Re: [typo] alignement optique

[Robert Keeble <rkeeble AT earthlink.net>]

Bonjour Alain (et tous),

   It has been some time since I followed this list regularly. It's
always a good source of information and strong opinions. Sorry that I'm
forced to reply in English. My written French is still quite horrible,
though my spoken is improving.

   Alain, please do give any strategies you think might be useful for
optical alignment at the right margin. I think the solution will not be
simple. What to do with a fancy terminal 'e' with a long tail? For some
characters, stripping the right side-bearing when justifying will give
reasonable results, but of course this does not work for the rounded
characters. And shouldn't the 'T' align at the right side of its stem? 
It
may be better to leave this to the designers of OpenType fonts.

   By the way, I can change the justification strategy for QXP in
version 7.0, though I thought our order was hyphen/word space/letter
space. I will check.
(Yes, I am back at Quark after 2 1/2 years elsewhere, and working on
the text engine again since last Autumn.)

Something else I have been pondering for some time now: are there
justification strategies that people used  in the days of hard type
that might still apply to digital layout? For instance, are there
well-defined places that one can insert a fine or hair space to widen a
line slightly? Or should we *only adjust word and letter spacing? In an
ideal situation, I suppose might use the TeX algorithm, allow
horizontal glyph stretching, apply word and letter spacing, and then
these other hypothetical strategies, and allow the user to control the
order of application. What do the experts do to fine-tune a line when
word and letter spacing has done the best it can?

Rob Keeble
Quark R&D
Text & Typography

On Jul 13, 2004, at 7:06 AM, Alain Hurtig wrote:

> At 8:51 -0400 13/07/04, Sébastien Mengin wrote:
> > c'est la page composée avec LaTeX qui a l'air de danser,
> > et davantage que celle avec Xpress
> Ah ? Je ne connais de pages bien composées avec LaTeX que celles du
> sinistre Th. B., de triste réputation.
>
> Ce type-là compose naturellement bien, mais j'ai toujours soupçonné 
> que TeX
> n'y était pour rien et qu'en fait Th. B. compose tout _à la main_, 
> lettre
> par lettre, ligne par ligne. Puis prétend que c'est TeX qui a tout 
> fait.
>
> Après, il se donne des airs de gourou et court les colloques 
> internationaux
> en prenant l'air modeste... Bref, le voilà démasqué, cet imposteur.
>
> > d'Xpress,
> > grossières mais plus rares (si j'ai bien suivi), réussiraient à se
> > faire discrètes.
> Si c'était vrai, je serais au chômage !
>
> > On nage dans la précision, là !
> Oh non, car un des mystères de la liste Typo vient d'être levé : c'est 
> de
> toute première importance...