On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Robert Thorsby wrote: > Perhaps I expressed myself badly. My point was that while ever > applications are forced to compromise their algorithms to accommodate > monitor resolutions they will never typeset as well as applications that > do not have to compromise.
Robert, I'm with you now. > I learned this when I was using FrameMaker at 1600% resolution while > trying to position some type precisely. I finally got to the point where a > thousandth of a point (1/72000 of an inch) change on paper resulted in a > "huge" shift on screen -- the PostScript algorithms could handle the > minute changes, the printer was having real problems, but the Monitor was > so far out that it was no longer reliable. > Mind you, you have to be pretty weird to want to move something 1/1000 > of a point but that's immaterial. Actually, no. It's not weird just a matter of priorities and how people view work. I'm in the category that focuses on content and prefers that graphic professionals design the appearance of the output. I prefer to not fuss with it. I'll tweak some things slightly, but soon lose interest: good enough is sufficient. Other people are focused more on the appearance than the content. This is not a bad thing, it's just the way we are wired. A graphic artist friend of mine will pick up a page and see the overall pattern; he may eventually get around to actually reading the text. If he doesn't then that's OK with him, too. My fiancee has often told me that she doesn't really care whether or not something works as long as it looks and smells pretty. Different strokes for different folks. One's not better than the other, just different. > Your reference to xdvi is spot on -- but the LyX output has to be > reprocessed each time, a matter of little consequence in reality. But an > anathema to the wordprocessor crowd. Could be. I never discussed this with a winWord user. And my book, admittedly short at its current 155 pages, still compiles acceptably fast on my ancient PII/333MHz workstation with 328M RAM. > I repeat my argument that it is the difference in monitor resolution that > forces the wordprocessors to use inferior typesetting -- if they used > better typesetting then their screen would no longer reflect what was > being printed. I appreciate that it's the cart driving the horse but I > believe that is what's happening. The interesting thing is that I see page appearance in OpenOffice.org-1.1.2 that looks really bad. But, when it's printed the uneveness goes away and it looks just fine. Shrug. Again, it may well be that I'm not doing page layout for a magazine or advertisement and I'm not oriented toward microtwiddling the appearance. I'm reading The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition now. I'm fascinated at the degree of control one can assert over pages, paragraphs, individual typographic elements. In the back of my mind is the thought, "perhaps, some day, I'll need to design a nice layout for some document and this will be a really good reference on how to do it". In the front of my mind is the thought, "nice. But, so what? The defaults -- and the publisher's .sty -- are just fine with me. Write and ignore the details." Rich -- Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM) <http://www.appl-ecosys.com>
