Re: Typography

Tim Streater <timstreater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell) wrote:

Tim Streater <tim.streater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think there was one kicking around but it wasn't helpful at all.

Hmm. Sounds more to me as if there wasn't a straightforward LaTeX
manual, 'cos if Lamport's book had been there (the one I'm thinking of),
you would have found it useful - especially if you were resorting to
using a homebrew macro set with its own \chapter command.

The book I'm remembering (and this was a long time ago) was a sort of
loose-leaf spiral-bound job with a blue-ish cover.

In which case, that was probably either Lamport's book and it would have
served you very well if you'd read it; or it was Knuth's book and you
have to be a studious hacker to get anything much out of it.

Can you recall if the cartoon lion was in modern or classical clothing?

I suspect my brother writes his books and papers [1] using Tex but
I can't be sure. Personally I would use Word or pageMaker (or
similar products) as appropriate. Why? Because I can't be arsed to
learn stuff.

Strange - one reason I've never used PageMaker is that I can't be
arsed to learn stuff, and learning to use LaTeX is a lot easier than
anything wysiwyg. I don't use MS Word because it's broken and
anyway couldn't do what I need even if it weren't.

Perhaps I should phrase that a bit differently. What I can't be arsed to
learn is basic tools - they should be straightforward/common enough to
require no learning curve.

Maybe they should - but how about a lollipop until such things come
along?

Everything needs learning.

Sure - but to do simple things so you can get going should only take a
few minutes.

To my mind, to learn the basics to get you going should take as long as
it takes, perhaps several hours or days.

A saw is a fairly basic tool - but you have to learn to use it. If you
want to make good use of a tool, you need to put the time in to learn
and practice and all that. If you don't, you'll use the tool badly -
whatever form the tool takes.

If I'm using a text editor, I don't expect to
need a manual for it - for the most part.

I've never met a text editor that I could use to any really useful
extent without a manual. How can one use anything but the most basic
functions without documentation? Even *with* documentation, it's
normally bloody hard to figure out what's going on - I've never managed
to work out how to get either Alpha or Emacs to execute code I've
written, for example.

Depends how you define useful. I have simple tastes.

So do I, I assure you. That's why I find very stripped-down text
editors really annoying.

When we started
using unix at SLAC in 1990 or so,

*Started*? Good grief. That late?

there was this great debate about
which editor to use. In those days I expected to have to *learn* an
editor, so I didn't want to learn one that was not going to be the local
standard.

Strange. There never would have been one standard - obviously. The
sensible thing is to learn to use one editor and stick with it.

SO as I had work to do I spent 5 minutes learning NotePad and
got on with that.

I've worked with similar text editors, and I find I can get more work
done more quickly and more accurately with text editors that have more -
well, I hate to say it, but `features'.

Six months and 10k lines of C later, they were still
arguing. I got given an Ultrix box at that point, so I moved to on to
dxnotepad. Only then did the penny drop - these were quite adequate for
what I wanted, so why waste time worrying about vi, emacs, JOVE, etc.
Into the rubbish bin of history with them.

Well, they're far from in the bin: I find that `basic' text editors are
just annoying. Emacs these days is very fancy. There are some Unix
setups which give you `instant TeX previewing' and similar.

Not that I can use the fancy stuff, mind.

I may look up more complex
features but that's all. My expectation is that, if I don't use it for 6
months, I may well forget where everything is and have to find it again
- but it'll be on a sodding menu somewhere, won't it, eh?

Well, no, and anyway, what does the command do? Without a manual, how
can one possibly tell?

I remember what the command does.

How can you find out in the first place?

Just quite likely I forget what its
called or where to find it. The beauty of the wsiwig editors is that
they are by and large self-documenting. Just look on a menu and see
what's there.

You know what? That's bollocks, that is.

When starting with Eudora I learnt completely how to use it from the
balloon help. Nothing else needed.

Quite. Eudora was heavily documented using balloon help, *very*
heavily. One of the few applications that ever implemented it properly
- it effectively had a full-on well-structured manual accessible that
way.

Now if only all wysiwyg applications had balloon help implemented that
way - well, you'd not hear anything like as much winging from me.

But you can't use Eudora as an example of anything except an unusually
good implementation of a now-defunct means of documenting an application
which means was eschewed by almost everyone else.

I've used
emacs twice (by accident, second time), and in each case it took 20 mins
for me to figure out how to quit it (the man pages were as usual
hopeless).

If you had taken the trouble to work through the Emacs tutorial, you
would have had a different experience entirely, I assure you.

Why should I want to use an editor whose simplest command, quiting, has
some dopey key-sequence rather than something standard?

Well, you might as well ask why you'd want to use a computer whose
simplest commands use some dopey key sequences like squiggle-Q or
require you to move your hands from the keyboard and grab a mouse (how
slow!) for the simplest commands, rather than something well-established
and standardised across all platforms like Emacs.

So all vt100 unix editors go straight in the bin and I use
TextWrangler or similar.

Fair enough. TextWrangler is completely incapable of doing what I need
from a text editor as far as I can tell - certainly, I can't see how to
get it to do what I need.

I had a 15 minute tutorial for PageMaker from another user - and that's
it (I haven't used its successor or competitive programs at all). So
placing stuff on the page and moving it around to see how it looks is a
doddle.

A shame the output quality is so poor it's hardly worth your while using
such a powerful bit of software. And I can tell that from the fact
you've told me you've spent bugger all time learning how to do
typography or make good use of PageMaker.

I've said nothing of the sort.

But you have done.

I've spent some considerable time
producing leaflets in PM. I have a better eye than some people, and a
much worse eye (for layout) than people who do that for a living. But
then I can't draw either. And you'll have to define what you mean by
"learning to do typography".

You talked about using tracking. That's all I need to know.

We do our monthly reports with PageMaker - in particular when
you update your excel chart with this month's data, you just re-open
your report and lo and behold, you have this month's charts in the
publication.

Your point being?

That this is easy in PM.

So? It's easy to do things of that nature with LaTeX - except that it's
a lot more flexible and can work with a wider range of things.

I've met people patching TeX into Web services to provide useful output
like that.

It turns out that people do that kind of thing with TeX all the time -
it's much more suited to that kind of job than most typesetting
software. Of course, if you refuse to admit that non-wysiwyg software
is practical to use because of the need to read the manual, you'll
object to that method as being too awkward. But when it's set up, `it
just works' - and works very, very efficiently. TeX used to take up
loads of RAM and work very slowly. Now, TeX (unchanged in itself) runs
in hardly any RAM at all and at warpspeed compared to everything else -
other software has developed to be slow and RAM-hungry, while TeX's
stayed exactly as it was.

Speed has never been a problem with PM, at least for what I have been
using it for.

You've never set it up to run as a server process doing thousands of
transactions an hour.

Adjusting things like tracking or leading to improve the look or to make
that extra bit of text fit are easy, too [1].

Yes, and adjusting tracking and leading on the fly like that leads to
fucking awful typography: you are one of the guilty parties. Using
tracking at all should be discouraged. That's the problem with pure
wysiwyg - it results in poor quality because people don't bother finding
out how to do properly what they're trying to do.

This is merely your opinion. I have a different one :-)

It's not *MY* opinion, and it's not a `mere' opinion either.

I can't imagine doing page layout stuff in LaTex or any other markup
program.

LaTeX was never meant for visual layout jobs so of course it's atrocious
for that kind of thing; ConTeXt is a different matter. But are you
seriously telling me that you cannot imagine doing page layout stuff in
HTML?

That appears to be a different thread. But, err, no.

`Or any other markup program,' you said. HTML counts, does it not?
People use HTML for page layout all the time - just look at the Web!

[1] See http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/index.html

Yep:

<http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/papers09.html>

2001

[134] On the uniqueness of the Chentsov metric in quantum information
theory, with M. Grasselli. Infinite-dimensional analysis, quantum
probability, and related topics, 4, 173-182. World Scientific.

Also available from the archive, math-ph/ 0006030. 10 LATEX pages.

Any why is he using that rubbish font [2]?

What I want to know is `why is he using such a stupid way of setting the
body matter block size?' The source code tells me that your brother
isn't bothered with typography as such, just getting it down on paper
neatly and accurately, and he's also clearly someone who's not bothered
finding out how to use LaTeX particuarly intelligently (either that, or
just doesn't care).

I will have to bug him about this. Sounds like he just wants to get the
job done, rather like me.

Yes, but you see, he's doing it the crap way. If you want to get the
job done, it pays to do it properly with LaTeX - saves you time and
effort in the long run.

No need to bug him. But you could tell him about existence of the
geometry package. That'll sort out the fact that the text on the page
is positioned far too far down. You gotta RTFM first, but basically he
can shove `6in' and `9in' in the appropriate places, get his text block
the right size, and have geometry position it sensibly on the page.

[snip]

I've never seen any LaTex doc
using any other.

Yes you have. Hardly anyone using LaTeX for publication using Computer
Modern these days, from what I hear. Back in the LaTeX 2.09 days, it
was hard to use other founts; these days, with the NFSS (developed for
use with 2.09) built in to current LaTeX, it's pretty easy if someone
else has done the setup work.

Yes, you're probably right.

Forget `probably'. I *AM* right. You're not in a position to have an
opinion.

It's just that the default looks so ugly (to
me at any rate).

Well, it's what Knuth likes: the textbooks he used when young were
printed in that kind of fount, and it's what he wanted for his books on
computing and maths, so he got on with it and ripped off Monotype.

I'm not particularly keen on 'em - but much can be done to improve the
look of a LaTeXed page even if you stick with Computer Modern.
Replacing the use of `bold extended' in sectional headers with (say)
sanserif helps, for example.

And if you use XeTeX with the fontspec package, it's utterly trivial to
use `other founts' - but if you do it that way, you lose the long term
guarantee of being able to typeset it exactly the same in future,
because XeTeX depends on access to host computer system founts which
might not be there in the future; the usual LaTeX way involves ignoring
the system founts entirely.

And how do you do stuff like orphan/widow,
keep-paragraph-with-next?

Be specific. If you have a job to do, I can provide an answer - but
what are you on about?

Keep-paragraph with next: In Word you tell it you want this paragraph to
appear on the same page as the next one. That way you don't get a
section heading at the bottom of the page and the section body on the
next one (in fact you tell it that in the heading style, if you want
to). This used to irritate me when reading mysql doc 7 or 8 years ago
(which was in LaTeX).

<shrug> There's all sorts of controls relating to that. Any number of
different ways of doing things in that line; damned if I can recall all
of them, mind, 'cos I prefer to fix things like that manually. It's
very rare that a problem of that sort appears in the final output.

But there's some sort of `keep things together' command that turned up
recently, IIRC, not to mention the widow and orphan controls built into
the TeX typesetting engine and the specific typsetting instructions
built into LaTeX.

There're also commands for indicating where you'd like (or insist on) a
page break; or the converse.

If you get a sectional heading at the bottom of a page and the first
line of the section body text on the next page, well, that's actually
forbidden and it only happens when LaTeX's trying to meet a bunch of
contradictory and impossible demands. I'd guess that the mysql docs
were put together by an idiot.

The bottom line is that you've always got to do manual tweaking if you
want utterly top quality typesetting. TeX does what it can, but at the
end of the day, the final copy needs to be given a once-over and usually
a few minor tweaks. Minor tweaks, I said.

You can give LaTeX a much easier time by loading the braindamage package
which makes it typeset as badly as MS Word - if you do that, you'll have
fewer tweaks to do in the final version, but it'll look as bad as if it
had been word processed.

Widow/orphan I am less sure about but I think it pertains to moving a
para between pages so you don't have (say) one line of the para on its
own on a page.

<shrug> Well, TeX has built-in widow and orphan control, and you won't
get 'em unless the typesetting engine is `under stress', and can't find
a good solution given the various demands placed on it.

It's a balancing act that it does, mathematically calculated, and -
well, basically, if `it just can't do it', the badness parameter hits
`infinity' (10,000 or above - just don't ask), TeX gives up, whinges,
and tells the human to sort it out.

[1] doesn't seem to stop people ignoring these features and laying out
text by hand. Then they decide to make the column a bit wider and
they're fucked, instead of having used the features of the software so
that the text just flows as you would like.

Using tracking and fiddling with the baselineskip (as I'd put it) is
fucking up the layout really badly if you ask me - it's certainly very
bad typographical practice that is encouraged by wysiwyg software and
people like you who think they know how to use it without studying.
What *you* mistakenly think is the right way to do it (because the
software allows it with easy controls) is in fact fucking it up really
badly and making a nasty mess of things.

Much better to make columns (document-wide) a touch wider in my
experience or add an extra line to the page or whatnot - I've no idea
why you say `and they're fucked' for doing so.

Because they try to make e.g. hanging indents by hand, so to speak,
using tabs and spaces.

Oh. Oh dear. I hadn't considered that sort of thing as being what you
meant by `laying out the text by hand'. I thought you meant `using the
manual controls and commands as intended' (by hand) rather than `letting
the machine lay it out for you' (by software). Which is the TeX view of
it - you either `do it by hand' and tell the machine what to put where,
or you let the machine make the decisions based on user-supplied
structural markup.

So it looks right until they adjust the column
width, at which point they're really, really, fucked.

Well, yeah, that's the problem with wysiwyg, I suppose. It's pretty
much impossible to do that sort of thing with TeX.

[2] I would ask him except that the response would be War and Peace
rather than the sixpenny novel.

It's the default. And if you want to `do complicated maths', it's very
hard to find the required symbols from *ANY* source in a form that
matches anything other than Computer Modern.

I suspect it's the maths that tips the balance - of course one can use
LaTeX to `do maths' using other founts, but because commercial
symbol/maths founts are missing most of the symbols that are needed,
it's always a bit of a bodge involving symbols taken from anywhere they
can be found.

Yes, I expect you're right about that.

I know I'm right. Oh god I know... I've looked into it in some detail.
No, I have *NO IDEA AT ALL* how to set up maths founts for use with TeX
and I cherish my ignorance having looked at what goes on under the
bonnet.

Rowland.

--
Remove the animal for email address: rowland.mcdonnell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sorry - the spam got to me
http://www.mag-uk.org http://www.bmf.co.uk
UK biker? Join MAG and the BMF and stop the Eurocrats banning biking
.

Loading