CompuServe Messages

Neil … personally, I never did like TeX … it was just too cumbersome. I used to edit/set a magazine which I took great pride in … I spent many happy hours making sure that the pages looked good … I tried to ensure that hyphenation was not overdone, that widows and orphans were not hanging around looking clumsy, that rivers were avoided and that the balance of the pages looked just right. I am certainly no type-setting pro, and found that Professional Page was just perfect to allow me to do the little tweaks to achieve my goal (which, in the end, received many accolades from some professionals who I greatl respected!). I a _minor_ adjustment to tracking, or a little manual intervention in kerning didn't pull that final two letter word back into the paragraph, then a quick recast of a sentence here or there was performed. The results were there on screen almost instantly. I tried PageStream and TeX at various points of my work, and found neither gave me the rapid feedback I demanded. I was also very unhappy with the way that PageStream would distribute white-space and I seemed to be forever trying to lose ugly rivers down the columns. PageStream is also so _very_ slow compared with ProPage, that I couldn't (and still can't) bear to use it except for very small things. TeX, on the other hand, produced very nice output (provided I didn't use Computer Modern, which is a type-face I personally detest) … but was _so_ cumbersome to use. It does have a place, and I can understand how many people like to use it … but I really don't want the "system" to get in the way of what I'm trying to do and the idea of having to embed strange commands and macros in my text seems very alien to me. However, I _would_ use TeX if I needed to set something small, but intricate, and then import it into ProPage … just as, if I wanted to use an unusual type-face, I might pop into PageStream. I would certainly agree that what is appearing in print in many places nowadays is [ MORE ]