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From: hugo@griggs.dartmouth.edu (Peter Su)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Quality of computer typesetting?
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.215651.13961@dartvax.dartmouth.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 91 21:56:51 GMT
Sender: news@dartvax.dartmouth.edu (The News Manager)
Reply-To: hugo@griggs.dartmouth.edu (Peter Su)
Organization: Dartmouth College
Lines: 33

This may be a silly and awful question to ask, but I'm really
curious...

To all those professional graphic designers and typesetters out there,
are any of the computer based systems (esp. TeX and troff) any good?
That is, do they produce output that YOU would put your name on?

I am particularly interested in comments regarding the TeX fonts vs.
(say) Times or Palatino...and the quality of books that you know have
been set with TeX or troff.

Examples of such books:

1) Bentley's _Programming Pearls_ books.  Very nice.
2) The TeXBook, actually, the whole series.
3) Concrete Math
4) Andy Tannenbaum's books on Networking, Architecture, and so on.  I
think these are very nice too.  I forget if they were done in troff,
but I think they were.

Personally, I am frustrated with both systems because I think TeX does
a better job with line/page breaking, and of course with equations.
However, troff definitely has the edge in setting pictures and tables
and things, and the fonts that you get are *much* nicer than Computer
Modern (ugh!).

Respond by mail, I'll summarize.  Flames to /dev/null

Cheers,
Pete


hugo@sunapee.dartmouth.edu