ed@wuibc (Ed Macke) (03/08/88)
Does anyone know a good method for handling leaders in
PageMaker? A friend asked me to inquire about this; apparently
the variable width of the Macintosh character set is giving him
fits.
Thanks for any help,
Ed Macke
Computer Systems Lab
Washington University
St. Louis, MO
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UUCP: {amdahl,decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!sun!plaid!desktop{-request}jhenry@rand-unix.ARPA (Jim Henry) (03/10/88)
I'm not sure I would call this a "good" way to do dot leaders but it's the
best I've found so far.
Hopefully your friend does know that Pagemaker supports leaders as part of
its tab mechanism. You can designate a tab stop as having a leader type
and then the approriate leader character fills the space to the tab stop
rather than white space.
Two problems though:
1) PageMaker doesn't put in the leader characters unless there is a non-
white character to tab to!
2) Dot leaders should NOT be just a sting of periods. Aldus doesn't know
this. (The company, not the man. I suspect the man knew what he was
doing.)
The work around:
1) Use a right tab.
2) Put a period after the tab so the leaders are made visible.
3) Set the tab and period in 12 pt. Courier. This gives you spaced out
dots that fall in straight vertical lines, at least for the layout I had.
The tab takes its format from the following character so you just need
to make the period Courier and the leader characters will be changed.
What I was doing looked like this (a Table of Contents):
Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
What I entered was
Chapter 1<tab>.<tab>3
The first tab stop is right with dot leaders, the second is right, no
leader. The first tab and the following period are 12 pt. Courier, the
rest is a proportionally spaced font.
You may need a space before the first tab.
I don't think this will maintain vertical alignment of the leader dots
for something like this:
Leading Man . . . . . . . John Bigger
Leading Lady . . . . . . . Mimi Too
On the screen it looks like this:
Leading Man . . . . . . . John Bigger
Leading Lady . . . . . . . . Mimi Too
I wouldn't expect the output to be any better than the screen.
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