On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 2:21 AM, Liviu Andronic <landronim...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:21 PM, stefano franchi > <stefano.fran...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Boy, do I know that drill! I am lucky that it never rains in Texas, as I > > needed all the sunlight I could get. For a few days I had several pages > of > > the actual book I was using as a design reference permanently taped to > my > > kitchen's windows, so I could easily check my latex output against them. > > > I'm getting curious about this. Did you actually have to tear down the > pages of a book to obtain the proper measurements? Wouldn't a simple > inquiry to the publisher help? > > Liviu > Ahh Liviu, you wan the dirty details... Here is a very short version: The book is published by Rodopi in their VIBS series. This is philosophy series (VIBS stands for Value Inquiry Book Series) created and almost completely managed by a US philosophy professor, not by Rodopi. All aspects of book production, from stylesheets to book design came in the form of a thick set of Word documents and with Word instructions. That's where the buck stopped, so to speak. I first tried to replicate the effects of Word commands in latex, and I quickly realized: 1. it was extremely time-consuming, because I had no clear idea of the expected result. For instance, I could not get a clear understanding of how many lines per page I was supposed to have. I only had fixed numbers for the textblock size and a font size. Since the textblock height was not a integer multiple of (what I took to be) the standard leading for that point size, the number of lines was fractional and tended to vary from page to page. 2. It was unreliable (I could not always get the same results on different runs), even when I substituted my guesses when the data was insufficient 3. The resulting typography was less than satisfactory. So here is what I did: I got a bunch of VIBS from my library, picked the one I thought was the best laid-out, bought a copy, tore off pages, and started to measure everything. Then I replicated the design in memoir (whose author, Peter Wilson should enter the (La)TeX Hall of Fame, especially for the beautifully comprehensive documetation. The current maintaner, Lars Madsen, was been very helpful too). Then I measured again using the window trick... It was fun. Cheers, Stefano -- __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Associate Research Professor Department of Hispanic Studies Ph: +1 (979) 845-2125 Texas A&M University Fax: +1 (979) 845-6421 College Station, Texas, USA
