🚀 go-pugleaf

To be perfectly honest I should inform the reader that I have spent a
significant amount of time over the past 10 years writing and enhancing
an "embedded command" typesetting program (called DPS) that runs on large
Sperry Univac mainframes.

In article <280@opus.UUCP> rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) writes:

>One of the reasons that an H&J pass is a problem is that you can't
>generally find all of the problems (bad breaks, rivers, etc.) without
>looking at the final page.  If you have to wait for the entire document to
>be formatted and a proof copy printed, the sort of fine-tuning necessary
>for really high-quality output can be very tedious.  Once you find and fix,
>say, a bad line break, you have to re-run a proof copy and check everything
>after that until a boundary that puts you back to the old document (meaning
>at least the end of a page and perhaps the end of a chapter).  It's like
>fixing compilation errors in a program when the compiler only shows you a
>few at a time.

One of my more onerous tasks is doing the typesetting for the Undergraduate
and Graduate Catalogs of the University.  These are LARGE documents, about
40000 lines of 128 column source text, and about 200 to 250 typeset output
pages.  The first runs took 8 hours clock on an 1100/42; I am down to less
than a half-hour clock on an 1100/92.

There is a tremendous pressure to keep the (physical) weight of the Undergrad
catalog below one pound.  We mail these catalogs to high schools around the
country, and going over a pound would kill us in postage!  Some refugee from
a Thanksgiving dinner decided to compress the document by not starting each
section on a new page...

So, this problem Dick mentions is worst-case here.  It doesn't get back into
sync until the next CHAPTER break.  Needless to say, this makes it virtually
impossible to do the kind of fine-tuning described.  The whole rest of the
chapter shifts, and you might end up creating dozens of bad widows in trying
to fix one.  Given the extreme time pressure (a week or two from when I get
the data till the printer needs the typeset pages) it is impossible to do any
fine tuning at all.

Thank <insert-euphemism-for-deity-here> that the powers-that-be are more
interested in getting the thing out on time than the subtle, finer points
of typesetting...
-- 
Ben Cranston  ...{seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben  zben@umd2.umd.edu