kbb@nancy.UUCP (02/14/87)
Many of Rich Salz' points have been brought up before (probably because
they're good ones!) and I guess I didn't make myself clear enough.
I don't think an ad house would be
happy with TeX by itself, either, with no support. But some companies
do offer support for bugs in TeX (of which I bet few still exist!) or
macro packages, I believe for less money than, say, Compugraphic.
(Because you're not paying for the software.) As for operating systems,
editors, etc, you have to do all that anyway for any typesetting
program, so it's not really an added cost.
TeX can use any font you can supply .tfm files for, which is primarily
width information. Any typesetting software has to have the widths, or
it can't do linebreaking, of shadow fonts, or outline fonts, or
whatever. So I don't see what the problem is.
The current software I have doesn't have the concept of ``infinite
space'', so vertical justification has to be done by hand. I shouldn't
have implied *no* software has that besides TeX.
If you set the \fontdimen parameters in TeX, you can get very narrow
columns without a lot of hyphenation and/or wasted time. (Yes, I did it.)
I'm not sure if
lines like this are
better than lots of hyphenated lines, but newspapers do seem to prefer it.
You're right, once a page is broken it's broken. But don't you have to
go back and recompose the pages in whatever system you were talking
about if you want to change the page break? If you put in `\vfill\eject'
you can get a page break anywhere you want, at the same cost.
Have a nice day,
Karl {decvax,ihnp4}!brunix!kbb
kbb%cs.brown.edu@cs.net.relay