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From: Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Way OT: Adam Smith and Software Markets/Word Processing
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 22:43:57 +0000 (UTC)
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Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote:
 
: I do find old typewriter documents hard to read now (eg, mid-80s
: document on an Ada-based OS -- Pulse?). All the same, I really don't
: think that you can measure quality in a document by the quality of the
: typesetting or the number of different fonts used.

Yes, but actually, you can measure some of the _typographic_
quality by the number of fonts used. It should be low, too many
fonts lead to fontitis. This is not just a matter of taste,
but empirical evidence, and taught to every typsetting apprentice.

There are even some aspects that can be measured using light:
the black:white ratio per area should be homogenous on the page
(in a book: both pages), unless you want eye *catch*ers.