On Nov 14, 2005, at 10:14 AM, Stephen Harris wrote:
I am developing an interest in digital typography where a few well chosen fonts are placed in a page design to mutually enhance some theme which of course represents an intended message to impart. A concern to a LyXer choosing fonts and including images. Some of this falls under the goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
There's been some work done on this sort of thing --- the NeXTstep program Pages by Pages and the ill-fated ``iPublish'' program come to mind. I think LyX is on the right track --- just needs some better template / documentclass support which may happen automagically come LaTeX3.
I doubt one could describe the precise qualities that make one translation of Homer's Illiad mediocre, while another is acclaimed as gifted.
One can quantify mathematically some of the things which constitute poor typography, esp. overly long lines for a given typesize, insufficient leading and poor character / word-spacing, much of which is taken care of automatically by (La)TeX for LyX.
There was some interesting discussion a while back here about attempting better support for Peter Wilson's memoir class &c. Certainly if you've not read his manual for it you should. I list it and some other free texts on typography at:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/books-free-type.html
What has made "The Lord Of The Rings" the second best seller to the Bible for the last 50 years. I find that a bit amazing.
Not the typography, or sales would've taken a dive in the 80s or so when they started doing physically sumptuous but typographically poor editions of _The Lord of the Rings_. I'm reading a hardcover which I received as a gift a couple of years ago to my children and it's _not_ set as nicely as the Ballantine paperback editions I read as a youth.
William -- William Adams, publishing specialist voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708 www.atlis.com
