ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (08/14/89)
In article <47700061@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > > >>Maybe I'm an "ivory tower" intellectual out of touch with the world, >>but where, I ask, outside of PEOPLE magazine and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER, >>is the ability to wrap text around pictures of any consequence? > >Well, I have a book on cryogenic technology in which there are >lots of photos and diagrams of stills for separating liquified gases. >They are often one inch wide and a half or a whole page high. >They wrapped text around them. This book would look mighty odd >without that. A surprisingly large number of people wrote me letters concerning this. One thing was clear from these letters. My notion of wrap and that of the writers was rather different. For me, "wrap" implies the idea of "surrounding" with an unbroken sentence or string of text. In my mind, the pattern you describe you does not involve wrapping, and can be done with "classic" troff. Essentially, you are indenting and leaving space for an illustration. Whether this occurs on the left or right side of a single column or in the middle of two columns (with a combined right indent, and left indent), it is still a simple indent. When I made my posting and asserted that wrapping was relatively unimportant, I was thinking of the criteria used in a recent PeeCee magazine to test page layout programs. In this review (not at hand at the moment), wrapping consisted of having text follow the ~OUTLINE~ of some object in an illustration or of splitting a sentence on either side of an illustration. I would would (continue to) assert that THIS type of wrapping is (a) extremely uncommon in serious publications; (b) contributes little to the reader's understanding when it is used.* Moreover, my guess is that it can probably be done in troff, although I would not want to try to quote a macro off the top of my head in this venue. * I checked a variety of publications: computer manuals, corporate reports, academic monographics, etc., without finding a SINGLE example of these types of wrapping.
eykhout@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl (Victor Eijkhout) (08/14/89)
In article <1989Aug14.024310.23502@agate.berkeley.edu> ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes: >wrapping consisted of [...] >splitting a sentence on either >side of an illustration. This used to be cited as one thing that the determined hacker can accomplish in troff, but not in TeX. Don Knuth took up the challenge and published his solution somewhere last year in Tugboat. I admit that it's probably not useful. Victor