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From: eepjm@cc.newcastle.edu.au
Newsgroups: comp.org.acm
Subject: Re: New format of CACM
Message-ID: <1991May3.125722.10073@cc.newcastle.edu.au>
Date: 3 May 91 02:57:21 GMT
References: <DAB.91May2113047@moxie.moxie.oswego.edu> <5839@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
Organization: University of Newcastle, AUSTRALIA
Lines: 25

In article <5839@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>, jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu
         (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) writes:
> Here's another vote:  The new format CACM is a typographical disaster!
> The table of contents is hard to read.  The names and titles of many
> if not most articles are hard to discover amidst the wild graphics.  The
> choices of character fonts in the text involves frequent font clashes.
> 
> It looks like they hired a graphics artist straight out of art school
> do do the design, someone with a life ambition to design Brillo boxes or
> something equally trashy.

While we're on this subject, I'd like to throw in a bitch which goes back
many years.  My bookshelf contains CACM from 1975 to the present, and from
time to time I have to look up a specific article.  (Which brings up
another point - although the production quality is terrible, the actual
articles can be very good.  Of course this depends on keeping the good
authors interested in submitting good stuff).  Anyway, it's very easy to
find a specific issue up to January 1983, just by reading the date/vol/no
on the spine.  After that date, the spines are quite unreadable.

I would even go so far as to say that the design of the spine on the
pre-1983 CACM is the best of any periodical I have seen.  And that the
post-1983 design is one of the worst.

Peter Moylan                                   eepjm@cc.newcastle.edu.au