Shakespeare in PDF from XML

[Anders Thulin]

Iain Truskett wrote:

> More a case of 'typography by bad algorithm'. If only they had used TeX
> (in particular, pdfTeX).

  It wouldn't have helped much: I find nothing in the examples that TeX
clearly would have done better. (I haven't studied all of them in minute
detail, I hope it's clear.)

  There are no math formulas, no tables, and no obvious need for the kind of
h&j that TeX does so well.

  I disregard the straight quotes -- they're more like a bug or
editorial oversights. Same thing with the '--' that probably should have
been em dashes.  And the overuse (IMO) of bold type is not something
TeX would have improved on at all: it's a design decision of some kind.

  The only thing I believe TeX would have changed is that widow line.
And even that could have produced an empty line at the bottom of the
preceding page, or perhaps differently spaced lines on that page -- which
might have gone unnoticed more easily, I admit. TeX has the functionality
to avoid that problem entirely. But even that would call for a design
decision: just how much should vertical glue be allowed to shrink or grow?
And doing that may produce other kinds of ugliness that will need another
change and another pass through the text to resolve well.

  It's just that good typography -- the viewpoint from which I 
tried to criticize the results -- is not achieved in a single pass
or without the help of a critical eye. But then, it seems not really to
be what these samples were intended to illustrate. 

-- 
Anders Thulin     ath at algonet.se     http://www.algonet.se/~ath