On Sun, Oct 23, 2016, Gerard Lally wrote: > > Would I consider tackling the illustrated page? No way, my > > sense of responsible typography forbids it. > > Well the sample is meaningless; I searched for a "desktop publishing" > image and chose that one at random as a reasonably complex example of > what I had in mind.
Good thing you said that. I had to bite my tongue not to comment on the extraordinarily poor layout. :) > Good typography is one of the reasons I am hoping to standardize > on *roff. It's going to be a lifetime commitment for me. I can see > its value with regard to normal document formatting, but I was > curious to know whether it could be pushed to handle more complex > DTP, brochure and business card layouts. Further to my other reply, I worked extensively with both page layout programs and "blind" typesetting systems (formatting inserted into plain text, like groff) when I was at Les Maîtres Typographes in Montréal. We found it was orders of magnitude faster to do catalogue pages, brochures, DVD covers, and the like with a page layout program. Equally, it was vastly more efficient to do things like books, annual reports, and technical documentation using a groff-like system. IOW, neither a page layout program nor groff is one-size-fits-all, although, bottom line, groff will provide you with better control over the typography. If you're truly committed to groff for this kind of work, consider using the mom macros, which provide a very fine-grained "front-end" to the typographic side of things. Hope this, and everyone else's comments, are of assistance. -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca
