🚀 go-pugleaf

lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) writes:
> If you could take the trouble to tell more about that back-and-forth,
> [between me, the troff hacker and her, the document designer] I think
> it would be useful to some of us.  Me, anyway.

	One thing that drove me crazy was getting the page numbers right.
She wanted them to be on the outside lower corner of the page, outside of
the normal text margins, with a hairline rule above them.  I was doing this
using the -me macro package as a base.  Provisions are made for even and
odd footers, so getting the "outside lower corner" right wasn't a problem,
but it turned out to be a bitch to get the overrules to come out right.
The first year, we punted on them and had them put in by hand (i.e.
somebody did "mechanicals").  Sometimes you just have to do kludges like
that to meet deadlines.  But, it turned out that the hairlines that the
mechanical guy could put in by hand wern't exactly the same thickness as
the hairlines my LaserWriter could produce.  Again, we punted and decided
that is was "close enough".  Personally, I couldn't tell the difference.

	Another problem we had was with the type size and leading
specifications.  Typographers specify type something along the lines of
10/12 x 14 which means 10 point type on 12 point spacing (i.e. 2 point
leading) on lines 14 picas long.  It turns out that the what the -me macros
do is instead of keeping track of the type size and line spacing, they keep
track of the type size and the ratio of the type size to the line spacing.
The (I think, misguided) idea is that as you change the type size, the line
spacing magicly changes in scale).  This may be convenient for computer
hacker types, but it doesn't jive with the traditional way that
typographers think and you end up with all sorts of strange round-off
errors.  Eventually, we had to settle on the line spacing that troff -me
could produce which was closest to what the designer wanted.

	Another problem which we found no good workaround to was that C/A/T
troff has a patheticly small set of fonts to work with.  You just can't do
bold italics (or, at least not that I can find out how).  Because of the
subject matter (microbiology), italics are used a lot (species name,
genetic markers, enzyme names, etc).  The document design called for
section titles to be in bold.  But what to do when a section title had an
italicized word in it (fairly common)?  The choices were to do bold roman
or unbold italic.  The former was more attractive but scientifically
incorrect.  We eventually settled on the latter.

	BTW, one interesting side note which really has nothing to do with
document design.  The head of each lab wrote a section describing their
work.  These sections were then combined with other text and assembled into
the complete report.  The people writing the individual lab sections had a
lot of trouble dealing with the discipline that goes with writing a part of
a whole.  There were stylistic decisions that were made and people had to
stick to; everything in third person, etc.  One decision that was made was
that the only people mentioned by name would be the lab heads.  This meant
you should say "Dr. foobar did such-and-such" even if the actual work was
done by somebody in Dr. foobar's lab.  One person insisted that the people
who did the actual work should get the credit by name, and wouldn't back
down when we told him that this wasn't really a scientific document, but
was being written for the lay-public and that stylistic uniformity was
paramount in this situation.  It got real ugly.

	Another problem was convincing people that page-count was
important.  Everybody was told to aim for X pages.  Some came in short,
some came in long.  A little variation was OK, but some were sent back with
instructions to "cut a half a page or we'll do it for you" (but nicely).
Some people just wouldn't listen and eventually we did have to do it for
them, often with a lot of screaming and yelling resulting.  Once everything
was assembled, people got galleys back for proofing, with instructions to
only look for typos, mispellings, missing words, and stuff like that.
Passages which had been badly garbled during the text-hacking process could
be fixed up, but only if they stayed about the same length.  Some people
came back with an extra half page of text, and got really pissed when we
told them "page layout is already locked up, you just *CAN'T* do this!"

	In once instance, somebody insisted on lots of fairly minor changes
all over his several pages of text.  Eventually, we gave in (it got *very*
ugly) and I told him to mark up his galleys and give them back to me.  He
insisted that he would rather just edit the files himself.  I explained to
him, as quietly and rationally as I could, that at this stage of the game
(i.e. final layout) the files were *mine*.  Nobody, right on up to the
chariman of the board, touched those files but me if they ever expected me
to work on them again.  They had been carefully proofed, spell-checked
several times, and run over again and again with a fine-tooth comb for all
sorts of things that this guy didn't know anything about.  We turned ascii
quotes into directed quotes.  Same for apostrophies.  We "did the right
thing" with stuff like primes, degree signs and scientific notation (turning
all the $ 3 X 10 sup 6 $ into $ 3 ^ times ^| 10 sup 6 $, where "times" give
you a real multiplication symbol instead of an "*", "x", or "X", with the
appropriate extra quarter-spaces to make it look better.  We got the
accents right on peoples names, got the little circles right for Angstrom
units, etc.  Fixed everybody's hyphens, dashes, and minus signs to be the
proper things.  Put hard spaces where they needed to be.  And so on.

	I tried to explain to this guy that if he would just take the
galleys and mark them up and give me the corrected hard copy, that would be
the best way for me to execute his changes.  But noooo.  He wanted to do it
himself and wouldn't listen to reason.  When I explained to him about all
the work that went into the files and that nobody could edit them but me
because only I knew every that was going on at this point, he got on his
high horse about how he knew what he was doing and "don't you trust me not
to mess it up".  When I told him that, quite frankly, I didn't, he really
got pissed!  Things got *very* *very* ugly.  Eventually, he refused to mark
up the galleys, insisted on giving me his version of the file.  Of course,
the file that he gave me was derived from the original file that he had
submitted weeks ago, many many editing sessions earlier, without benefit of
all my work to get the accents and quotes right, and the typos, and the
spelling checks, and.... but he didn't give a shit.  He just wanted to do
it his way, no matter how much extra work it made for other people.
-- 
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"