Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!think!barmar
From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Editing a Macintosh File (never the same way twice)
Message-ID: <39727@think.UUCP>
Date: 26 Apr 89 17:05:14 GMT
References: <17605@cup.portal.com>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@kulla.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 53

In article <17605@cup.portal.com> mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson) writes:
>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.

Is it Apple's fault that your word processor forces you to solve these
problems using manual overrides?  A good text formatter should allow
you to specify minimum widow sizes and control hyphenation.

It doesn't seem like OS changes would be the only things that would
cause you trouble using this scheme.  Simply adding a line (or maybe
even just a word) to your document would force you to go through it
and manually adjust everything.  The only difference is whether you
have to go through this process at home or at the printer's office.

>I cannot perceive any improvement in character spacing

So, decisions about whether changes should be made should be based
upon whether Mark Robert Thorson can tell the difference?  There's a
whole science of typography and font design, which spends much of its
time worrying about hundredth-of-an-inch differences in the lines that
makes up printed characters, so obviously some people can.  I think
Apple should be commended for caring enough.

>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?

So they should never fix bugs, in case some users happen to be relying
on the incorrect behavior?  What about the people who DO care about
the precise spacing, and complained to Apple that their documents were
coming out wrong?  Unfortunately, someone has to lose.  And it's
usually the person relying on the bug.

Suppose Apple had a compiler that incorrectly compiled multiplication
statements, always producing a result one higher than the correct
result (don't laugh -- early versions of a popular microprocessor chip
had a bug in a multiply instruction).  A user of this compiler might
write

	A = B * C - 1;

in order to multiply B and C.  Then a new version comes out, which
fixes the bug.  Should the user complain that this broke his programs?
If so, what is Apple supposed to do?

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar