slj@mtung.UUCP (03/30/87)
In article <536@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> beloin@batcomputer.UUCP (Ron Beloin) writes: >If MS Word drove you crazy with the uneven line spacing imposed >by super/subscripts, don't leave the funny farm yet. I just wish >Word would stop thinking it's smarter than I am. >Ron Beloin I upgraded to 3.0 back in January because of Bill's High-Pressure "Do it Now or Else" threat (which turned out to be bogus). That is, I sent the money back in January. I got the product in mid-March. Anyhow, it's sitting on a shelf now because I'm one of those single-drive people you weren't sure still existed. (I have 64K ROM, too :-) Word 3.0 purports to require multiple drives (or, presumably, a single hard disk) and I know very well that 1.05 just barely worked with a single drive, so I've put 3.0 on the shelf to wait until I decide what upgrade (Plus or SE) to get. I visited my local authorized dealer to drool over the SE and played a bit with 3.0 and was, to put it mildly, disturbed to see that if you do random text <propeller-shift-i> italicized text <prop-shift-space> more random text the damned thing STILL doesn't put any space between the last character of italics and the first character of roman text. Is it just me or does anyone else think they need to fix that? I have to double space after an italic word because it looks like crap if I don't. And if I try to do something cute like italicize the first syllable of a word, then I have to put a space after it and it gets wordwrapped and @#$^&*%! (On the up-side, I *was* slightly molified to see that the entire line didn't spaz when you typed a character when there was funky text - e.g. italics and/or su{per|b}scripts on the same line.)
munson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (03/30/87)
In article <907@mtung.UUCP> slj@mtung.UUCP (S. Luke Jones) writes: > >I visited my local authorized dealer to drool over the SE and played a >bit with 3.0 and was, to put it mildly, disturbed to see that if you >do > random text <propeller-shift-i> italicized text > <prop-shift-space> more random text >the damned thing STILL doesn't put any space between the last character >of italics and the first character of roman text. Is it just me or >does anyone else think they need to fix that? I have to double space >after an italic word because it looks like crap if I don't. And if I >try to do something cute like italicize the first syllable of a word, >then I have to put a space after it and it gets wordwrapped and @#$^&*%! This problem with spacing after italics/slanted characters is not easy to solve. The problem is that you may not want an extra space after the italics if the next character is a period or comma. Text-processing languages like TeX can handle this but I think it's a lot to ask of a word processing program. The best solution uses varied kerning after the italicized text depending on what the next character is. I don't even know if Word 3.0 can kern, much less kern on the basis of interactions of font and adjacent character. Ethan Munson munson@ernie.berkeley.edu
lamy@ai.toronto.edu (04/01/87)
>In article <907@mtung.UUCP> slj@mtung.UUCP (S. Luke Jones) writes: >>the damned thing STILL doesn't put any space between the last character >>of italics and the first character of roman text. Is it just me or In article <18081@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> munson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Ethan Munson) writes: >Text-processing languages like TeX can handle this but I think it's a >lot to ask of a word processing program. The best solution uses varied Not quite. TeX does not handle kerning across font boundaries for the simple reason that kerning values are part of an individual font design. TeX fonts have an other feature called "italic correction" (all fonts have this, slanted or not). Going from italics to roman is {\it italicised\/} text. The \/ will add as much space as required to accomodate the slant of the current font. This is usually far less than a space, and for "straight" fonts no extra space is added. Rules like "no correction before punctuation" would be nice, but some kind of override would then have to be provided Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.toronto.edu (CSNet, UUCP) AI Group, Dept of Computer Science, lamy@ai.toronto.cdn (EAN) University of Toronto, Ont, Canada M5S 1A4 lamy@ai.utoronto (Bitnet)