Re: TECH: more help?

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Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 6/23/06, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
>
>> Heh, I suppose it depends on what your standards for "attractive" are
>> -- I presume the wider margins are there because Dr. Knuth found them
>> more attractive than the alternative :)
>
> Leslie Lamport, actually.  They're a feature of LaTeX, not TeX.
And even then, they exist to keep the number of characters per line to a
readable amount[1], not for reasons of aesthetics.

What Knuth cared about was the evenness of colour of the text, which is
why TeX is so good at hyphenating, and why characters deform slightly
at varying relative sizes (smaller = wider, larger = taller).

K.

[1] http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/columns.htm

- --
Keith Gaughan | http://talideon.com/
"You forgot the first rule of the fanatic: when you become obsessed with
the enemy, you become the enemy."
    -- Jeffrey Sinclair, Babylon 5 episode "Infection"
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