.tei repostings and evaluation of their .pdf versions
josh, i see a few of your .tei projects were reposted. i looked at your earlier .pdf versions, to evaluate them, but it was very hard to keep at the task for very long. first, they are much _improved_ over earlier attempts, so whoever is refining the xslt -- marcello? you? both? -- deserves some warm encouragement for that. keep it up! in their current state, the .pdf's kind of remind me of a young pre-teen girl. her face might well _be_ pretty, but it's difficult for us to tell, because we can't look at it for long enough to decide, since it's covered with pimples... the "pimples", in your .pdf files, are widows and orphans. to the typographically knowledgeable, they're eyesores. and since they appear so frequently within your .pdf's -- practically every other page-spread -- it's distracting, distracting enough that it's impossible to see much else... fortunately, i think there is probably some easy setting that you can make to eliminate all the windows/orphans. indeed, you might even have made that change already! have you? if so, i'll look at the .pdf's that were reposted, and we can move on to some less-obvious points... -bowerbird
Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
the "pimples", in your .pdf files, are widows and orphans.
to the typographically knowledgeable, they're eyesores. and since they appear so frequently within your .pdf's -- practically every other page-spread -- it's distracting, distracting enough that it's impossible to see much else...
fortunately, i think there is probably some easy setting that you can make to eliminate all the windows/orphans.
If we want to eliminate the widows and clubs we must - include `stretchability' in the leading or - have a ragged bottom. Both solutions can be worse eyesores than the original problem. With stretchable leading the lines on the left hand page will not match the lines on the right hand page. With ragged bottom, facing pages may be of different length. In commercial typesetting these problems are overcome by manually tightening or loosening some paragraphs on the page, or even making the author rewrite some of the copy to fit the page. In a purely automated process this is impossible. We also want to keep the flexibility of changing fonts, page sizes etc. so we cannot insert manual fixes. I know that you will write a program over the weekend that solves exactly this problem that Dr. Knuth was not able to solve. But what good is it to me if you don't ever show a single line of all the fantastic code you wrote? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
Marcello wrote:
Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
the "pimples", in your .pdf files, are widows and orphans.
to the typographically knowledgeable, they're eyesores. and since they appear so frequently within your .pdf's -- practically every other page-spread -- it's distracting, distracting enough that it's impossible to see much else...
fortunately, i think there is probably some easy setting that you can make to eliminate all the windows/orphans.
If we want to eliminate the widows and clubs we must
- include `stretchability' in the leading or - have a ragged bottom.
Another tweak in higher-end typesetting engines (of which Adobe Indesign is at the lower end) is to look at selected hyphenation to compress the text a little more, and even do small tweaks to the character spacing, both of which sometimes leads to freeing up a line in a paragraph.
Both solutions can be worse eyesores than the original problem. With stretchable leading the lines on the left hand page will not match the lines on the right hand page.
Agreed. Leading changes on one page can lead to left-right-page differences which will be noticeable. One solution is that the leading on the left/right pages are tweaked together.
In commercial typesetting these problems are overcome by manually tightening or loosening some paragraphs on the page, or even making the author rewrite some of the copy to fit the page.
In the case of reproducing already existing (finished texts), rewriting is definitely not an option!
In a purely automated process this is impossible. We also want to keep the flexibility of changing fonts, page sizes etc. so we cannot insert manual fixes.
Definitely. However, there is the possibility that future automated typesetting engines may improve the widows/orphans problems by multiple attacks on the various parameters that can be tweaked.
I know that you will write a program over the weekend that solves exactly this problem that Dr. Knuth was not able to solve. But what good is it to me if you don't ever show a single line of all the fantastic code you wrote?
<laugh/> Jon
participants (3)
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Jon Noring -
Marcello Perathoner