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From: npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Ragged right philosophizing
Keywords: troff, tex
Message-ID: <1990Nov21.153806.2787@cbnewsl.att.com>
Date: 21 Nov 90 15:38:06 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 38


Really a follow-up on Tuthill's question...
First, ragged right usually looks a lot better than
flush right in multicolumn documents; that's because
the narrower the column the less room there is to
play with white space. Newspapers violate this rule,
of course, but their layout is frequently ugly or
silly, because you're going to throw it out the same
day anyway.
Second, the "unnegotiable" principle of troff is to
force output a line at a time. As soon as a line fits
(adjusted or not) it's sent out.  TeX, on the other
hand, does paragraph at a time adjustment. While this
leads to better esthetics, it also has the annoying
property that, say, diddling the last line of a paragraph
may cause the first line to be re-adjusted in a way you
don't like.
Third, troff doesn't do kerning (at least in the AT&T
version; some VARs have added this). That means troff
only plays with the white space between words, never
with the space between characters of a word. This makes
troff less flexible in its adjustment rules, but also
leads to more regular appearance. (The "desktop publishing"
look (read "amateur") is usually due to excessive kerning
(too tight or too loose) or the free use of vertical space
that results in an accordion look up and down the page.)
None of this may satisfy Tuthill, who wants the formatter
to produce the document according to his personal esthetic.
But that's just what page layout programs are for (e.g.,
PageMaker).  For those of us doing book-length documents,
the freedom afforded by page layout wears thin very quickly.
(For example, up until the current version of PageMaker,
the writer had to manually insert the page number on each
page!)
The point of all this is that you first have to think
about what you value most in your formatting software,
and not expect every program to provide every feature
every other program provides.