Not off-topic: Wrong couple divorced after computer error by law firm Vardag's

Fri Apr 26 19:40:09 CEST 2024

On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 6:13 AM Kaveh Bazargan <kaveh at rivervalley.io> wrote:

>
> The above article is not Open Access, so I can only comment on what I see
> here...
>

You are right. Elsevier had it labelled Open Access all over, but alas it
is not.

> The PDF line width is narrower and as you say it is justified, so harder
> to get good looking lines.
>

It is not all that hard. In fact, this text is ultra-easy, but needs hand
intervention.

> So most of the issues above are TeX style issues. It would even be
> possible to have a filter that would automatically tie "A" to the next word
> at the beginning of a sentence if that is what is required.
>

I do not see how a "TeX style" would change anything or even how it would
treat this text and tons of others any differently. Good line breaks are
obtained by hand with interword separation, struts, kerning, tracking ...

[image: Screenshot from 2024-04-25 22-33-17.png]
>>
>> but ignore it on the second occurrence of the same thing:
>>
>>
>> [image: Screenshot from 2024-04-25 22-29-35.png]
>>
>>
>>
> The points you make regarding the above I feel are not major, compared to
> many other problems that published articles have. I think that if
> the MathML is correctly structured it is possible to use "left" and "right"
> for brackets automatically. And the tilde, perhaps an automated filter too.
> But to my eye the tilde is not a major problem. Your standards are probably
> higher than most!
>

Yes, there are solutions for every single one  of them -- but they are not
used -- even by the largest publisher in the world, in journals of very
high visibility.

The typography of eBooks on the Kindle, iPads and standard applications on
Android are pure junk, and even Chrome is ahead of them in
implementing Knuth--Plass. Observe that these guys have almost infinite
resources at their disposal.

What one needs here is the easy handling of typographical issues, so they
can be adopted -- and XML stands in their way.

>
>> Here is an article:
>>
>> Classification générique de synthèses temps minimales avec cible de
>> codimension un et applications
>> B. Bonnard, G. Launay, M. Pelletier
>> https://doi.org/10.1016/S0294-1449(97)80149-7
>>
>> that runs 48 pages without a SINGLE hyphenation for line break. I have
>> never seen anything like that.
>>
>
> Quite common and again simple style file problem I would say.
>

Oh my! Gods have pity on us. If this is a "simple" style file problem --
why does it NOT get done???

It does look like someone typeset the article in English, saw the many
>> erroneous line-breaks and instead of going back and changing the language,
>> they went back and inserted \sloppy at the top of the file. We are only
>> humans, and when one has a hammer everything in the world looks like a nail.
>>
>> Inserting directives for kerning, tracking, etc ... in XML to be used by
>> TeX rendering is a shitty job and most people are willing to ditch it.
>>
>
> In my opinion, the content should be structured correctly in the XML and
> we so what we can to automate kerning etc in the rendering stage.
>

I don't think the automation you imagine exists.

But what is the solution? We cannot have TeX files as the source,
> because TeX is not structured. It is for typesetting. So we need simple
> tagging for content and the best possible rendering with minimal manual
> work. I have learned to live with slightly bigger or smaller brackets, but
> ensuring truly futureproof content.
>

I don't think the solution exists yet. Of course structuring is a must, and
so is preservation. There are a lot of people working around structuring
TeX: GELLMU, plasTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX3, ... and that is likely one answer
that could lead to preservation.

The arguments I am hearing now for displaying XML generated content
rendered by TeX is

        that is what we have and what we need

which mirrors very close the argument pushed on us for books typeset in
typewriters in the 70's.

Paulo Ney

>
>
>>
>> Hope you are looking more convinced now. Best,
>>
>> Paulo Ney
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 23, 2024 at 12:15 AM Kaveh Bazargan <kaveh at rivervalley.io>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Paulo
>>>
>>> Could you possibly point to an example, e.g. an Open Access Elsevier
>>> paper and where you see the bad typography? In general, the settings for
>>> the class and style files should ensure that only rarely TeX-specific
>>> commands need to be used.
>>>
>>> On Mon, 22 Apr 2024 at 23:02, Paulo Ney de Souza <pauloney at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We do that ALL the time, not on lines on a poster, but with lines on
>>>> Bibliographies.
>>>>
>>>> It used to be an extremely cumbersome and expensive procedure
>>>> during BibTeX times, when TeX did not know the language it was
>>>> typesetting a bibliography entry. It got infinitely better with
>>>> BibLaTeX.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, it is possible to annotate the XML with inter-word and inter-
>>>> character spacing information, but it is plain NOT done, most likely
>>>> because of the costs involved.
>>>>
>>>> Just open the Bibliography of an Elsevier published article processed
>>>> with TeX, especially the ones with two columns, it is absolutely awful,
>>>> with absurd spacing in the wrong places and incorrect hyphenation
>>>> of words. It does look like they have the command \sloppy at the start
>>>> of every Biblio and hyphenate everything in English no matter what
>>>> is written in the text.
>>>>
>>>> I am publishing a book with one of the big publishers and it has been
>>>> converted to XML. At every complaint of a bad line break or wrong
>>>> hyphenation they take a week to respond and, in general, with another
>>>> bad line-break or hyphenation caused by the previous fix.
>>>>
>>>> Kaveh, if you know an efficient and inexpensive way to do this, you
>>>> could probably teach us because this is probably holding up the adoption
>>>> of XML as a source, by authors. What about a talk at TUG'24?
>>>>
>>>> Paulo Ney
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 12:23 PM William F Hammond <hmwlfsr at yahoo.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I ended my last message with this:
>>>>>
>>>>>     But if I want to be fussy about typesetting I will use
>>>>>     regular LaTeX.
>>>>>
>>>>> Speaking about fussy typesetting, one case is that of a long
>>>>> paragraph in a public poster on a wall (with suitably large
>>>>> fonts).  I think it desirable to have both left and right
>>>>> flush margins and no line-ending hyphens.  Usually, though
>>>>> not always, I can tease that out of LaTeX with micro
>>>>> adjustments to line width.  Failing that, I may need to make
>>>>> manual adjustments to the inter-word spaces in a few lines.
>>>>> But is there a package that attempts to do this?
>>>>>
>>>>>           -- Bill
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.facebook.com/william.f.hammond
>>>>> http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/
>>>>>
>>>>> 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒂𝒗𝒆 𝒂 𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒚 𝒊𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒆
>>>>> 𝒊𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒕.
>>>>>    -- 𝐊𝐞𝐧 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐬
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Kaveh Bazargan PhD
>>> Director
>>> River Valley Technologies <http://rivervalley.io> ● Twitter
>>> <https://twitter.com/rivervalley1000> ● LinkedIn
>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/bazargankaveh/> ● ORCID
>>> <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1414-9098> ● @kaveh1000 at mastodon.social
>>> <https://mastodon.social/@kaveh1000>
>>> *Accelerating the Communication of Research*
>>>
>>> *
>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bazargankaveh_ismte-innovation-award-recipient-kaveh-bazargan-activity-7039348552526921728-XAEB/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop>  [image:
>>> https://rivervalley.io/gigabyte-wins-the-alpsp-scholarly-publishing-innovation-award-using-river-valleys-publishing-technology/]
>>> <https://rivervalley.io/gigabyte-wins-the-alpsp-scholarly-publishing-innovation-award-using-river-valleys-publishing-technology/>*
>>>
>>
>
> --
> Kaveh Bazargan PhD
> Director
> River Valley Technologies <http://rivervalley.io> ● Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/rivervalley1000> ● LinkedIn
> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/bazargankaveh/> ● ORCID
> <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1414-9098> ● @kaveh1000 at mastodon.social
> <https://mastodon.social/@kaveh1000>
> *Accelerating the Communication of Research*
>
> *
> <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bazargankaveh_ismte-innovation-award-recipient-kaveh-bazargan-activity-7039348552526921728-XAEB/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop>  [image:
> https://rivervalley.io/gigabyte-wins-the-alpsp-scholarly-publishing-innovation-award-using-river-valleys-publishing-technology/]
> <https://rivervalley.io/gigabyte-wins-the-alpsp-scholarly-publishing-innovation-award-using-river-valleys-publishing-technology/>*
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20240426/a04eb4b8/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screenshot from 2024-04-25 22-29-35.png
Type: image/png
Size: 9335 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20240426/a04eb4b8/attachment-0002.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Screenshot from 2024-04-25 22-33-17.png
Type: image/png
Size: 10356 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20240426/a04eb4b8/attachment-0003.png>