Re: About exporting

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Tuesday, 30 Mar 2021 at 09:06, Tim Cross wrote:
>> The trick with Latex is to go with the flow, not against it. 
>
> +1
>
> This is the first thing I tell my students.  LaTeX knows much much more
> about how to make documents look good than any of us ever will.

If you don't know anything about typography, perhaps it is preferable to
let LaTeX do its work. With the standard classes (or non-standard ones,
like Koma) and a few packages the result it will always be better than
in a Word-style word processor. For example, TeX justifies paragraphs in
a very more intelligent way, understanding the paragraph as a whole, and
not line by line, as word processors do. In fact, the Plass-Knuth
algorithm (see:
http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf) from TeX was
implemented by Adobe for its layout software InDesign. pdfTeX
implemented, in addition, micro-typographic features (protrusion and
expansion), based on the theories of the great German typographer
Hermann Zapf (author of typefaces such as Palatino and Optima and friend
of Donald Knuth). Those properties were picked up by LuaTeX, which in
turn picked up the legacy of a TeX experimental variant (that I
used quite a bit in the early 2000), Omega, later Aleph.

So, yes, you can get very high-quality documents using LaTeX. And there
is also ConTeXt, another TeX format with a radically different
conception compared to LaTeX, more monolithic and, in certain aspects,
more avant-garde. But that does not mean that LaTeX, used as is, produce
a typographically finished result. LaTeX is the means, not the end. Of
course, through packages we can adjust many things at a high level. An
obvious example is the geometry package, but to establish good page
dimensions you have to know what you are doing... But other things can
only be adjusted by hand, visually, unless someday some AI comes to do
that job ;-)

A very typical example: the \raggedbottom option is almost never
acceptable in a book. The \flushbottom option requires that the height
of the composition box is a multiple of the line spacing. TeX also does
very good work with the vertical stretch gaps (glues), but we also want
to modify them depending on the chosen font, the main text body, etc.
And a penalty of widow and orphan lines will also be desirable. There
are many ways to do it (including packages), but the simplest is to add
a couple of TeX primitives to the preamble, with these values:

\widowpenalty=10000
\clubpenalty=10000

But if we have penalized widows or orphans we will get pages that have
one line less, *unacceptable* in a book. That we will have to fix
manually, probably adding a line to the paragraph (\looseness=1), but it
will depend on the context. If we use LuaTeX we can apply things like
the ones discussed in this thread:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/372062/paragraph-callback-to-help-with-widows-orphans-hand-tuning

There are, in short, many things in a 'standard' LaTeX document that
require fine adjustment. Packages like lua-typo or impnattypo are
helpful in this regard. But some typography skills are required. Of
course, this knowledge is accessible to everyone. There are so many
bibliography, but I would highly recommend the writings of Stanley
Morison, author of the Times Roman and a great theorist of the modern
typography. Of course, as for TeX, the TeX Book is always an almost
obligatory (and exciting) read :-)

Best regards,

Juan Manuel