npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) (11/21/90)
Really a follow-up on Tuthill's question... First, ragged right usually looks a lot better than flush right in multicolumn documents; that's because the narrower the column the less room there is to play with white space. Newspapers violate this rule, of course, but their layout is frequently ugly or silly, because you're going to throw it out the same day anyway. Second, the "unnegotiable" principle of troff is to force output a line at a time. As soon as a line fits (adjusted or not) it's sent out. TeX, on the other hand, does paragraph at a time adjustment. While this leads to better esthetics, it also has the annoying property that, say, diddling the last line of a paragraph may cause the first line to be re-adjusted in a way you don't like. Third, troff doesn't do kerning (at least in the AT&T version; some VARs have added this). That means troff only plays with the white space between words, never with the space between characters of a word. This makes troff less flexible in its adjustment rules, but also leads to more regular appearance. (The "desktop publishing" look (read "amateur") is usually due to excessive kerning (too tight or too loose) or the free use of vertical space that results in an accordion look up and down the page.) None of this may satisfy Tuthill, who wants the formatter to produce the document according to his personal esthetic. But that's just what page layout programs are for (e.g., PageMaker). For those of us doing book-length documents, the freedom afforded by page layout wears thin very quickly. (For example, up until the current version of PageMaker, the writer had to manually insert the page number on each page!) The point of all this is that you first have to think about what you value most in your formatting software, and not expect every program to provide every feature every other program provides.
jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se (Alan Jeffrey) (11/24/90)
In article <1990Nov21.153806.2787@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes: >Really a follow-up on Tuthill's question... >First, ragged right usually looks a lot better than >flush right in multicolumn documents; that's because >the narrower the column the less room there is to >play with white space. Well, sometimes. If you're playing with a {\em really\/} narrow measure then you either run ragged-right, live with rubbish, or spend your time doing optical markup (or rewriting the text). In some cases you can live with ragged right, but it gives a very different `feel' to a document. It tends to work well with informal texts, for example in the `computing textbook' style of layout, such as Heading This is a paragraph which runs on and on and probably explains something very dull about compiler optimisation. But if you're trying for a book/magazine design which is authoratative, serious, composed, oldstyle, etc. then ragged right really isn't acceptable. Horses for courses and all that. [...] >(The "desktop publishing" >look (read "amateur") is usually due to excessive kerning >(too tight or too loose) or the free use of vertical space >that results in an accordion look up and down the page.) `Kerning' is a word that's being over-used and moreover used in a different sense than it's original meaning---it used to mean part of a letter that stuck out over another, for example `To'. What we're arguing about is letterspaceing. But yes, most DTP systems suffer very badly from this sort of mis-use. `New wave' typography can work very well, but it has to be used sparingly, as part of a design, and only for display copy. TeX is pretty good at trying to get a uniform colour for a paragraph though. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else we've got. At the moment, the only other alternative is hiring trained compositors. Just nit picking, Alan. -- Alan Jeffrey Tel: +46 31 72 10 98 jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden