[pdftex] tiny supp-{pdf,mis}.tex bug? line numbers TeX/MSWord

[Adrian Heathcote]

Marco

Just on this point:

> 3. TeX/MSWord
>
>    I was talking the other day to a student of typography who told me 
> that
>    "no" typesetting program [she was, I guess, mainly talking about 
> major
>    programs like MSWord, Adobe products, ...] would have control over
>    extra spacing between letters, like V/o and such. When I told her 
> about
>    TeX/metafont's ligature ability, she was quite convinced that this 
> is
>    a *real* typesetting program. [To her personally, this was not 
> important
>    enough for her (as a graphics designer) to change to TeX, but
>    nevertheless...]

Spacing is a different issue to ligature formation. All good page 
layout programs (Indesign, Quarkexpress, Pagemaker, and Framemaker) do 
allow precise tracking and kerning control. But LaTeX's ability to 
insert ligatures automatically, and pdftex's ability to give hanging 
punctuation (thanks to Thanh) make it by far the best typesetting 
program for books---whether about mathematics or anything else.

What strikes me as strange is that publishers have not discovered these 
advantages to a greater extent than they have. (It is remarkable how 
many books come out, even now, with no ligatures and fake small caps.)

Thank G-d for Knuth!

(another 2 cents)

Adrian Heathcote