jim... you just utterly and completely fail to grok the listserve imperative to move threads forward. *** jim said:
I believe I did say something that makes sense,
then you have a serious intellectual problem too.
its just that you still do not understand that your problem was not font size but rather line length.
this is now the third time i have said it, twice now directly to you, and you still don't seem to "get it". i retained the p.g. linebreaks. that means p.g. decided the line-length, not me. if you don't understand the exact meaning of that, continue pondering it until you _do_ understand it. because you won't be able to keep up with the thread, let alone advance it, until you've understood that fact. i retained the p.g. linebreaks. that's why each line was as exactly as long as it was. because that's how long it was in the p.g. e-text... (except for lines i rewrapped to get rid of orphans.) are the lines in p.g. files too long, in general? _yes._ does that have any bearing on our experimentation? not really. because we're just trying things out here. nothing is cast in stone. and perhaps, for this book, for michael's eyes in particular, the p.g. lines are fine, even though -- for you, or me, or somebody else -- they might be too long. our opinion doesn't matter, because michael is printing out this book for himself. that's a beauty of print-on-demand -- customization. besides, we're going to do _more_ experiments later...
You also do not apparently understand that it is not generally true that font size and line length are inversely related.
again, you need to put in some more thought... if we talk about a pre-determined line of characters -- like in this case, where we retain p.g. linebreaks -- it is _absolutely_true_ that the space required will be directly related to the fontsize. _it's_absolutely_true_. the character-count of the line will remain unchanged -- by definition, as it was determined by linebreaks -- but the width of the line printed on a page depends on fontsize. the bigger the size, the more space required. and if we also constrain the size of the space in which we are putting that pre-determined line of characters, we have put an upper-limit on the fontsize we can use. in this case, we are using a space that's 4.5-inches wide, so the biggest fontsize i could use that kept all the lines reasonably within the width of the space was 10.5-point. a smaller fontsize wouldn't have filled up all of the page, plus it would've been less readable, so i used 10.5-point. in other words, all of the other factors were constrained, and fontsize was left to vary, and had to make it all fit... for my next .pdf, and i've said _this_ three times now too, twice directly to you, so it really should've sunk in by now, i will unwrap the text (i.e., free it from the p.g. linebreaks) and jack the fontsize to 12-point, so michael can see that. and then we'll do some more experimentation after _that_.
So you retract your previous statements when you said that I should have been reporting to you when your tools fail?
just exactly how useful do you think an "it doesn't work" report is, anyway? you never gave one worthwhile report. so no, jim, i don't want any reports from you, none at all... are we clear now? or do i have to repeat that a third time? -bowerbird