spaces in grouped styled text

[Friedrich Vosberg]

Hiho.

The spaces between words in grouped styled text in Word:mac vX are
estimated line by line. Will Word:mac 2004 calculate these spaces
paragraf by paragraf or line by line?

Readyou.
Friedrich

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Friedrich:

I am not entirely sure what you mean, or where you got your information

I think you mean when adjusting the kerning, Word lays the document out line
by line? Yes, I think you are right, but I am not sure and it is unlikely
that they would tell me if I were to ask.

However, as a general rule the answer to all of these questions about
displaying and printing is "Word is not a typesetting program, it's a Word
processor. For high quality type layout, you should use a product designed
to do that. Word is designed to work with the text of office documents at a
"good enough" standard to be cost effective."

Just to expand on this answer a bit:

To the best of my knowledge, have been no changes to Word's typography for a
few years, other than to enable the features for Unicode that had to be
disabled in the previous version when OS X did not support Unicode on
schedule as planned.

I believe that it would be unrealistic to expect such changes. Ever.

The cost involved would be quite high in development time (you would have to
change every application in both PC Office and Mac Office) and the extra
power demands on the user's computer would be quite high.

So the move would be hurting Microsoft shareholders and most Office users,
on both PC and Mac. For a benefit that far less than one per cent of users
would even notice, and very few of them would want. There "might" be 100
people in the whole world who would pay more to get better typography in
Word. Pay how much more? Because to get the investment back, we are
talking about raising the price of each copy of Word sold by perhaps a
thousand dollars.

Word's future direction will be to enhance its ability to produce non-paper
output, in XML and other electronic formats. There is, as far as I know, no
interest at all in developing the appearance of documents for printing on
paper.

So there's you and Elliott who want this ... And I think I know Elliott well
enough to suggest that he would not be willing to invest the price of "many"
bottles of good red wine to get this in Word. He already has and uses
high-quality publishing software when that's what he wants.

I guess what I am trying to say is "stop asking for better typography in
Word. It's never going to happen. There's no way Microsoft could make
money out of providing it. This problem has already been solved by other
software from other companies: it makes no commercial sense to re-invent
this particular wheel in Microsoft Word."

Sorry: I know this is not what you wanted to hear

Cheers

Hiho.

The spaces between words in grouped styled text in Word:mac vX are
estimated line by line. Will Word:mac 2004 calculate these spaces
paragraf by paragraf or line by line?

Readyou.
Friedrich

--

Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hi Friedrich:

Word's future direction will be to enhance its ability to produce non-paper
output, in XML and other electronic formats. There is, as far as I know, no
interest at all in developing the appearance of documents for printing on
paper.

So there's you and Elliott who want this ... And I think I know Elliott well
enough to suggest that he would not be willing to invest the price of "many"
bottles of good red wine to get this in Word. He already has and uses
high-quality publishing software when that's what he wants.

That's right Friedrich, John has beaten me up many times over this. He
has more or less convinced me that good typography and Word are
intentionally disjoint. InDesign2 does a remarkably good job of placing
your Word text into its own document and book format.

However, I still think that MS are missing the bus on this. Especially
the new point that John brings up about 'other electronic formats'. I
am right with him about XML for editable documents, although sticking
with its parent, SGML, would have been a more open and documented way
to do that job. Currently Word's capability in PDF is woeful. We really
do need PDF forms and links and workflow, but instead we are getting
all of that in the proprietary shell being wrapped round the next
version of Office. As well as that, typographic quality in 'final' PDF
documents intended for electronic distribution is still very important.
It is the whole reason for PDF. That means I'll still be pushing
important PDFs through InDesign on their way to the web. If it were not
for needing to interwork with PC-toting colleagues, I'd not persevere
with Word.

Word has no other method, aside from PDF or printed on paper, for
delivering documents in the same form as they leave the author. It is
the single most stupid thing about the product. You cannot guarantee
fonts, line breaks or page breaks from one user of Word to the next. MS
have simply stuck their head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich
over this.

It is not fair of me to whine about the new one till I get my claws on
it first hand, but it ain't what I want from what I'm seeing in the
publicity. I'll take long filenames and Unicode gratefully, but I'll be
once again wasting hours tailoring off bloat and fixing shortcuts to
make it usable.

I guess what I am trying to say is "stop asking for better typography in
Word. It's never going to happen. There's no way Microsoft could make
money out of providing it. This problem has already been solved by other
software from other companies: it makes no commercial sense to re-invent
this particular wheel in Microsoft Word."

Sorry: I know this is not what you wanted to hear

Nope, nor me.