Essays in digital typography

[dave3heaton]

I've just been handed a set of corrections from an Oxford scholar that have really made me understand that, despite being staggeringly intelligent and generally quite technically literate, he still has no idea how a word processor is different from, say, a typewriter

Comments

[eviladara]

Y'know, the more you rant about it, the more you unwittingly suggest yourself as a suitable proof-reader for my PhD...a fate worse than death neatly contained in 100 000 words of drivel :)

[lyndagb]

Wow, a full-blown at the word limit length thesis?! You don't see them very often in my area.

[lyndagb]

Ah, the page break. I do love it, almost as much as the semi-colon. I actualy discovered it by accident (rather like the way discovered tab indenting when I was 14) but have put it to good use ever since. Particularly in my 300 page thesis... (can you image that without page break?!)

[dave3heaton]

Yes. Yes I can.

Because I've had to deal with people who still think you need to put a paragraph mark at the end of every line!

More detail on cool ways to implement page breaks will be coming up in part two: So, what's this "Styles tab" thing, anyway?

[thewhitespider]

"Because I've had to deal with people who still think you need to put a paragraph mark at the end of every line!"

TYPISTS!

Spaces and right aligning

[sultan_vinnegar]

Of course you don't use spaces to move text to the right hand side.

That's what tabs are for.

If you are using Word and expecting the document to look the same on different computers, then you are in trouble. That's what LaTeX is for.

James

PS I know lots of clever things like page breaks, but we don't want to let Toni know, or else she'll be looking for a proof-reader/type-setter a bit closer to home.

Re: Spaces and right aligning

[dave3heaton]

Or FrameMaker. It might not be quite so powerful as LaTeX, but underneath the 80s style interface is a serious piece of typesetting software, that runs on Windows, Macs and Unix. No fancy pictures or layers or master pages, but utterly bulletproof: I've never seen it crash, even when running 1000+ page manuals, which were x-reffed to hell and back. (Though it did take 9 hours to pdf!)

Hmm... I think you've got a good idea there, not letting on to Toni. I'll go back to my incompetent mode, shall I?

Re: Spaces and right aligning

[eviladara]

Yes, but I *know* you know how to proofread Greek. James just tries to make equations out of my Sappho quotes.

Re: Spaces and right aligning

[dave3heaton]

What? Greek? Nah, not me! It's all just funny squiggly things, innit?

Well, if you want someone to go over the file for general tidiness and stuff (I can't really guarantee the quality of any proofreading!) then I'd be happy to - and I can certainly give you some pointers on getting things ready for printing.

[dorianegray]

Are you me?

I have been trying to beat this stuff through my colleagues' very thick heads for some years now.

Along with some more advanced stuff, such as the use of proper grammar. And not marking up edits on the hardcopy in black ink. And...

I could rant. I shall refrain. Here and now, anyway. :-)

[dave3heaton]

Don't worry, I'm not ranting about any of the stuff you sent me - I don't mind tidying stuff up for people I like! It's just the people I work for... who then complain that I've changed the layout that they wanted. Like I care.