Re: How could a typesetting system be today?

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

luigi scarso wrote:

>> - optical (vs. metrical) kerning
> hz ?

all those kerning options can lead to rather bad text ... i get the 
impression that wrongly applied hz (extreme values) and intercharacter 
spacing and such in general lead to bad text ... i read quite some books 
and am sometimes puzzled by the completely different and inconstent 
'look and feel' of typeset paragraphs (that could be done better by tex) 
... too many degrees of freedom may not be a good idea

>> - a GUI ;-) and thus layout by "let's try how it looks"
> true

just develop styles using small samples, not whole books -)

>> - better page breaking constraints (you can define in your style
>> sheets "keep n lines together" and "keep this together with the next
>> paragraph)
> maybe (hans/taco help needed here )

i have an experimental mechanism for weighted skips and penalties for 
mkiv; keep in mind that traditional tex only looks forward (unless you 
do trickery which in itself has side effects)

>> - PDF/X output

pdftex is mostl pdf/x (depends on what trickery the macro package does)

>> - color profile conversions

tex treats graphics as abstractions which is why it could survive so long

keep in mind that normally one only needs to 'convert' a graphic once, 
so that can be done externally; in dtp one often works with copies (we 
see projects with the same 25 meg graphic copied all over the placs) and 
i assume that in say indesign graphics are also converted once (too much 
a slow downer otherwise)

in context one can do some trickery with turning gray scale images to 
multitone but that a well kept secret -)

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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