Typesetting Fight Club: 3B2 vs. TeX

5. Juli 2010 – 14:11
I was recently browsing sample PDF pages from a major german, alleged typographically pretentious publisher in the humanities, as I noticed the use of wrong range-dashes and poorly justified paragraphs. Since the PDF was made with 3B2, this finally encouraged me, to compare TeX's abilities on a real-life paragraph. I tried to reproduce the original parameters like text width, font size and leading, etc. as much as possible. The original uses letter tracking, which IMHO, is not necessary for that font and leads only to poor kerning pairs (like in "Tr"). First Blood Below is the sample paragraph by 3B2. It has many disadvantages: quite loose lines no ligatures no optical margins use of tracking Disproportionate Response My first try was with the state of the art pdftex with activated font expansion and optical margins through the LaTeX package microtype without any tweaking. The result is smashing: pdftex produces much better, thight lines, ...

Posted in Code, English, Examples, LaTeX, TeX, Typography, Umbruch | 4 Comments »

BibTeX output to XML

11. März 2010 – 16:51
Publishing online BibTeX references is not just matter of converting a .bib file to XML/HTML. If there is a print (PDF) edition, two very important items should be the same in both print and online versions: same entries same sorting Further editing of the online references includes for example abreviation of the author/editor names inclundig and formatting the needed fields The publisher's demands for the online references are often included in the DTD describing the XML tags for the online documents. In the worst case the online formatting differs from the print formatting. Nevertheless, if there is already a LaTeX/BibTeX workflow, and especially a BibTeX style file, it is better to use directliy BibTeX (the program) to produce the XML output instead of external converters. Using BibTeX guaranties automatically that the both items above are true. Further, if one is familiar with the BibTeX programming syntax and with the used style file, it is easy to modify the functions to produce the XML output, while keeping ...

Posted in BibTeX, Code, English, Examples, LaTeX, Text Processing, Work | No Comments »

No Comment. Ohne Worte

24. November 2009 – 03:30

Posted in Allgemein, Kvetch, Work | No Comments »

“Ша” (Ш) като “Шин” (ש)

23. November 2009 – 02:48
Малко известна подробност (сред българите, иначе уикипедия я споменава) за произхода на буквата "Ш": най-вероятно е взаимствана от ש (Шин) в иврит. Примерите са от Linux Libertine.

Posted in Allgemein, На български | No Comments »

Die neue (Typo-)Epidemie: Ligaturen an den Wortfugen

23. November 2009 – 02:18
Die automatische Verwendung von Ligaturen ist in den gängigen DTP-Programmen, dank OpenType, eine Frage des Häkchen-Setzens geworden. Demzufolge gibt es neuerdings kaum ein Druckwerk, das ohne dieses "coole Feature" auskommt. Der Haken an der Sache mit dem Häkchen liegt aber in der deutschen Rechtschreibung. Denn sie bestimmt, kurz gesagt, dass keine Ligaturen an den Wortfugen gesetzt werden dürfen. Während der TeX-Quelltext Listen- (rmligs) oder Silben-basiert (ligatex) bereinigt werden kann, scheint die Ligaturentrennung für InDesign & Co. (hier und hier) eine ziemlich aufwändige Gelegenheit zu sein. Und so breitet sich die Cool-Feature-Plage mit den Wortfugenligaturen in gigantischen Ausmaßen aus. Keinen Verlagshersteller und keinen Lektor scheint diese Art des Analphabetentums zu stören, nein schon "Auflage" im Impressum wird mit der falschen Ligatur gesetzt. Fazit: InDesign & Co. sind für den deutschsprachige Werk- und Mengensatz ungeeignet! PS Ich lese zur Zeit ein Taschenbuch, das in Minion mit Ligaturen an den Wortfugen gesetzt ist. ...

Posted in Deutsch, Kvetch, TeX, Text Processing, Typografie | No Comments »

Arial’s strike on Helvetica in “JPod”

5. Oktober 2009 – 11:34
Looking at my "JPod" paperback I was shocked to see that they used Arial instead of Helvetica. Of course this can't be intended, because Helvetica is the Coupland font. I suppose, somewhere on the workflow from the "graphic-designer" to the printing device the whole Arial-Helvetica-exchange-madness went berserk. And no one even realized it!

Posted in Allgemein, English, Fonts, Kvetch, Typography | No Comments »

\include and missing file

28. Juli 2009 – 15:09
If you try to \input a non-existing file, you get an error and if in interactive mode, you are prompting to type a new filename. But if you do the same with \include, no error occurs, just a little warning "No file ...". This behaviour, although documented, is sometimes not optimal if one wants to make sure that no file is lost without checking the logfiles. \include uses \@input@ in its definition to load a file and \@input@ is defined as \def\@input@#1{\InputIfFileExists{#1}{}{\typeout{No file #1.}}} The simplest way to change \@input@ ist to \let it to \@iinput, the macro, which issues an error if file is not found. \let\@input@\@iinput Since \@input@ is not only used in the \include macro, this redefinition affects the input of .fd and .bbl files. You can see this as some kind of strict (or final, because of BibTeX) mode LaTeX, producing error on missing files. Of course, we can redefine ...

Posted in Code, English, LaTeX | No Comments »

Database Publishing with LaTeX and hyperref

28. Juli 2009 – 00:43
We had to produce a book catalogue from publisher's data. The layout was also predefined. We got a Word file with fields-like data: #001 Springer, Anne; Münch, Karsten; Munz, Dietrich (Hg.) #002 Sexualitäten #003 Eine Publikation der DGPT #004 #005 Bestellnr.: 854 #006 ISBN 978-3-89806-854-3 #007 2008 #006 455 Seiten #006 Gebunden #008 ? (D) 39,90 #009 Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes reflektieren aus heutiger Sicht mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven ein zentrales Thema der Psychoanalyse in Überlegungen zur Theorie und Behandlungstechnik: die Sexualität. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Aktualität des Triebkonzepts. #010 #011 9783898068543 After automatic cleaning and processing the file, we produced a LaTeX formated data: \begin{eintrag} \autor{\Index{Springer, Anne}; \Index{Münch, Karsten}; \Index{Munz, Dietrich} (Hg.)} \titel{Sexualitäten}{854} \subtitel{Eine Publikation der DGPT} \artnr{854} \isbn{978-3-89806-854-3} \jahr{2008} \sechs{455~S.} \sechs{Gebunden} \preis{€~(D)~39,90} \beschreibung{Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes reflektieren aus heutiger Sicht mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven ein zentrales Thema der Psychoanalyse in Überlegungen zur Theorie und Behandlungstechnik: die Sexualität. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Aktualität des Triebkonzepts.} \cover{9783898068543} \end{eintrag} The pictures for the book covers were delivered as jpeg files. We used ImageMagic ...

Posted in Code, Database Publishing, English, Examples, LaTeX, Text Processing, Work | 1 Comment »

Index Processing – the Hard Way

17. Juli 2009 – 12:17
We had a book to set from a translated original. The index entries were taken also from the first book, translated and put in a list. So, in the first preview of the new book we set the index list as enumerate and asked the lector to mark the text with the entry numbers for index generation: We finally received a heavy marked text as commented PDF with the index number in each comment. Almost every page looked like this: The index had to be generated very quickly and obviously there was no way to do that by marking each entry in the source TeX file. Fortunately it was confirmed, that the book preview is OK and no page should change. We used the Acrobat feature of summarizing the comments in one PDF file to merge all the comments with the page numbers: We converted the PDF file with the comments to ...

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Typesetting a Dictionary with LaTeX

10. Juli 2009 – 10:15
As I mentioned in the previous post, we typesetted recently a german-albanian dictionary. It is an easy job with LaTeX. The most interestings and challenging points were: create new phonetic glyphs from the base font create albanian hyphenation patterns based on the turkish ones with some additions like not to break on digraphs vertical bars and underrules used in the main entry words for showing morphology and intonation disappear (automagically) in the running head, so there is only the whole word typesetted (example below) The main work actually was to clear and normalize the Word sources. Emacs did a good job as usually.

Posted in English, Examples, LaTeX, Text Processing, Typography, Work | 4 Comments »