Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!nedludd
From: nedludd@ut-emx.UUCP (charles s. geiger, esq.)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Fractured Widths (Fairytales?)
Keywords: MS Word, Fonts
Message-ID: <18030@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 6 Sep 89 16:02:31 GMT
References: <126900068@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <5263@tank.uchicago.edu> <2183@randvax.UUCP>
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
Lines: 21

> To get back to the original question, Fractional Widths does work and
> does make a MAJOR difference in appearance.  The difference is much
> more noticeable with ragged text.  If you do NOT enable Fractional
> Widths, your printed output will be too loose.  In 3.0, you could
> even have lines disappear from a page; I don't know if this still
> happens in 4.0.  On the other hand, disabling Fractional Widths
> does make the screen easier to read, particularly at smaller sizes.

Fractional widths is most noticeable when using bold, italics, and
bold-italics.  The word spacing is just all screwed up on these
without fractional widths -- it just looks like dog poo-poo.

Of course, the trade-off is:  use fractional widths and get
good-looking bold and italics but lousy justification, or don't use
fractional widths and get justification but really shitty-looking
bold and italics.  Such a trade-off is really not acceptable when
trying to produce quality output.  In such a case, hell, pipe
everything into pagemaker or xpress.

cheers, from
charles s. geiger, esq.