X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil] [nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil]) Date: Mon, 14 May 90 17:32:00 GMT Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list From: "Chris Rowley - Open University UK (R01/Maths)" Subject: Parameters? To: Rainer Schoepf Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 100 > Roswitha made some interesting remarks about basic > parameters that designers need to change in design. I > would urge everybody who is on this list to specify > what parameters are necessary in his/her opinion. I have to say first that I am not entirely sure what "parameter" is intended to cover here: but I think that is not too important, provided they are happy with the type of answer i shall give. My opinion is that what is "necessary" depends on the type of document, so what I shall give here is what I find designers normally specify. This is very often a lot less than is needed to produce a Latex style file as designers are not used to having almost every thing done automatically: they are used to leaving a lot of things to the knowledge and skill of the typesetter. 1: Typefaces for main text, quotations, etc. and rule-weights if appropriate. 2: Dimensions of the page-grid for the body. The complexity of this depends on the type of document: compare for example: A Novel: just the text dimensions, the paper size and the placement of the page number. A multi-column document with: several different widths of floats; multi-part headers and footers; etc. 3: Layout and fonts for heads for all sectioning levels. 4: Layout and fonts for all list-types and other specialised paragraph elements. 5: The internal layout and caption fonts for figures, tables (but NOT the layout of the actual tables, these are handled by ad hoc mark-up). Other elements, such as frontmatter, indexes, etc. tend not to be specified at all as designers are used to dealing with these by ad hoc mark-up. For a series of books or a journal, a lot more of these elements will be specified in the design. I am not sure where this gets us. I can supply further details of any of these if it would be useful, but they would be based on a particular document type. chris