[XeTeX] [tex-live] Future state of XeTeX in TeXLive

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/10/29 Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>
> Chris Travers wrote:
>
>> I think you are assuming a lot about knowledge of book design.  The
>> LaTeX styles out of the box are a bit formal.  I think the margins are
>> too wide, and I prefer different fonts....  But I would hardly call
>> them "ugly" ...
>
> OK. one quote from my 1993 paper "Book Design for TeX Users, part 1",
> and then I shut up and let others debate the point if they wish :
>
You are right, I remember your lectures for CSTUG. When I started to
play with LaTeX 20 years ago, I saw that the documents look ugly but I
did not know why. After a few lectures I learned the reason. And
fortunatelly when typesetting the first few books the publisher gave
me another book from the same series and I had to preserve the
graphical design. Thus I have learned how to tweak LaTeX styles.

What is good on LaTeX is that the author can type the document using
the prefabricated (ugly) classes and they are rendered somehow, so
that the author can work on the text. In the meantime a typographer
designs a package or a class implementing required graphical design by
redefining the standard macros. When it is finished, just
\documentclass and/or \usepackage are chganged and page breaks are
hand tuned.

I have also prepared classes/packages for a few companies. The user
know standard LaTeX and do not wish to learn new macros. A typographer
invented the graphical layout be he does not know TeX. I was just a
LaTeX programmer who converted the layout to a new definitions of
\chapter, \section etc.

Samples of my 3 books are displayed on
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/vsechna.editina.tajemstvi/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/chromozom46yb/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz/sedmero.dracich.srdci/

Everything is in Czech only, the link to a sample in PDF is almost at
the end of the page, look for "ukázku" or "ukázka ke stažení". The
colophon says that the book was typeset in pdfLaTeX, the link to the
colophon in PDF is "v tiráži". And the colophon contains URL of TeX
Live.

>> Knuth, in his closing exhortation, wrote: "GO FORTH now and
>> create masterpieces of the publishing art." Nowhere, so far as I can
>> trace, did he write: "and let every one of them shriek 'TEX' from every
>> page". . .
>
> http://www.ntg.nl/maps/19/10.pdf
> http://www.ntg.nl/maps/19/11.pdf
>
> ** Phil.
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz