🚀 go-pugleaf

	I've been doing *roff for about 10 years now, only a few years less
than I've been writing programs and designing circuits.  Over the last few
years, I've been doing a lot of troff, and even some Mac-based word
processing.  I can turn out man pages as well as the next guy, or tech
reports, or scientific manuscripts.  I can even sound like I know what I'm
talking about when it comes to serifs and rag-right, and neat stuff like
that.  Does that mean I know anything about document design?  Not a chance.
And, from some of the really ugly textbooks I've seen, it's pretty obvious
that there are a lot of people just like me out there; the difference is
that they think they know what they are doing and have been able to
convince publishers to let them submit camera-ready copy and to hell with
the designers.  The results are often pretty horrible.

	A few years ago, I got involved with putting together our annual
report.  80 or so pages.  I did the technical end of it, setting up the
troff macros and stuff.  We had a designer do the actual design, however.
She worried about all sorts of stuff that never would have occurred to me.
Due to budget limitations, we do the masters on an Apple LaserWriter Plus.
That means 300-dpi resolution on regular xerox paper.  That limits the type
of fonts you can use.  It means you do the final printing on the kind of
paper which doesn't make the fuzzyness of the letters look bad.  That means
you have to pick from a certain set of inks.  That means you're limited in
the colors you can do the type in.  Which means you're limited in what
color to make the cover.  And the type of font changes how you lay out the
pages (not to mention that you're limited to the fonts available in a
LaserWriter Plus).  The original design was done in Helvetica and we
discovered that the LW's Helvetica wasn't quite like the Helvetica the
designer was using (some of the carefully-fit display type didn't fit
anymore and needed to be re-designed).

	The designer worred about keeping the page count to a multiple of
four.  About which stuff ended up on facing pages.  About keeping certain
pages on left- or right-hand pages.  Some sections were re-arranged to get
the handedness correct, and I think we even ended up with inserting blank
pages in stategic spots to get it to come out like she wanted (all the time
worrying about that magical multiple of 4 page count!)  And, every 4 pages
we added made it cost more.  And made it fatter; we did fold-over-and-
staple-through-the-fold binding; which starts to not work well somewhere
about 80 pages, the exact limit depends, of course, on the kind of stock
you use for the cover and on the kind of paper you use inside, which of
course depends on the resolution of the printer and the type of ink, etc.

	Actually, it was an interesting back-and-forth.  She did the
initial design specs (type sizes, column lengths and widths, hairlines,
underbars, all that neat stuff) and I sat down to turn it all into troff
macros.  When I went back to her with some sample pages which I thought
were pretty true to the specs, she tore them apart and I went back and
diddled the macros to get them closer.  Changes I had made because I
thought they were inconsequential turned out to have far-reaching
consequences.  Some stuff that she wanted to do just turned out to be
impossible to do in troff.  Eventually we came up with a design which
pleased her and was doable in troff.  The end result was a really good
looking report.  The design was flexible enough so that every year it can
change a little bit as needs dictate, and to keep each year's different
enough to be interesting yet still clearly the same style.  Had I done it
myself, it would have come out neat and clean and very ugly.
-- 
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"