[OS X TeX] overview of what TeX is producing

[Gerben Wierda]

> On 1 mrt 2005, at 20:33, William F. Adams wrote:
>
>> InDesign gets one TeX's H&J w/ a couple of bells and whistles.
>
> I've put up a page with a small comparison between various H&J engines.
>      http://www.nat.vu.nl/~sneep/ars/type/
> (the "ars" is not a description of what most of them look like, but a
> reference to
> ArsTechnica.com, where some of the samples come from). Further samples
> are
> welcome.

I noticed a few things: In the second paragraph I notice a hole between e
and a in dream and i and second s in sister and more problems like these.
This disappears if I scale to 200% to 300% (I am now using Acrobat 5 on
Win2000). Those effects are also visible with the LaTeX-produced output.
It seems to me that using PDF like this might not be a good tool.

Secondly, I would try this with only one paragraph. If one takes the
second paragraph for instance, one sees that Word in the end makes a
wide-spaced line of "what a wonderful dream it had" but TeX's finale lines
of the paragraph are as good as the first.

TeX however produces a rather awkward long space after dream!' in the
second line of the second paragraph which I find worse than what Word
produces.

Word also almost doesn't hyphenate. So you might see the combined effect
of line-by-line and how much penalty a hyphenation brings.

This, I think, is not an easy project. But it is fundamental if you want
to be able to show people why the complex algorithm is better.

Maybe no-hyphenation and a wider text width would be better to show the
difference, you have one less variable in the mix.

G

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