Message-Id: <9212060522.AA04380@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
In-Reply-To:  Paul Taylor's message of "Thu, 26 Nov 92 12:27:41 +0100."
Date:         Sat, 5 Dec 92 19:57:32 +0100
From: Lutz Birkhahn <lutz@BISUN.NBG.SUB.ORG>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: default paper sizes
Status: R


> The hypothesis was that we have a CD rom with 15000 documents on it [in source].
> FTP archives give rise to a similar situation. In this case I don't care how
> the documents are typeset - I just want to be able to see as quickly as possible
> what's in the collection. Maybe later I'll want to print a few of them
> "perfectly".

OK, perhaps my view was too much that of a perfectionist. There are several
different "perfection levels" of documents: at the one end of the range is
the real work of art, where every dimension is carefully determined, every
paragraph tuned to come out well, and so on.

On the other side there is the "every-day work", e.g. technical reports or
similar document types, where the main goal is to have a usable output that is
at least readable and correct (in a technical sense), but not much more. Here
it doesn't matter much if e.g. the paper size is "letter" or A4, if the inter-
word space is large (very loose lines) or not, nor where the text is positioned
on the paper (i.e. left and top margins).

I can imagine several approaches to deal with these different "perfection
levels". For example, there could be a declaration at the beginning of the
document, stating whether this is a "piece of art" or not. Perhaps it could be
more concrete, e.g. in the sense of

   "this document is fine tuned to be printed on A4 paper size, don't try
   to use different paper size, if ever possible. Give a severe warning to
   the user if he wants to use a different paper size (like e.g. the "over-
   full hboxes" messages), using some drastic words. But if the user really
   wants to, accept his own size specifications."

The thousands of documents that are on your CD will probably not have this
"high quality tag", so you can specify any paper size you want without
having TeX to complain about every document. One sort of "low quality tag"
in LaTeX2 is the \sloppy declaration. Unfortunately its effects are very bad:
people often wonder why there are some lines with only two words in it and
a huge amount of white space between them (a consequence of the infinite
\tolerance). Clearly this is an error that should be corrected in LaTeX3,
which should be no problem with the new \emergencystretch parameter of
TeX 3.x.

> Increasing the page width is in fact likely to reduce the number of
> over-full \hbox'es.

... and likely to reduce legibility, by the way. At least in some cases. Only
to remind you that page size is *not only* a question of economy or paper size.

> So, I think the original suggestion, that the paper size should be settable by
> some external method (such as looking for "paper-size.sty") is reasonable.

Given the above, I agree that it could be fine in *some* circumstances to
have the ability to specify some document parameters without changing the
document itself. My main objection concerned Tarjei T. Jensen's proposal to
solve this with a (operating system dependent!) specified order of different
styles with the same name, but from different dircetories. Besides, I think
LaTeX3 should work with today's TeX3, not (only) with NTS (New Typesetting
System, sort of successor to TeX) or whatever it's name will be. And today's
TeX3 does not read multiple styles with the same name, although some imple-
mentations (but not all!!) allow you to specify more than one directory where
to look for files.

With today's TeX there might be some solutions: one mentioned by Paul Taylor
is a "paper-size.sty" (for portability reasons, the name should be shorter
and without a hyphen, if possible) or something like a "local.sty" or
"local.tex". A second possibility could be TeX commands given in the command
line, e.g. in Un*x

   latex '\papersize=a4 \input document'

then the style could check that \papersize variable (and spit out a warning
if needed). I'm not sure if this solution still meets the portability criterion.

A third solution could be some actions in the \everyjob token list, e.g.
loading some file, although I see no advantages over the first solution.

I'd favor the second solution, if it proves to be portable. I dislike solu-
tions that change the paper size automagically, since I think that document
distortions at least should be specified *explicitly*. One of the main reasons
that most DTP documents look so bad is that all bad things are as easy to
do as the good ones (sometimes even easier). TeX and LaTeX should continue to
select the best quality by default, even if used as a formatter of "every-day
documents".

--
Lutz Birkhahn (Germany)   email: lutz@bisun.nbg.sub.org (don't use another!)
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