[OS X TeX] overview of what TeX is producing

William F. Adams wadams at atlis.com
Tue Mar 1 20:33:52 CET 2005


On Mar 1, 2005, at 12:55 PM, Matthew Hills wrote:

> Just to be a bit contrarian, take a look at how TeX handles 
> widows/orphans...
> (read Google's News archives of comp.text.tex for this)
>
> Pretty painful, as even Word can sort of handle this...

One can set TeX to have the same behaviour as Word by issuing 
\raggedbottom

At least if one fixes widows and orphans manually in TeX they stay 
fixed, and the easily workable options for fixing such are in line w/ 
expectations of good typography (running spreads long and short, 
setting \looseness+-1 &c.)

> On the whole, TeX output looks pretty good and handles standard
> document structures pretty well...  InDesign's output also looks quite
> good, but unfortunately doesn't provide as much support for structured
> documents.

InDesign gets one TeX's H&J w/ a couple of bells and whistles.

In return one loses pretty much all programmability, w/ numbering 
(other than pages) provided as an afterthought by the Pagemaker plug-in 
pack --- as one person noted, it's so bad ``you'd laugh until it 
hurts''.

One _can_ set it up to typeset XML though, so if one works up a 
compleat XML workflow which numbers things it might be workable.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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