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Assume v. Presume

Black Hole said:
There's no difference between typing and print except the limitations.
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  • Double spaces at ends of sentences
  • Underlining (Except in proof reading!)
  • Right justification
  • Flexible spacing between lines
  • Orphan control
  • Math axis (The line, above the baseline, that maths is conventionally centered on.)
To name but six. There is not a great deal of difference between duplicating and typing, but a world of difference between printing and typing, and to compare typing with electronic typesetting is to compare Morse code with a telephone call. You will say this is all capabilities, but printing is fundamentally different. It has as its objective the production of beautiful printed pages.

Whether all the control in typesetting is still relevant in an age of HTML and Kindles is an entirely different matter.
 
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Mike0001 said:
To name but six.
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Six limitations.

I've earned some of my living finding ways to produce what's needed using whatever medium happens to be available, so it's no good trying to tell me there is one standard way.

Incidentally, I've just spent the last hour or so rescuing a large .ODT file that crashed OpenOffice when loaded - repeatedly. The solution was to drill into the .odt zip, find the problem XML record and edit it out, then load the result and hope that it didn't invalidate the file.

The file was invalid, but not irrepairable by the ODT loader. Phew!
 
Mike0001 said:
Talking of place names, where, if anywhere, do you think the rules for pronouncing them are kept?
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In Nottinghamshire there is Gotham (pronounced goat-am) and Southwell. Even the locals can't make up their mind. Is it Suthull, or South-well?
Who knows where the rules are kept for this? In some old sage's head?
Mike0001 said:
Type for the web and use single spaced sentences, font variants for emphasis (but not underline) and font sizing for headings.
Most of us now vote with their feet for option 3, apart from technical scientists who must use option 2 because the others cannot manage technical writing.
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It is possible to write technical documents in Word and OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It can be a sod getting the formatting right. I found that WordPerfect (for DOS) did exactly what I wanted when writing technical papers (many years ago). At the time I had no access to *TeX and so that wasn't an option. Try writing a technical document using Digital Standard Runoff (for a VAX). You had to leave a blank space for the equations and write them by hand.
I wrote a paper for a conference once. Authors were instructed to send their papers in a Word document, correctly formatted. I did. The conference publication process completely mangled the formatting. (I even sent them a pdf just in case). :rolleyes:
 
EEPhil said:
Authors were instructed to send their papers in a Word document, correctly formatted. I did. The conference publication process completely mangled the formatting.
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Inexperienced Word users (and WP users in general) don't understand that what they receive in a .doc ain't necessarily going to look the same to them as they did to the originator. It's a problem I am constantly banging my head against, because they are used to an environment where the IT department ensures all the office PCs are set up the same.
 
Black Hole said:
Inexperienced Word users
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That would be me! But I gave them the document and a pdf of how it looked when I formatted it... Anyway, I managed to point the problem out during the presentation. (The whole conference was badly organised. They had a PC with 800 x 600 pixels set. "it needs someone from IT to come and fix it - can you manage with it?" I did, but having to switch between Powerpoint, web pages and a standalone Flash animations was a pain in the A)
 
Black Hole said:
I gave some thought to why this all matters ... When the channel noise margin is high, any data errors at source (malformed sentences) can be corrected on reception, ...
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This reminds me of a conversation on Sky News last week. During the paper review there was mention of the changes to the shopping basket used to determine price inflation (I think). The suggestion was that specialist beers were being added to the basket. "Next they'll be adding beer doyle," said one reviewer. "Beer doyle? What's beer doyle?", queried the presenter. "Beard oil" was the reply. WTF?
 
Walking around the local Morrisons supermarket I saw the pet food aisle. "Dog Food", "Cat Food", "Cat Litter", "Small Dogs"... Small dogs? Are Morrisons allowed to sell small dogs?
 
EEPhil said:
Southwell. Even the locals can't make up their mind. Is it Suthull, or South-well?
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Suthl. Lovely little minster, the leaves of Suthl, bliss!

I am an old atheist with a life long interest in churches! In this case, a mini cathedral town.
 
EEPhil said:
In Nottinghamshire there is Gotham (pronounced goat-am) and Southwell. Even the locals can't make up their mind. Is it Suthull, or South-well?
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There is a village in Bedfordshire called Salford which the locals pronounce Saffud. I mean the real locals, not the London overflow families that came up the M1 when it was built. Local joke is that the M1 was lit up as far as J13 so they knew where to turn off. :)
 
There was a young lady of Cirencester
Who stood up to speak, and they hissed her.
A man threw a carrot --
She screeched like a parrot --
But ducked in a flash, and it missed her.

Translation of:

There was a young lady of Cirencester
Who stood up to speak, and they hirencester:
A man threw a carrot --
She screeched like a parrot --
But ducked in a flash, and it mirencester.
 
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Black Hole said:
it's no good trying to tell me there is one standard way.
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I gathered that. However, there are standards and the lack thereof. Anyone who told me to underline headings would be told to find another job!
 
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Calver, pronounced Carver. There is a crossroads near the centre, with a garage/shop. Cross the road to the Insomnia cafe car park and look at the garage shop front, and what do you see in large letters?

Whites Welcome

How bad is that?
 
Black Hole said:
Inexperienced Word users (and WP users in general) don't understand that what they receive in a .doc ain't necessarily going to look the same to them as they did to the originator. It's a problem I am constantly banging my head against, because they are used to an environment where the IT department ensures all the office PCs are set up the same.
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Isn't this exactly what PDF was invented to solve?
 
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