elwell@osu-eddie.UUCP (Clayton M. Elwell) (12/03/85)
In this argument about the suitability of embedded-command vs. WYSIWYG and laser printer vs. photocomposer, several distinct issues seem to have become confused. WYSIWYG systems are extremely useful for some applications. Embedded-command systems are just as useful for other applications. For example, if I were producing, for example, a newsletter for limited distribution (such as for a club or other local organization), I would use a WYSIWYG page layout system and a small laser printer. A Macintosh with Aldus PageMaker and a LaserWriter would be the way to go. It would allow me to do a ONE-TIME layout quickly and accurately, with fast proofing and output quality good enough for xerographic reproduction. It certainly beats a Selectric. This is being popularly referred to as ``desktop publishing.'' This is what such products as PageMaker were designed for. On the other hand, if I were writing a book that would be conventionally printed, I would use TeX (or a TeX macro package such as LaTeX) with a laser printer for proofing and a photocomposer for reproduction masters. Put simply, I have not found a better system for getting the highest quality output with the smallest expenditure of effort. I don't WANT to manually lay out each page of my document. I don't even want to manually lay out section headings and the like. I want to specify the format I want once, in excrutiating detail if necessary, and not worry about it again. Aside from that, TeX's handling of kerning, page and line breaking, etc., works correctly. In the uncommon situation that you need it to act differently, it can. All you have to do is tell it what you want. If you want unhyphenated, ragged-right text set without leading, you can do it by putting one line at the beginning of your text. If you decide it was a bad idea after all, take out that line. Voila!. Ah, but I hear the objection that it wastes paper to reformat and print it to make sure it came out the way you wanted it. This is not true. Since TeX puts out a device independent file, I can preview it on my screen first, and then print out selected pages. As to output devices, laser printers are very nice toys. They allow quite reasonable-looking output on a demand basis at a fairly low cost. If a photocopy is good enough quality (such as for a reference manual for a computer program, high-class form correspondence, etc.), a laser printer is usually the right solution. For professional printing, however, there is no substitute for a photocomposer. I can see jaggies on a 300 dpi LaserWriter. It does an admirable approximation, but it isn't the same, especially when reproduced. What type of software & hardware is the ``best way'' depends on what you are doing. Let me draw an analogy--If I want to move my belongings from Ohio to California, I'll use a moving van. If I want to get from my home to a conference in another state, I'd rather have a Ferrari. Neither is better than the other. What's important is to use the right tools for the job at hand. -- -- Clayton Elwell Elwell@Ohio-State.CSNET Elwell%Ohio-State@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA ...!cbosgd!osu-eddie!elwell ----------------- "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads..."
guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (12/07/85)
> I don't WANT to manually lay out each page of my document. I don't even > want to manually lay out section headings and the like. I want to specify > the format I want once, in excrutiating detail if necessary, and not worry > about it again. Aside from that, TeX's handling of kerning, page and line > breaking, etc., works correctly. In the uncommon situation that you need > it to act differently, it can. All you have to do is tell it what you want. > If you want unhyphenated, ragged-right text set without leading, you can do > it by putting one line at the beginning of your text. If you decide it was > a bad idea after all, take out that line. Voila!. And here we have an example of the very sort of confusion you decry. There is *N*O*T*H*I*N*G* in the notion of a WYSIWYG system that *requires* you to "manually lay out each page of the document", or "even... manually out section headings and the like". Any reasonable WYSIWYG system will, at least, allow you to say "please lay out the pages for me". Interleaf, in fact, does this layout as a part of its display. You don't have to do anything to get your pages laid out; they just *are*. As you type or delete stuff, the display changes to reflect the new layout. Furthermore, if you want unhyphenated, ragged-right text set without leading", you just set the "component properties" sheet for all the components of type "paragraph" to say "Hyphenation Off, Alighment Flush Left, Line Spacing 1 line, Bottom Margin 0 inches" (I presume by "without leading" you mean no extra leading between lines or between paragraphs; if this is not what you meant, the changes to the property sheet should be obvious. (In case anybody's curious, Interleaf uses the Knuth-Liang algorithm.) If you "decide it was a bad idea after all", you just change the "component properties" for all the components of the type in question again. There are things Interleaf does not do. The release that I'm looking at the documentation for doesn't handle footnotes, for instance. It also doesn't know how to automatically number things like paragraphs or section headings. On the other hand, although the WYSIWYG editor that I did at CCI didn't do a lot of the things Interleaf did, it did handle footnotes and it did automatically number paragraphs and section headings (and footnotes!). So those can be done by WYSIWYG systems, too. Guy Harris