- ntg-context - NTG Mailing Lists

InDesign/InCopy vs. TeX and friends
by Charles P. Schaum 01 Jun '08

01 Jun '08

I would say that TeX is a way in which a mathematician / theoretical computer scientist that is well-steeped in music, languages, art, literature, and other areas might approach the issue. InDesign is the way in which a large number in the design community might approach the issue. I use mainly InCopy because I'm an editor, but I work closely with the designers. Here's a few things I see that could stand some improvement: 1. What does it mean to have either an overfull hbox or vbox? You might think, duh! But overfull boxes and copyfitting issues are not sets of the same cardinality or topology in the problem domain. First of all, some do make a distinction between intraword and interword spacing, although this need not necessarily be made. It does become helpful, however, when setting Sperrdruck and noting the rules for commas, periods, etc. The soul package in LaTeX does well here, although if there were essentially two realms, intraword and interword, with different letterspacing controls for each, this could result in the following solution: If (overfull hbox) then Apply an algorithm taking into account aesthetic rules for adjusting intra- and interword spacing within tolerance n and produce a warning that says either: Spacing adjusted to fit copy in hbox on line nnnn or Copyfit warning for hbox in line nnnn Similarly, leading (interline spacing) ought to be considered, but horizontal spacing, especially when pagefitting copy to avoid widows and orphans, can be tied with interline spacing to get the desired result. Tweaking the font size is generally a poor solution. Boxes and glue is good if you are modeling classical typesetting. I believe that is what DEK was shooting for. In 1978, that made good sense because electronic means were not well-defined and were sometimes quite displeasing. For modern digital needs, boxes and glue may not be appropriate in every situation. InDesign and InCopy simply pop up a warning when you have copyfitting issues. Still, there must be a standard approach when a designer fixes such issues (apart from an editor doing some rewording) in order to give one's products a good look and feel. Even with InDesign, copyfitting issues are not a no-brainer. That's where generating a preview that would step through copyfitting issues and allow input for heuristics might be helpful. 2. The box or the text frame? Ever use LaTeX and BibTeX to do a bib and footnotes and all of a sudden your URLs go right off the line? How annoying is that? The text frame should have priority over the boxes in it and should trigger copyfitting rules to enforce that priority unless locally or globally suppressed. 3. Multi-author workflow InCopy works with InDesign to allow an editor to work with a "story" that may be in one text frame or spread over multiple frames. It allows check-out and check-in of a story and locks the story when checked out. Of course, this implies that the workflow happens off a central server. Nevertheless, this allows the document to be constructed in parallel with designers, substantial/copy editors, proofreaders, and so on working on different parts as needed. TeX may be batch-oriented, but it is also single-user oriented unless you have a master with lots of linked input. The problem is that InCopy and InDesign can show you your work in relation to the whole, giving a better idea of what you need to do to fit your work in harmony with the others. TeX cannot do that. 4. TeX is still better at some things. Kinda like GraphViz, TeX has its area where it just shines. Those schemata that I was doing are a major pain to do in something else. TeX's ability to intermix math mode and regular mode is probably unique. I would bet that one could do things like sentence diagrams and grammar theory much more easily in TeX than elsewhere. 5. Toward Generalization, but Keep the Good Stuff It would be neat to sit down with experienced designers or professors of design and see where DEK's solutions and those built on them work well for today's expectations and where they do not. Curiously, if you look at Wikipedia on page design, typography, and other design-related issues and TeX does not really show up in the external links. My design books are almost twenty years old. They are: Collier and Cotton. Basic Desktop Design and Layout Murphy and Rowe. How to Design Trade Marks and Logos Devall. Desktop Publishing Styleguide White. Graphic Design for the Electronic Age Craig. Designing with Type, 3rd ed. Still, one can see even there certain relationships of parts to whole that, in the main, ConTeXt has done better than any other TeX variant to address. I find the \setuplayout and related general layout, makeup, sectioning, and other features to be substantially superior to LaTeX, where the publishers do the styles and the scientists write the content, or plain, where you have to do everything (not always bad, but Herculean for a large project). Charles

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split cells ? world lost !
by Steffen Wolfrum 31 May '08

31 May '08

Hi, hope the answer to my question is not too obvious: How do I split not only TABLE but cells? Please, have a look at this minimal: \starttext \bTABLE[split=yes,option=stretch] \bTR \bTD \input tufte \input knuth Hello world ... \eTD \bTD \input tufte \eTD \bTD \input knuth \eTD \eTR \bTR \bTD Test \eTD \bTD Test \eTD \bTD Test \eTD \eTR \eTABLE \stoptext (Hello) world lost? Thanks, Steffen

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Wiki page about emacs-muse updated
by Jean Magnan de Bornier 31 May '08

31 May '08

Hi all, The page on the wiki about emacs-muse and ConTeXt has been updated to show how you can use Thomas Schmitz's presentation module within muse: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_and_emacs-muse enjoy! -- Jean

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pdf forms
by Bernhard Boser 30 May '08

30 May '08

I wrote a simple context file for pdf form filling. Translates fine, but the resulting pdf simply shows text but no fillable forms. What's needed to actually get forms? Here's the tex code: % interface=en tex=pdfetex output=pdftex \starttext Field 1: \fillinfield[name]{text that defines field length} \definefield [Email] [line] [ShortLine] [] [pragma(a)wxs.nl] Field 2: \field [Email] [your email] \stoptext Thanks! Bernhard

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[Fwd: problem with context]
by Hans Hagen 29 May '08

29 May '08

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Out of office: ntg-context Digest, Vol 47, Issue 62
by rordorf＠mdpi.org 29 May '08

29 May '08

I am out of office and will return on Thursday, 29 May 2008. Kind regards, Dietrich Rordorf -- Mr. Dietrich Rordorf Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) Matthaeusstrasse 11, CH-4057 Basel, Switzerland E-mail: rordorf(a)mdpi.org Tel. +41 61 683 77 34 (office) Tel. +41 76 561 41 83 (mobile) Fax +41 61 302 89 18

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American-style letters with t-letter?
by David Rogers 29 May '08

29 May '08

Hi all (but especially Wolfgang Schuster): I'd like to use Wolfgang's t-letter module to set up a very basic American-style letter. I see (by looking into t-letter.tex) that there are at least plans for this to be possible. Is there a little example anywhere of how to get started? (Really, for my purposes, the basic DIN example as given in lm.pdf is pretty good - just wondering what the other possibility looks like.) Thanks David

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mplib/metafun broken in latest beta
by Thomas A. Schmitz 28 May '08

28 May '08

Hi Hans and Taco, it looks like mplib is broken in the latest beta. Simple file: \starttext \startuseMPgraphic{test} draw fullcircle scaled 5cm ; \stopuseMPgraphic \useMPgraphic{test} \stoptext produces no output. I tested on several different computers, so it doesn't look like a misconfiguration. My Macbook compiled the file fine with a context version from last week; after updating, a get an empty pdf. All best Thomas

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Re: [NTG-context] Odd Behavior in pdftex/xetex
by Michael.Urban＠jpl.nasa.gov 28 May '08

28 May '08

text and non text and such > > If he use \retype the table works. > Thanks; and so does \asciistr I cannot find documentation on \retype, \asciistr, nor \simplifytype ; in which situations should these be used?

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Re: [NTG-context] InDesign
by Charles P. Schaum 28 May '08

28 May '08

On Tue, 2008-05-27 at 08:24 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote: > how do they deal with non compatible new features; for instance, at > bachotek i learned that some otf features that are not supported in > older versions are supported in new ones (or are supported > differently); > is there some compatibility mode (i.e. is the old behavior still > present > and the ID/IC version number stored in the document?) > I asked those wiser than I and this is what professional expectations tend to be: 1. Versioning within a document (track changes) basically becomes a non-entity by production; that is local and removed within a production cycle and tends to be wholly separated from version issues. Also, product cycles are generally tagged to a version of a program and therefore multiple versions need to be able to coexist in the case where the new version may not be backward-compatible with the old. With Quark, one could only count on backward compatibility over one version bump. After that, compatibility would diminish so that Quark 4.0 would not open Quark 1.0 docs. Makes Microsoft's format versioning seem positively user-friendly by comparison. The firm I work for has only started with the current InDesign/CS3 suite and relies on the quark plugin to do the work. Especially in Quark, third-party plugins were the most fragile. We expect, however, that Indesign will probably follow Quark in failing to be too bacwardly-compatible, opening well only the prior version docs and then saving them as current. That's one of the things that drove my personal computing away from Windows to Linux/FreeBSD. I was using an English firm's Creative Suite knock-off product (Serif) and realized that their business plan called for making shoddy products and substituting version bumps for bugfixes. I can only bleed so much to sate someone's greed and I found OSS to be far friendlier regarding version compatibility, bugfixes and robustness. AFAIK no real pressure for a compatibility mode exists in the commercial DTP sector. senecadesign.com has good InCopy resources and archives. Charles

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