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Subject:RE: RE: Interviewing "under the hood"? From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 23 Jun 2003 13:05:52 -0400
<grumble>
Gene raises an interesting issue. Back when page make-up was a manual process (whether we are talking about foundry type, hot metal, or RC paper), we had the equivalent of style definitions, and we had rules for making up pages. The first rule was that facing pages had to have the same depth (except for first and last pages, of course, which had their own rules).
In facing pages that contained things like breaks, subheads, numbered or bulleted lists, tables, figures, etc., the person making up the page adjusted the various spaces, in a proportional and subtle way, to make the depth. So the verso page, with two number 1 subheads might have a few points more lead above each of those subheads than the recto page, which had three number 1 subheads, for example. Or the extra space was thrown in above the table on one page.
This did not require a special definition for a new style every time you wanted a slight spacing adjustment.
Some pagination systems (Penta and, IIRC, Interleaf) got this principle and would automatically space a page vertically to justify it without requiring that you define a new tag.
Software implementations and markup languages that ignore this concept and force you to define new styles leave me cold.
</grumble>
Dick
--
Fondling fonts since 1960
"GeneK" <gene -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
>
>I would guess that my styles work just fine about 99% of
>the time, but every once in a while there comes a situation
>where the "correct" style doesn't quite fit, but modifying
>it to make it work will ruin the other 150 or so paragraphs
>with the same style. In that case, I'll "cheat" the style
>with a bit of manual reformatting, and sometimes I'll even
>"cheat" the frame size for a signle page. It's either that
>or create a special "based-on" style for that one instance,
>and IMO, compromising to keep the number of tags in my
>templates down makes individual "cheats" the lesser evil.
>
>
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