Typesetting Nightmares
Hans Hagen
PRAGMA ADE
The Netherlands
pragma@wxs.nl
Sunday July 20, 2003
It does not take much for users (and customers) to realize
that TEX is a programming language. This often results in
the perception that you can do anything you want, and make
people believe that you can do better than other, less open
applications. Combine this with the fact that developers
seldom admit that something cannot be done, and the
ingredients of a typographic programming nightmare are
there.
The complication arises from the fact that:
- opposite to desktop publishing applications, TEX
sees a document as a sequence of content
- where TEX based macro||packages tend to organize
fonts and measures, designers follow a more random path
- where TEX loves structure, authors want to put any
thought on paper, being structured or not, which results in
not only interfering data, but also in the wish to escape
from TEX's machinery
- one reason for choosing TEX is its ability to
typeset math, and typesetting that often conflicts with pure
text typesetting
- TEX tries to do its best to typeset beautiful
paragraphs, but frequently the (not producible by TEX)
counterpart is considered more beautiful or adequate.
This means that in order to fulfil the needs of authors and
designers, one sometimes has to bend TEX's rules and cook
up rather complicated macros. In this presentation I will
discuss a couple of last year's (typo|)|graphical programming
nightmares.
Wendy McKay
2003-12-20
