[pdftex] TUGBoat - HTH's thesis

[Hans Hagen]

At 09:39 AM 1/30/2002 -0800, Joe Riel wrote:
>Yes, it is fascinating (I'm two thirds of the way through it).
>I look forward to using these features in pdfTeX.
>
>I had a few minor comments, though, about the typesetting of
>the article itself.  There appears to be too much vertical
>space above the equation displays; that is, there is more space
>above then below the displays which looks wrong.
>Another is that the rendering of "TeX" doesn't look quite
>right with the chosen font.  The serifs of the lowered "E"
>run into the "X" (from memory).  Contrast this with Knuth's
>TeX in CM.
>
>A final comment concerns the rendering of "METAFONT", in its usual font.
>Because it looks so different from the rest of the text (that's almost
>always the case), it is much whiter, it stands out.
>That conflicts, I feel, with one of the topics of the article,
>the achievement of a uniform grey page.  That criticism may not
>be fair or warranted, however, it jumped out at me.

it may be interesting to know that herman zapf, being one of the examiners, 
was quite positive on the desing and quality (in terms of typesetting) 
document as a whole, so i would not bother to much about the logos (these 
come with using tex, and most users don't bother adapting the spacing 
inside logos to the font).

With regards to the spacing around equations: a watertight solution for 
this is not trivial (only under certain controlled circumstances one can 
look back to the previous paragraph; anyhow, when i saw the thesi for the 
first time, i was glad that this document didn't 'scream' tex all over the 
place. Esp with regards to spacing, there are so many ill-designed, if 
designed at all tex docs around, that you make it sound like you're working 
in an environment with all-perfectly typeset documents. Get me right: when 
attention is being paid, one can let tex do a wonderful job, but >50% of 
the tex docs does not look wonderfull at all (the price of automation and 
haste). So, i think that in general, we can be glad that thanh's thesis 
looks okay. [i'm sure that most of my docs look less ok]

Hans


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