Re: English versus German

On Jul 3, 12:12 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<9c7b4da7-70e4-498f-8510-9481c9461...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 2, 9:09 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why should I pay over $600 to get ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
hyphenation, when I can get it for free?

You shouldn't. None of those are the business of the writer.

And as Brian points out, what if the writer is also the typesetter?

A very unfortunate situation. Don't you have grad student assistants,
or (department) secretaries?

Or publishers who care what they put out looks like?

In addition:

Handling of floats.

Evidently a technical term in TeX.

Floats are tables and figures that "float" within the text, to the
most visually optimal spot (for example, keeping the text/nontext
ratio at acceptable levels).

Oh, so now Mr. Knuth is imposing his esthetic judgments on you?

No.  You can change the default ratio and other float parameters to be
whatever you want them to be.

Great. Untrained amateurs messing with esthetic questions.

When I do \begin{table}...\end{table}, it automatically numbered
behind the scenes for me.

Whether you want it or not. How nice for you!

The number only shows up when I call for it, of course (for example,
in a caption, list of tables, or in a cross-reference).

Just like Word!

Smart cross-referencing: you can have ordinary numerical
cross-references like "on page 213", but if you want, you can have
them automatically come out as relative references like "on the
previous page" or "on the next page".  If your content changes the
relationship, the cross-references will automatically change
appropriately.

Just like Word!

I don't believe you.  Where are smart page references documented?  How
are the inserted?

You're now in 2007? References tab, Captions group, Cross Reference.
Anything with an automatic number is automatically listed in that
panel, and if you want to reference a word, a passage, or whatever,
you insert a bookmark, and that too is in the cross reference panel.

So if I reference a figure on a different page, this Cross Reference
capability will know whether to say "on page x" (if the figure is far
away) versus "on the facing page", "on the previous page", and "on the
following page" as appropriate?

You didn't bother to check?

It doesn't do "facing page." It does "above" or "below," with or
without the page number, and of course that changes if the relative
position changes.

Or did you misunderstand what I meant by "smart cross-referencing"?

In LaTeX, they are just "v"ariant references, so they are inserted
quite easily, with \vref{...} and \vpageref{...}.

A hell of a lot of typing.

It's shorter than typing "on the facing page", and then having to
change it yourself to "on the previous page" when you repaginate and
discover the pages are no longer facing each other!

So you think your reader is too stupid to find an illustration on the
adjacent page without you telling them where to look? That's
insulting.

Proper small caps (when they're available in the font): Word scales
down capital letters rather than using the true small caps, resulting
in wispy small caps that don't fit in with the rest of the text.

How many decades ago did you last look at Word? If they're in a font,
Word can use them.

I just tested it.  The small capitals for Times New Roman are faked in
word: they are 80% scaled down version of the regular capitals.

There are options for changing the ratio,

Irrelevant.  Any sort of scaling will cause the line widths of the
small caps to be thinner than the rest of the characters by that ratio.

True small caps have the same line widths, not smaller.

That's why there are what Adobe called "Expert" fonts, back in
PostScript days, and now there are OpenType fonts.

but again, Word is not a DTP program.

If it can't handle small caps properly, then it is inferior to TeX,
which is the only point under contention.

Once again, not the writer's problem.

David Kleinecke quoted a math publisher's style guide deprecating the
use of TeX, presumably because mathematicians are spending so much
time programming their output that has to be changed anyway because
their parameters are all screwed up.

In LaTeX, the small capitals are true small caps.

If the font designer has provided them.

Of course.  But even when the font designer has provided them, Word
ignores them, and substitutes its own, vastly inferior, scaled caps.

In Computer Modern, they are
even worse done than the regular font.

Again you conflate TeX with Computer Modern!  I'm beginning to believe
that you really just don't understand that they are two separate
things.

An awful lot of mathematicians (and pseudo-linguists like Ruhlen)
don't understand that, either.

Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods.  No need to do
a search-and-replace to change the occasional double space into a
single space (which is still wrong anyway: the spacing is supposed to
be 1.5 spaces, which can't be done easily in Word).

Where did "1.5 spaces" come from? Is that something Knuth invented
because he didn't quite want to abandon the typewriter?

Technically, the actual spacing is 1em, which is about 1.5 regular
spaces.

For the third time:  WHO SAYS?

You seem to be such an expert on typesetting, I assumed you already
knew this.

I'm surprised you don't know this.

Sorry, I've only been studying type design and typesetting and the
history of printing for about thirty years now.

Then why haven't you heard of this?  Why haven't you noticed that,
until word processors became so ubiquitous, sentence-final spacing was
larger than inter-word spacing?  It's all throughout my older books.

Define "older."

Provide a statement from a typography guide asserting such a thing.

Checking illustrations in two standard references, Blumenthal's Art of
the Printed Book 1455-1955 and Morison's Typographic Arts, I find that
it was done sometimes in the early 18th c. and often in the late 19th
c. (both eras when the "typographic arts" were at a nadir). It does
not occur in 20th-c. fine printing. In the examples where it is used,
there are big white spots akin to the rivers you complained about
earlier.

(Because of an increase in adamant "one-spacers" and the use of poor
typesetting software like Word, more and more printed books use one
space instead of the proper 1.5 space.  The first book I found with
the proper spacing after going through half a dozen on my shelf was
printed in 1989.)

Care to name the publisher? Was it CRC?

Ballantine Books, 1989 printing of _The City and the Pillar_.

Fer cryin' out loud. A mass market paperback.is what you use for your
esthetic standard??

My copy is Signet, 1965, 11th printing, purchased 3 July 1975, and has
no such thing.

Also, Oxford University Press, 1993 printing of _The Linguistics Wars_.

For the fourth time: WHO SAYS IT'S "PROPER"?

It is descriptively proper, not necessarily prescriptively proper.  
(I'm sure someone somewhere put it into official-sounding words.)

As I said, in thirty-odd years of reading about and doing such things,
I have never heard of such a description or prescription.

If you claim you didn't invent it yourself, where did you hear about
it?

Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).

Just like Word! (Including for combinations that are not pre-defined
in Unicode.)

I tried.  It doesn't work.

Maybe your program is broken.

Yes, I've been saying that all along.

Or maybe Mac is different from PC.

Yes, I've been saying that, too.

Maybe now you're finally understanding!

Turns out, as shown above, that it's a matter of type technology, not
of Word.

Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.

Just like Word!

If you want "fortran" to remain un-hyphenated every time it appears,
how many times do you have to specify that in the file?

Once. In your custom dictionary.

Does the custom dictionary travel along with your file if you send the
file to someone else?  Will they get the same hyphenation patterns you
do when they open your file?

If you send them a pdf. Usually it's unwise to distribute a Word file,
unless you want them to edit it, in which case hyphenation should not
be turned on at all. You could, of course, type the nonbreaking hyphen
at the start of the word, and then it will port (or Find/Replace the
word with the word preceded by nonbreaking hyphen).

Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
without legacy version issues.

Word has no cross-platform conversion issues,

You are lying.  I have witnessed them first-hand.  I have received
files created on PCs, opened them on my Mac, and found them not to
look like the original (I always ask the sender to send a PDF too, so
I can see what he intended the layout to look like).

As I said, if you have the same printer driver (which is what Word
uses for the external parameters), the result should be the same.

Should be, but isn't.

That's not a cross-platform thing, that's a different-computer thing.

Have you already forgotten?  "Or maybe Mac is different from PC."

If two PCs are not using the same printer driver, they can show
different formatting.

Since you have so many questions about Word, maybe you should
subscribe to the newsgroup microsoft.public.word.docmanagement (but
there's another one for MacWord users).

and the only "legacy
version issues" are because Word2007 uses a new, much compacter format
and you can download a free Compatibility Pack for your earlier
version of Word so it can open the new format (or you can save from
2007 in the earlier format).

How swell of them to offer a special downloadable "compatibility pack"!

I've never needed any sort of "compatibility pack" to open a plain
text file.

Which means either that the system has never been improved, or that
the program is burdened with tons of obsolete code to deal with
obsolete matters.

I don't even know what that is supposed to mean.

A plain text file is a plain text file.

And in the decades since TeX was introduced, no new capabilities have
ever been added? Or if a user hasn't updated their TeX, they can
smoothly open any file using any newly added features?

I don't believe you.
.