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From: gjb@cs.brown.edu (Gregory Brail)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.wanted,comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Why does Mac output not look as good as LaTex?
Message-ID: <76319@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 21 May 91 06:06:44 GMT
References: <20081@cs.utexas.edu> <1991May20.223955.22343@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: gjb@cs.brown.edu (Gregory Brail)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 40

In article <1991May20.223955.22343@midway.uchicago.edu> lrm3@ellis.uchicago.edu (Lawrence Reed Miller) writes:
>In article <20081@cs.utexas.edu> turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>>I notice that my papers, produced with Word 4.0 and printed on a
>>good laserwriter, do not look as good as papers produced with LaTex
>>on Unix boxes.  Looking closer, what I discovered is that the
>>individual characters are fine, but that their spacing (under
>>Microsoft Word 4.0) leaves much to be desired.  Adjacent characters
>[etc...]
>
>Try turning on Fractional Widths in the Page Setup dialog.  This will improve
>the character spacing on the LaserWriter.  This is one of those weird MS Word
>features that you never find until you read the manual 5 times :^)

True, but that's only part of it. TeX does lots of nice typographical
things like pair kerning (adjusting the space between characters
depending on what characters they are -- like making "Te" closer
together than "NM", for instance). It also has better hyphenation,
takes better care of letterspacing (adjusting the space between all the
letters on the line in fully-justified text) and just pays more
attention to how each individual paragraph looks rather than just
trying to squeeze the appropriate amount of text on each line like
Word does.

Both PageMaker and Quark XPress do a much better job with typography
than Word. PageMaker (the one I'm more familiar with) gives you
control over pair kerning, letterspacing, track kerning, and generally
produces very professional looking type -- especially if you use Adobe
fonts that come with extra kern pairs and PageMaker has tracking
information available for that font.

So in short, if you want your type to look better, pour it into
PageMaker.

				-greg


+----------------------------------------------------+
Greg Brail
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