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From: munson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Word 3.0 Bug Query
Message-ID: <18081@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 14:45:05 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.18081
Posted: Mon Mar 30 14:45:05 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 1-Apr-87 00:40:16 EST
References: <2121@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <4408@utah-cs.UUCP> <536@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <907@mtung.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: munson@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Ethan Munson)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <907@mtung.UUCP> slj@mtung.UUCP (S. Luke Jones) writes:
>
>I visited my local authorized dealer to drool over the SE and played a
>bit with 3.0 and was, to put it mildly, disturbed to see that if you
>do 
>    random text <propeller-shift-i> italicized text
>    <prop-shift-space> more random text
>the damned thing STILL doesn't put any space between the last character
>of italics and the first character of roman text.  Is it just me or
>does anyone else think they need to fix that?  I have to double space
>after an italic word because it looks like crap if I don't.  And if I
>try to do something cute like italicize the first syllable of a word,
>then I have to put a space after it and it gets wordwrapped and @#$^&*%!

This problem with spacing after italics/slanted characters is not
easy to solve.  The problem is that you may not want an extra space
after the italics if the next character is a period or comma.
Text-processing languages like TeX can handle this but I think it's a
lot to ask of a word processing program.  The best solution uses varied
kerning after the italicized text depending on what the next character
is.  I don't even know if Word 3.0 can kern, much less kern on the
basis of interactions of font and adjacent character.

Ethan Munson
munson@ernie.berkeley.edu