Word Breaks

[Joseph McCollum]

On Sat, 8 May 1999 09:33:17 -0400 Grant Barrett
<gbarrett at AMERICANDIALECT.ORG> writes:
>Two answers to Barry's question:
>
>1. They could have computers and still get the bad word breaks. It
>depends on how good the hyphenation dictionary is in the program
>they're using, and how well they've set up their preferences.
>
==>
Don't depend on online spellcheckers and grammatical editors to do your
work for you.  There are horror stories to that effect.
==>
>One thing I would add is that jobs lost in a newspaper environment due
>to the introduction of computers are usually balanced by new jobs such
as
>computer technicians, network specialists, computer layout artists,
>digital scanner users, digital photo retouchers and reporters
specializing in
>computer-aided reporting. Unfortunately, there is no natural
>transition from the old non-computer jobs to the new ones. It's the same
number of
>jobs, but different people doing them.
>
===>
        I gather there are a lot of researchers on this list.  Do any
other members do any manuscripts in-house?  I am amazed at how
inefficient our process is.
Our publications shop uses PageMaker -- and it is almost compatible with
WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and ApplixWare -- but not quite.  I do not
understand why
they go through the PageMaker step at all.  Their bogus reason is that
they want to be
able to make a .pdf file -- but you can scan the finished document and
accomplish
the same purpose.  In fact, that is what they did with our archived
documents.
        Before WordPerfect 5.0, a person couldn't mix graphics and text.
Now, a person can do that, make newspaper columns, do binding offsets,
number pages,
and make what any intelligent person would consider a publication quality
document.
The difference between a "Word Processor" and a "Desktop Publisher"
doesn't exist any more.   I just wrote a paper that has maybe 75
equations -- the layout artists cut each equation out of MS Word and
paste it into PageMaker -- it seems unnecessarily
labor-intensive to me.  In fact, I made them a double-spaced version for
editing and a
single-spaced version with newspaper columns to show it could be done --
but they want to make a career out of it.
        The reason I'm upset about this is that I had promised my
manuscript to some experts, and I finally had to send out a loose
manuscript rather than a published final version.

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