In many
areas where the user ?¬?ndsWord does not support what he would like to try, the reason
is more likely to be that it was a poor idea than that Word is somehow lacking. For
instance, the user may ?¬?nd that the letter ???i??? looks too thin on his screen, and want to
make it wider everywhere. This would be possible in PostScript, butWord offers no
speci?¬?c support for such an operation. The reasons are clear: fonts are generally
designed so that character sizes are well balanced, and also any apparent imbalance is
more likely just an artifact of the screen resolution. By not providing global percharacter
settings, Word embodies this piece of experience; the apparent freedom of
PostScript would be a bad thing for most users. However, an experienced typographer
may well want to experiment with different kernings, and then the freedom of
358 TOOLS FOR DSM
PostScript or TeX may be needed??”at least until she ?¬?nds an environment speci?¬?cally
built for typographers.
14.2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOOLS
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana,
The Life of Reason (1905)
The history of tools for implementing support for new modeling languages has not
been a pretty one. Unlike other software ?¬?elds, such as operating system UIs, web
browsers, compression or encryption, there has been little building on previous work.
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