Path: inforamp.net!ts1-12.inforamp.net!user From: poynton@poynton.com (Charles Poynton) Newsgroups: comp.text.frame Subject: Re: Shrink-wrap leaves a 1 pt border Date: Sun, 13 Aug 1995 13:04:04 +0000 Lines: 114 Distribution: world Message-ID: References: <40e6t0$9pp@yuggoth.ucsb.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: ts1-12.inforamp.net In article <40e6t0$9pp@yuggoth.ucsb.edu>, steve@tweedledee.ucsb.edu (Steve Trainoff) wrote: > when I import my graphics [in 3.0.1] I use the "shrink-wrap" command to > shrink the enclosing frame to the size of my graphic. Unfortunately FM > leaves a 1 point border around the graphic. This behavior is evident in Frame 4 and Frame 5 as well. In this situation you have two frames -- the frame with the equation or the graphic, and its surrounding anchored frame, which FrameMaker has made two points wider and two points higher. In your post you use the term "border" loosely -- I'll call it the "slop zone". Strictly speaking, Border refers to what is painted by the Pen around a frame (unless the Pen is set to None). Border doesn't affect positioning or size. I assume that Frame introduced the slop zone to avoid the confusion that would result among inexperienced users if the two frames were put right on top of each other -- the newbie wouldn't know how to select one and not the other, he might not even realize that two frames were involved. I'm sure that the Frame designer or programmer that decided to do this meant well, but the two point discrepancy is a big nuisance if you are trying to achieve precision, simplicity and good typography. A similar technique is used by Frame when it imports a graphic onto the page or into a text column: the graphic appears at the center of a frame that's not one but TWELVE points wider and higher than the graphic. You can defeat the slop zone by manually setting Offset from Top and Offset from Left of the interior (equation or imported graphic) frame to zero, and then setting the Height and Width of the exterior (surrounding) frame to be exactly the same as the Height and Width of the equation or imported graphic. But what a pain. On my Mac, I already have my finger on the Option key to invoke Shrink-Wrap (Option-Keypad *), otherwise I would suggest to Frame that Option-Shrink-Wrap should produce an exact fit. But some mechanism should be available to produce a fit that isn't sloppy. How about a preference setting for "Slop zone" that would default to 1 point for the newbies, 6 points for imported graphics, but that could be set to zero for precision work? Related to the issue of surrounding frames, FrameMaker enforces a minimum 0.015 point (1/4800 inch) width on any border. This setting is inconsequential if Pen is set to to None, but sometimes I wish I could just set it to zero. Here's another problem. High-quality typefaces are designed so that the tops of the characters all appear, optically, to have the same elevation. The top of a character like "T" is located along the top boundary of the em-square. But the top of the curve in a capital "O" (or S or Q or C) must extend beyond the em-square in order to achieve an optical match. If the font designer makes the top of the O precisely match the top of the T, when they're set together it looks like the O came from a smaller font. In FrameMaker, when you put a text frame directly on the page, the tops of these characters are rendered correctly, slightly outside the text frame. But if the text is set within in an anchored or unanchored frame, with an Offset from Top of zero, the excursions outside the em-square are cropped by Frame -- when printed, your characters will be missing those components. I find it a highly visible artifact, even in ten-point type on a 300 dpi laserprinter, because the chopping is quite abrupt. To prevent this behaviour, you must sacrifice alignment and offset the frame downward slightly, say a point or so (for typical body type size). This means that you can't achieve good typography by simply dragging a figure caption to the top of its anchored frame and letting it snap to the top boundary -- if you do that, your characters will be clipped. There is an analogous problem in the horizontal dimension. It is common for a font to have characters whose shape extends horizontally outside what a typographer calles the "body" of the character. In Times-Italic for example, the "fi" and "fl" ligatures, and the beta characters have "negative side-bearings": portions of these characters extend to the left of the body. When placed in a text frame directly on the page, the edges of these characters appear cropped on-screen, but print properly. However, when enclosed in a FrameMaker anchored frame with an Offset from Left of zero, these characters are cropped on display and upon printing. In Times-Italic, the beta character is the worst case: to avoid Frame's poor behavior you must manually introduce an Offset from Left of about 1/5 of the point size. Now let me tie these problems together: the 1-point slop zone upon shrink-wrapping masks the cropping of excursions that would occur if the element were the same size as its surround. A cynic might say that the 1-point zone was introduced to avoid cropping, treating the symptom rather than the disease. I have collected a list of several word-spacing problems in Frame. Here's one: even when word spacing is supposed to be absolutely fixed (minimum 100%, optimum 100%, maximum 100%), when the last line of a paragraph is full, FrameMaker shrinks the word spacing in a line if a space character immediately precedes the paragraph mark. None of these issues materially affects the use of Frame to produce technical manuals, but they all deter high quality work. I'm a fan of Frame Technology, but Frame's lack of typographic awareness explains why serious work is done with PageMaker and Quark. Recommendations to Frame: 1. Provide an easily-accessible Shrink-Wrap with exact fit. 2. Remove the border restrictions -- allow me to set a border of zero. 3. Repair the mistreatment of excursions of a character's shape outside its "body" -- when you set a character, set the whole character, not just most of it. 4. Forgive my being blunt, Frame: learn about typography. C. Charles Poynton [Mac Eudora, MIME, BinHqx] tel: 416 413 1377