On Mon, Jun 26, 2006, Ted Harding wrote: > > [Peter's fascinating tour of the Typesetting Museum snipped]
Makes me sound like a fossil. :) > I have to agree with this. Whenever I have wanted to produce > fine-tuned output, I wait until I'm sure the document is in final > form. <snip> Then you can interpolate troff requests/macros to > make the adjustments you want, on a line-by-line basis, where > needed. Exactly the procedure I use. And not one I mind. In fact, I expect it. Good typesetting always requires a judicious eye and manual intervention. However, the amount of intervention required by groff on a line-by-line basis can sometimes get out of hand (think "narrow measure columns"). > Once again, I suspect that all this kind of thing could be > helped by pre-output access to the finally formatted output > line (since the mechanism I describe above amounts to this, > but riding a mule to climb the mountain rather than taking the > helicopter). Good analogy. FWIW, back in the Museum, even though galleys were set from what amounted to "source files", the workstations had a continuously updating "status line" that told you exactly where you were, both vertically on the galley and horizontally on the currently-being-input line (measured from the position of the cursor in the input text). By keeping an eye on the status line, you could make a lot of judgment calls concerning where to break troublesome lines, how much kerning to apply, etc. during the first run. I'm wondering if this is the kind of "pre-output access" you're envisaging. Hard to imagine how groff could implement it in user-space, nice though it would be. Seems to me it would require a specialized front end. -- Peter Schaffter _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff