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From: jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se (Alan Jeffrey)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Ragged right philosophizing
Keywords: troff, tex
Message-ID: <4340@undis.cs.chalmers.se>
Date: 23 Nov 90 17:45:30 GMT
References: <1990Nov21.153806.2787@cbnewsl.att.com>
Organization: Dept. of CS, Chalmers, Sweden
Lines: 49

In article <1990Nov21.153806.2787@cbnewsl.att.com> npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes:
>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. 

Well, sometimes.  If you're playing with a {\em really\/} narrow
measure then you either run ragged-right, live with rubbish, or
spend your time doing optical markup (or rewriting the text).  In some
cases you can live with ragged right, but it gives a very different
`feel' to a document.  It tends to work well with informal texts, for
example in the `computing textbook' style of layout, such as

   Heading This is a paragraph which runs on and on
           and probably explains something very dull about
           compiler optimisation.

But if you're trying for a book/magazine design which is
authoratative, serious, composed, oldstyle, etc. then ragged right
really isn't acceptable.  Horses for courses and all that.

[...]

>(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.)

`Kerning' is a word that's being over-used and moreover used in a
different sense than it's original meaning---it used to mean part of a
letter that stuck out over another, for example `To'.  What we're
arguing about is letterspaceing.  

But yes, most DTP systems suffer very badly from this sort of mis-use.
`New wave' typography can work very well, but it has to be used
sparingly, as part of a design, and only for display copy.  

TeX is pretty good at trying to get a uniform colour for a paragraph
though.  It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else we've
got.  At the moment, the only other alternative is hiring trained
compositors.  

Just nit picking,

Alan.
-- 
Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 98         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden