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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Typography--Was Re: ventura
Message-ID: <4073@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 7 Jun 89 16:52:44 GMT
References: <43acc9f9.1b147@apollo.COM>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 58

From article <43acc9f9.1b147@apollo.COM>, by nazgul@apollo.COM (Kee Hinckley):
>In article <4062@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>>The book I did had two columns per page.  What's the big deal?
>
>Hmmm.

Perhaps the following questions were to make a point and were not meant
to be answered.  But such issues of detail interest me, and so in hopes
of stimulating further discussion, I'll go ahead and make some
comment, anyhow.

>Did you make sure that illustrations were at the top of the page?  Did

It was a dictionary without illustrations.  Are you implying there is
a special rule about this for multi-column text?

>you line up the first letters mechanically, or adjust them according to the
>balance of the characters (in other words, to appear in a vertical line a
>capital "O" needs to be somewhat to the left, since the eye doesn't see the
>left edge at the same location, say, as the left edge of an "E").  Did you

Mechanically at the left of columns, and on the (justified) right I
allowed letters to protrude over a point past the margin.  I have seen
the issue you raise discussed with regard to design lettering, but I did
not know printers ever did this kind of justification for text.  In
regard to the right margin, well, there's a trade-off between how well
the lines can be broken and the size of such protrusion errors that are
allowed.  A dictionary has many short paragraphs and consequently
many paragraph-final lines that will not be justified.  Perhaps for
this reason the errors on the right seemed unnoticeable (to me).

>make sure that the bottom lines of pages opposite each other lined up exactly,

Essentially, once I realized that giving TeX just a little vertically
stretchable glue to play with between each pair of paragraphs would
allow over a line's worth of stretch for each column (because there
were so many paragraphs).  This allowed TeX to avoid widows and orphans
completely, too.  [But you're making a point about illustrations, I
know.]

>..., issues of which fonts to use, ...

I did drafts with each of the font families available to me, CMR and the
Adobe LW fonts, and chose the nicest looking.  Is that what I should have
done?  (Times-Roman worked best, CMR looked bad and made the line
breaking *really* difficult.) After fixing the column dimensions,I chose
the point size by increasing it until TeX (and I) had too many line
breaking problems, then backing it off a little.  Is that what the pros
do?  I wound up having to break a line by hand about once every 10 pages
in the 450 page dictionary.

There *might* be some things that amateurs do better than pros because
they know about special properties of a text and can afford to take
the time.  I wrote my own hyphenation routines for the non-English words
that allowed for the presence of reduplicated forms, which were common.
Would a publisher these days do that?  I doubt it.

			Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu