Hi :)
+1
On the rare occasion i have glanced through newspapers in the last few years i
have noticed really bad kerning between words on different lines. I doubt
LaTeX is really perfect either although it probably is a shed load better than
Writer/Word. Getting the spacing right between words on different lines
without leaving the end all raggedy takes craftsmanship (craftswomanship) and
is more of an art than a science. Computers will never really understand the
way human beans see things. They can only approximate. ("If only you could
see what your eyes have seen" Bladerunner replicant to the chap that
manufactured his eyeballs)
The people who compare Writer to LaTeX seldom mention how well Word compares.
People reading some of these posts, or quoting them in articles, might be
under a false impression. The very fact that people are annoyed that Writer is
not a perfect Desktop Publishing shows how much closer it is than Word. Word
makes a complete mess of documents. If you tried listing the various nasty
messes Word makes in an average document then it could take a looong time.
That's why they have Publisher.
Having used Publisher a fair bit, and Word and now Writer but not LaTeX i think
output quality starts with Word as being the worst on the left
Word ................. Publisher .... Writer ................... LaTeX
although maybe the gap between LaTeX and Writer is even closer than that?
There might be some things Publisher does better and maybe i have only ever
seen it being mis-handled but so far everything i have seen produced by people
experienced (but not necessarily good with it) with Publisher has been done a
lot better by a noob with Writer.
Regards from
Tom :)
________________________________
From: Virgil Arrington <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, 7 September 2013, 13:39
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: spacing after punctuation
Bruce Byfield wrote:
>I know of several publishers who work directly from ODF files. With a
>couple
>of exceptions, Writer has most of the tools needed for a thoroughly
>professional design job, allegedly because when the original code was being
>written in the days of Star Division, they were told they would have to use
>what they wrote for documentation.
>The trick is to know what options to use, and which to ignore (topics that,
>if
>you forgive the shameless plug, I am currently grappling with the book I am
>writing with Jean Hollis Weber).
>For now, I'll just say that Writer is not a word processor so much as an
>intermediate desktop publishing program. You can actually substitute it
>very
>successfully for proprietary tools like FrameMaker.
No doubt, many publishers are simply publishing the files sent to them that
are created by word processors. And, sadly, the results are often quite
apparent. I'm reading more and more books that are set without true small
caps or old style numbering. Writers and publishers simply accept the faux
small caps generated by their word processors by shrinking regular upper
case letters complete with the corresponding weakening of the lines that
come from the shrinking. Now, perhaps these are the options that you and
Weber would recommend avoiding. (I look forward to hearing more about your
book.)
However, for me at least, LO's biggest limitation that disqualifies it for
final publishable work is its justification method. It's line-by-line
justification results in too many word space variations from line to line
and too many hyphenated lines. As an experiment, just prepare the same
document using LO and LaTeX (with the Microtype package). The difference in
the justified lines will be quite obvious.
To me, LO Writer is a business class word processor, and perhaps the best
there is, but until it finds a more complete justification method, I don't
think I qualifies for creating publishable output.
Virgil
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