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From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Editing a Macintosh File (never the same way twice)
Message-ID: <17605@cup.portal.com>
Date: 26 Apr 89 05:45:50 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 53

I suppose this phenomenon has been mentioned before, but just so you know ...

I just finished a long document.  I took it to a place to be laser typeset.
Up until last December, I was using the same software as this place, so
I expected I'd just open the file and print it.

Little did I expect, they had updated their software.  Operating system 6.X
and about the 40th beta release of Word 4.0.  

To those of you who don't own Mac's, it may surprise you to know one of these
updates made it impossible for them to print my file.  They could print
something that looked a bit like my file.  What I eventually came away with
was only slightly mutilated.  But it took a lot of work just to get that.

I had a similar experience the last time they updated their software.  It
took many man-hours to discover that the operating system on a Mac has some
subtle control of the spacing of characters run out to the laser printer.
They call this "partial pixel spacing".

It seems that, in an effort to make the printed result match up more closely
with the screen image, hundreds of hyperactive typesetters are constantly
tweaking the OS control of character spacing.  Every new release of the
operating system produces documents which differ in ultra-subtle ways.

Although these typesetting fanatics get a result which comes closer and 
closer to what they like to see on paper, it's us users who get screwed 
each time.  As a result of their tweaking, no document paginated under the
old OS works under the new OS.  The text has expanded, and any manual page
breaks or non-breaking carriage returns are likely to cause the production
of extra pages and lines.  Fortunately, I had enough time (hours) to re-
paginate while I was still at the shop.  Unfortunately, I didn't catch all
the line breaks.

Why not avoid manual page breaks and line breaks?  Because I don't want a
second level head and two lines of text at the bottom of a page.  Because
I don't want the term "n-MOS" to be split across a line break.  Because of
a lot of reasons which are important to the look and readability of a 
document.

I cannot perceive any improvement in character spacing as a result of the
twits at Apple who release new "improved" versions of their OS.  But I
certainly can perceive the effect of their mischief on my document.

I thought desktop publishing was supposed to be one of the reasons to buy a Mac?
Why do they persist in screwing things up with each new release
of the OS?  Don't they realize that some people have to maintain documents
across OS releases?  That these people don't have free man-hours to burn to
appease some demented font designer at Apple?

Why not complain to Apple?  I sent them complaints after the last OS release.
(You can't call them up, because their complaint line has been disconnected.)
Their response was simply to explain what partial pixel spacing was, and
that it was out of the hands of the people who answer complaints.