[OS X TeX] overview of what TeX is producing

[Ross Moore]

Hi Maarten, and Will

On 02/03/2005, at 11:18 AM, Maarten Sneep wrote:

> On 2 mrt 2005, at 0:57, Will Robertson wrote:

>> Also, you don't specify if \sloppy was used for the prot/extrude 
>> samples. Was it?
>
> will post more info later on, I did play with \tolerance.

Yeah; there needs to be more playing around with these parameters
to get the best results.

Even your final example of TeX has two **awful** Overfills
at the top of the 2nd page. It also has one hyphenation
of  Al-ice  --- quite horrible to my mind.


That's the awful dilemma with TeX and LaTeX these days,
especially with non-standard layouts:

   You *can* get superior results with plain text --- but only
   after lots of playing around with parameters, in a non-visual way.

You always have to re-run and look at every page --- or pay
attention to the .log file. (How many people really do that?)
With this kind of thing you can understand how difficult it is
to get people to switch from word-processors.


We need a bunch of collections of parameter settings that can
be easily applied (via the \everypar hook, say).

Is there a package that already does this ?
If so, and it already gives good results, then this needs
to have its profile raised so that everyone gets used to
using it.

Clearly some settings should change according to the width
of the columns. Work is then needed to determine what kind
of relationship this is, and how to impose it (maybe 'offer'
is a better word to use) automatically.


>> It would be good (I'm not nominating you! just hypothetically:) to 
>> create some sort of poster sheet with several examples and big red 
>> circles around the ugly things with some explanation...provided there 
>> weren't too many red circles around the TeX examples :)
>
> Before I do that I'd like to receive more samples. Also the \tolerance 
> levels may need to be set to the values that _just_ doesn't give 
> overful lines.
>
> Maarten
>


Cheers

	Ross


BTW. Your Word examples were a little unfair.
They seem to have wider columns, located further
to the left. One of them has only 1 page, not 2
like (all ?) the other examples.


>
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Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
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