Aaron Shepard said:
I've posted the next rough-draft chapter of Perfect Pages, my upcoming
book on publishing with Microsoft Word (successor to Books, Typography,
and Microsoft Word). This chapter is "Typesetting Your Text." I welcome
your comments, and here again is the page for downloading.
http://www.aaronshep.com/publishing/books/WordType.html
Hello again. I ripped into your early chapters. (No apology). This one
is much better. You *do* need to be battered round the head and ears
with a copy of Knuth's "The TeXbook" in the matter of mathematical
typesetting. But I do like your cunning plan for getting type on facing
pages to line up. I'd be very interested if you have a similar plan for
getting two columns after a "continuous" section break to line up on
the same page. (it is a lot more slippery than it looks)
If I could be constructive for a moment, might I suggest you get a
clearer idea of who your target audience is likely to be. Are you
instructing somebody who knows about type in the art of tricking Word
into doing a good job, or are you trying to show someone who uses Word
competently some of the finer points of typography? You will admit that
this chapter swaps between the two audiences.
A competent Word user would be aghast at your hard break techniques. A
competent typographer might argue for a thin and an en space to
separate one sentence from another. He might also like to hear your
excuse for Word not justifying a paragraph as a unit, and for Word
having no automatic river avoidance. You need some kind of running
rationale to avoid unsettling each audience. You do some of this, as in
the vertical justification reasoning. You'd do well to develop that
further.
