Re: too small inter-word spacing

[Greg A. Woods]

At Fri, 5 Sep 2008 20:28:34 +0200, Joerg van den Hoff wrote:
Subject: Re: too small inter-word spacing
> 
> if you enable the antialiasing and gv know's the font (that might be
> important: I believe otherwise some fontmapping occurs which might
> indeed mess the appearance up) -- which definitely is the case for me,
> since palatino is one of the few "canonical" fonts available
> everywhere (or,rather, an exact substitute), if this is the case, than
> the display is flawless (concordant with printed output) for me.

At the moment I use gv-3.6.2 and gs-8.61 and the standard gs-fonts-8.11.

Note also that currently I use a 100dpi true monochrome display driven
by X11.  This seems to have various implications for the "antialias"
option in gv and the device parameters for gs.  I've had varying degrees
of success trying to use the "antialias" option.  Sometimes
magnification of the view alone will make the problems disappear, and
sometimes the antialias option will help, but nothing works 100% all of
the time.

BTW, I spent some time (a long time ago) talking to friends who worked
at a professional local typesetting house.  Amongst many other tools
they worked on, they happened to have created their own custom version
of AT&T Troff.  From these discussions I know they considered plain
Troff, as well as Groff, output to be quite inferior.  That's one of the
reasons why they licensed AT&T Troff and created their own custom
version.  Even on the 300dpi PostScript printer I had available to me at
the time I could very easily see some of the most blatant differences
between the output created by the original AT&T SysVr4 Troff and their
custom version.

I say this just as a warning that Groff and Troff are not highly
regarded by at least some folks with backgrounds in typesetting.
Certainly they produce quite adequate output that is far superior to any
other comparable tools available in the general purpose computing world
except maybe for TeX.

> what I really would be interest in is a "poll" on this list: if you
> are looking closely on your recent documents: do you not see
> incidences of way too tight spacing between words? do you feel the
> spacing is on average a) optimal, b) to loose, c) to tight? please ask
> yourself the same questions for your troff or TeX documents (or Open
> Office, for that matter -- but not for msword :-)).

I personally haven't noticed any problems with printed lout output, at
least not lately.

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

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