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From: russell@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Request for Comments on Article Found in comp.sys.mac.digest
Message-ID: <635636458.4382@minster.york.ac.uk>
Date: 21 Feb 90 21:40:59 GMT
References: <66437@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Reply-To: russell@SoftEng.UUCP (russell)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
Lines: 34


In my limited experience of writing, I have found a similar phenomenum.
I use a Sun workstation, not a Mac or a PC, but run various typesetting
tools on it ranging from nroff through troff, TeX, LaTeX and WYSIWYG
systems.  It is often the case that the prettier the output, the more
easily I and my colleagues are impressed with it, and indeed a lot of time
goes into tweaking the typesetting into producing prettier output.  This is
*not* just a case of better presentation being superior, because this
tweaking is done at the expense of refining the contents.  And if I am
initially impressed with the superficial results, I am less likely to
change it afterwards.

I think the problem, with me anyway, is that no matter what the content is
like, a typeset document looks professional and "finished", and there is a
distinct psychological barrier which means that I am loath to alter it.

Jotted ideas are obviously incomplete and need work, but typesetting them
fools you into believing that they are fine as they are.

Now, I will hastily add that since I am aware of the problem, I try and
consciously concentrate on the content and not just the appearence of the
document :)

Knuth says, in the TeXbook, that good typesetting deserves high quality
text (or something similar, anyway) - I feel that the converse is true in
practice: the better the typesetting, the worse the content tends to be...

if you are not careful, that is...


Russell.

Advanced Computer Architecture Group.
russell@uk.ac.york.minster