Path: inforamp.net!woody03.inforamp.net!user From: poynton@inforamp.net (Charles A. Poynton) Newsgroups: comp.text.frame Subject: Re: How to prevent changing the standard font of a paragraph? Date: Sun, 04 Dec 1994 14:09:38 -0500 Organization: InfoRamp inc., Toronto, Ontario (416) 363-9100 Lines: 85 Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <3bk0di$24k@sunserver.lrz-muenchen.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: woody03.inforamp.net In article <3bk0di$24k@sunserver.lrz-muenchen.de>, sta@mmk.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de wrote: > [FM4/Solaris] If I change the font format ... while writing AT THE END of a paragraph, > and I change it back to the standard format ... then the standard font > of the WHOLE paragraph will change to the previous selected format. This is apparently a bug. On 4.0.4p1 on my Mac Quadra, changing the size or weight or angle of just the last character of a paragraph -- the character immediately preceding the paragraph mark -- would cause the entire paragraph to change, just as Holger observed. It was clearly a bug and not a feature because Undo would only undo the change to the intended character and not to the rest of the paragraph. Same deal for the last character of a table entry, the character before the end-of-flow mark. Changing the character format of just that one character would make the whole entry change. But it's flaky -- today, I can't recreate it. How about this one -- a display bug where any character with a decender gets displayed propped up on an x-height or so worth of pedestal. Printing was fine. The bug was zoom-factor dependent -- changing zoom factor sometimes made it go away. But usually only for a while - it would come back. Quitting Frame and restarting would make it go away for a while, anything from twenty minutes to six hours of heavy use. But eventually it would come back. This on a system with all the TrueType fonts ripped out -- which is the recommended situation -- running SuperATM 3.6. I could reproduce it quite reliably with all extensions disabled except ATM. The problem disappeared when I upgraded to System 7.5 and ATM 3.8.1LE. Anyone else seen it? If you have read this far, you must be concerned about bugs and idiosynchracies. Does it bug anyone else how whitespace at the end of a line affects wordspace and letterspace calculations? In PageMaker, even in Microsoft Word, a space character at the end of a line makes no contribution whatsoever to justification or wordspacing -- it even floats off past the end of the column if necessary. This is as it should be. Frame has no typographic sense here -- every space character at the end of a line contributes to squeezing wordspace or even letterspace to its left. In a document with Smart Spaces, the extent of the damage is limited an en or so, but if you run with smart spaces off, amazing things happen. As you add spaces immediately left of the line end (paragraph mark, end of flow, or line break), the rest of the line starts squeezing into less and less space. The line-breaking machinery of Frame refuses to allow the line formatter to make a new break solely because of space characters, so it squeezes out to infinity if it has to, well past violating the word space parameters that you have set in the Advanced properties of the Paragraph Designer. It's even funnier in a Centered paragraph. As you add space at the end of a centered line, with default wordspace parameters (min 90, opt 100, max 110), first the text in the line gets leterspaced a little wider, then stabilizes, then starts squishing. The design principle here should be, the reader does not know or care how many spaces were typed at the end of a line, so he should not see their effects either. I would argue that they should be swallowed at the start of a line as well, but I admit that there is a certain marketing necessity to enable Frame to be used by people who grew up with typewriters. PageMaker and Word concede this point also. There is a very practical, down-to-earth aspect of this problem. I put a space character at the end of every sentence. This allows me to cut and paste sentences, even from the middle of a paragraph to an end or from an end to a middle. But Frame loses its typographic sense unless I manually post-process to rip out the spaces from paragraph ends. I also habitually put a space at the end of a word, even a word in a table entry. This allows me to cut and paste words without having to manually repair spacing afterwards. But if leave a space character as the last character of a table entry, the other characters in the entry are unjustifiably squeezed. C. -- Charles Poynton [Mac Eudora/MIME/BinHex]