🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun27.112938.21202@infoserver.th-darmstadt.de> xitijsch@ddathd21.bitnet (Joachim Schrod) writes:
>   And why does one want to produce an unreadable document? (And in
>fact, the rest of your posting describes a style creating an
>unreadable document!)

Because what makes a readable document for some purposes makes it
completely useless for others.  In particular, normally emphasis or
bold material, or shifts into Greek, or the difference between \Sigma
and \sum should be fairly subtle, and should only be obvious to 
people looking out for it.  But if you're sending a ms to a
compositor, the last thing you want is to send a subtle ms, you want
to send one that shouts `This heading is in bold!' or `This is a
summation, not a Sigma!'  If you submit typeset manuscript to a
compositor, they are not going to love you for it.

On the subject of an ms.sty, the main problem is getting the fonts
together.  As DEK pointed out, if you want to take things like
underlining seriously, you need a separate font for it, especially
when you start using full markup and need things like wavy-underlining
and triple-underlining.  There's also real headaches with mathematics,
which you don't want to know about.  But as a few examples:

   Let $a$ be a pudding      should appear as    Let _a_ be a pudding
   Let $x$ be a pudding      should appear as    Let x be a pudding
   Then $f(a)$ is a box      should appear as    Then f(a) is a box
   Then $fa$ is a box        should appear as    Then _fa_ is a box

Obviously, this is completely impossible to generate by machine, so
you're better off making do with every bit of mathematics underlined.
Which isn't what the compositor is used to seeing, and therefore takes
more time, and therefore takes more money.

One of these days, unless anyone beats me to it (please do) I'll get
round to sticking together a full family of cmtt fonts with various
sorts of underlining, and put together a ms.sty to go with it.  But
it'll be a lot of work, and it won't get done until next year
sometime.

Cheers,

Alan.




-- 
Alan Jeffrey         Tel: +46 31 72 10 98         jeffrey@cs.chalmers.se
Department of Computer Sciences, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden