Eric S Fraga <e.fr...@ucl.ac.uk> writes: > On Tuesday, 30 Mar 2021 at 09:06, Tim Cross wrote: >> The trick with Latex is to go with the flow, not against it. > > +1 > > This is the first thing I tell my students. LaTeX knows much much more > about how to make documents look good than any of us ever will.
If you don't know anything about typography, perhaps it is preferable to let LaTeX do its work. With the standard classes (or non-standard ones, like Koma) and a few packages the result it will always be better than in a Word-style word processor. For example, TeX justifies paragraphs in a very more intelligent way, understanding the paragraph as a whole, and not line by line, as word processors do. In fact, the Plass-Knuth algorithm (see: http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf) from TeX was implemented by Adobe for its layout software InDesign. pdfTeX implemented, in addition, micro-typographic features (protrusion and expansion), based on the theories of the great German typographer Hermann Zapf (author of typefaces such as Palatino and Optima and friend of Donald Knuth). Those properties were picked up by LuaTeX, which in turn picked up the legacy of a TeX experimental variant (that I used quite a bit in the early 2000), Omega, later Aleph. So, yes, you can get very high-quality documents using LaTeX. And there is also ConTeXt, another TeX format with a radically different conception compared to LaTeX, more monolithic and, in certain aspects, more avant-garde. But that does not mean that LaTeX, used as is, produce a typographically finished result. LaTeX is the means, not the end. Of course, through packages we can adjust many things at a high level. An obvious example is the geometry package, but to establish good page dimensions you have to know what you are doing... But other things can only be adjusted by hand, visually, unless someday some AI comes to do that job ;-) A very typical example: the \raggedbottom option is almost never acceptable in a book. The \flushbottom option requires that the height of the composition box is a multiple of the line spacing. TeX also does very good work with the vertical stretch gaps (glues), but we also want to modify them depending on the chosen font, the main text body, etc. And a penalty of widow and orphan lines will also be desirable. There are many ways to do it (including packages), but the simplest is to add a couple of TeX primitives to the preamble, with these values: \widowpenalty=10000 \clubpenalty=10000 But if we have penalized widows or orphans we will get pages that have one line less, *unacceptable* in a book. That we will have to fix manually, probably adding a line to the paragraph (\looseness=1), but it will depend on the context. If we use LuaTeX we can apply things like the ones discussed in this thread: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/372062/paragraph-callback-to-help-with-widows-orphans-hand-tuning There are, in short, many things in a 'standard' LaTeX document that require fine adjustment. Packages like lua-typo or impnattypo are helpful in this regard. But some typography skills are required. Of course, this knowledge is accessible to everyone. There are so many bibliography, but I would highly recommend the writings of Stanley Morison, author of the Times Roman and a great theorist of the modern typography. Of course, as for TeX, the TeX Book is always an almost obligatory (and exciting) read :-) Best regards, Juan Manuel
