Les Denham wrote:
On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:54, Martin A. Hansen wrote:Hello All,
[...]
The document contains several errors as far as I can tell: there is a white
space missing after (ii) and the vertical white space between 67. and 68.
institutions should not be there. Furthermore, I am not sure I like the
choice of fonts (and the high number of fonts used). Finally, I have this
feeling that all blocks of text are aligned in an unpleasing way, but I
cannot say what exactly triggers this feeling. Perhaps somebody can?
I agree on all the points you have made.
One aspect which I find particularly offensive is the use of upper case where
lower case would traditionally be used and lower case where upper case would
traditionally be used.
The general feeling of unpleasing alignment is, in my opinion, due to three
features: justification is by varying word spacing only; kerning is not used
(look at the spacing of "V" in the last word of the title); and a sans serif
font (Officina Sans-Book I'd guess, from the fonts listed by Adobe Reader) is
used for the bulk of the document, made worse by putting the first page in
bold. There's a reason why most printed blocks of text have used a serif
font for the last three centuries or more: it's easier to read.
Also, there is no hyphenation. This shouldn't happen too often,
but the occational hyphenated word will help prevent the
sometimes excessive variation in interword spacing that we
see here. (See first and last line of point (3) for example.)
Another way of getting nicer interword spacing is to vary the
font width ever so slightly. Lyx will do this too, if the microtype
package is used.
Helge Hafting
