Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site umd5.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!gymble!umcp-cs!cvl!umd5!zben From: zben@umd5.UUCP Newsgroups: net.text Subject: Re: WYSIWYG Message-ID: <807@umd5.UUCP> Date: Wed, 4-Dec-85 18:13:50 EST Article-I.D.: umd5.807 Posted: Wed Dec 4 18:13:50 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 6-Dec-85 07:46:38 EST References: <280@opus.UUCP> Reply-To: zben@umd5.UUCP (Ben Cranston) Organization: U of Md, CSC, College Park, Md Lines: 43 Summary: Some war stories To be perfectly honest I should inform the reader that I have spent a significant amount of time over the past 10 years writing and enhancing an "embedded command" typesetting program (called DPS) that runs on large Sperry Univac mainframes. In article <280@opus.UUCP> rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) writes: >One of the reasons that an H&J pass is a problem is that you can't >generally find all of the problems (bad breaks, rivers, etc.) without >looking at the final page. If you have to wait for the entire document to >be formatted and a proof copy printed, the sort of fine-tuning necessary >for really high-quality output can be very tedious. Once you find and fix, >say, a bad line break, you have to re-run a proof copy and check everything >after that until a boundary that puts you back to the old document (meaning >at least the end of a page and perhaps the end of a chapter). It's like >fixing compilation errors in a program when the compiler only shows you a >few at a time. One of my more onerous tasks is doing the typesetting for the Undergraduate and Graduate Catalogs of the University. These are LARGE documents, about 40000 lines of 128 column source text, and about 200 to 250 typeset output pages. The first runs took 8 hours clock on an 1100/42; I am down to less than a half-hour clock on an 1100/92. There is a tremendous pressure to keep the (physical) weight of the Undergrad catalog below one pound. We mail these catalogs to high schools around the country, and going over a pound would kill us in postage! Some refugee from a Thanksgiving dinner decided to compress the document by not starting each section on a new page... So, this problem Dick mentions is worst-case here. It doesn't get back into sync until the next CHAPTER break. Needless to say, this makes it virtually impossible to do the kind of fine-tuning described. The whole rest of the chapter shifts, and you might end up creating dozens of bad widows in trying to fix one. Given the extreme time pressure (a week or two from when I get the data till the printer needs the typeset pages) it is impossible to do any fine tuning at all. Thank that the powers-that-be are more interested in getting the thing out on time than the subtle, finer points of typesetting... -- Ben Cranston ...{seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben zben@umd2.umd.edu