LaTeX Oddity

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LaTeX Oddity

Postby Мастер » Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:24 am

I use LaTeX for just about every document I produce. The only time I ever use evil MS software to produce documents is when it is essentially forced on me by other people. Maybe hippietrekx uses LaTeX now also; I don't know.

Among the functions of LaTeX is (really the main function) is the arrangement of words on the page. How much spacing is needed between words to have justfied text on one side, the other, or both, how much spacing between lines is needed to avoid having a single line of text overflowing onto the next page, all by itself, what's a good place to hyphenate the words to make the spacing not be too awkward, and so on. Just type in your text, and don't worry about the spacing; the software takes care of it. If you're not satisfied with the result, some manual tweaking is possible, but I try to avoid that as much as possible.

I have just discovered a paragraph that takes about 6.5 lines of text in the document I am writing now. Having looked at it, I decided one multi-syllabic word was unnecessary, and deleted it. The last line of text became longer. Remove some of the text, and what is left, takes up more space.

I found that odd.

I'm trying to figure out what visually pleasing spacing effect is served by making the words take up more space when there are fewer of them. I probably won't spend too much time doing that though.
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Re: LaTeX Oddity

Postby Lance » Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:12 pm

Do you remember Aldus PageMaker?
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Re: LaTeX Oddity

Postby Мастер » Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:15 pm

Lance wrote:Do you remember Aldus PageMaker?


Certainly I knew about it. Never used it though.

I think that was more of a general purpose publishing system, as opposed to LaTeX, which is mostly for scientific papers. (And also for a few people like me, who use it for, well, anything.)
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Re: LaTeX Oddity

Postby Lance » Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:55 pm

It was for pretty much anything, because it was the only game in town for a while.
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