🚀 go-pugleaf

One of the consequences of my learning TeX has been that, for better or
worse, I am now much more sensitive to the typographical quality of what
I read.  A case in point, and a particularly horrendous example of
visual formatting, is found in the sidebar on p. 148 of the September
Scientific American.  There is a series of formulas that have evidently
been visually formatted and the results show quite clearly why one
should stick to logical formatting.  To begin with, the size of the font
used in the displays is entirely out of proportion with the text font.
The second formula has $e^{-x_j}$ in the denominator of a fraction.  The
minus comes out at the level of the top of the x and the dot of the j
comes out at the level of the bottom of the x so that the j is actually
inline with the e (its descender actually comes out below the baseline).
In the third equation, the term (y_i-d_i)^2, appears.  The y is raised
so that its top is at the same level as the top of the d and its bottom
at the same level as the bottom of the d. The minus is at the level of
the lower line of the = that appears earlier in the equation and the
comma is in the exponent (I don't punctuate displays, in part because
they don't need it, being large breaks in the action anyway and in part
because distributing random dots and commas in an equation can be
confusing).  In the next equation the y and d are still displaced,
though not as badly and the minus now is in the middle halfway between
the bars of the equal sign.  The next equation has some terms in a
numerator raised too high above a fraction bar (which is probably
related to the fact that one fraction has a subscript; this is a
non-trivial problem that TeX might not handle too well either) and a
minus sign that is now *below* the level of the bottom of the equal
sign.  The last two terms have {\partial {\cal E}\over \partial x_j} and
in each case the base line of the \partial comes below that of the \cal
E and above that of the x. Either this is a very weird font or it is
just badly set.  If this is what visual formatting brings you (and this
is pretty clearly visually formatted even if set in letterpress), I will
stick with TeX.

Michael Barr