MetaFun - Pragma ADE

12 Defining styles
Since the integration of METAPOST into CONTEXT, a complete new range of layout fetaures became available.
In this document we have introduced several ways to include graphics in your document definition. In this
chapter we go one step further and make dynamic graphics part of a document style.
12.1 Adaptive buttons
14
So far we have seen a lot of graphic ingredients that you can use to make your documents more
attractive. In this chapter we will define a simple document style. This style was written for the
PDFTEX presentations at the TUG 2000 conference in Oxford (UK).
This style exploits a few tricks, like graphics calculated using positional information. It also
demonstrates how you can make menu buttons that dynamically adapt their shapes to the rest
of the page layout.
A Few Nice Quotes
A Simple Style Demo
Hans Hagen, August 2000
Douglas R.
Hofstadter
Donald
E. Knuth
Edward
R. Tufte
Hermann
Zapf
close
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Donald Knuth has spent the past several years working on a system allowing
him to control many aspects of the design of his forthcoming books.from the
typesetting and layout down to the very shapes of the letters! Seldom has an
author had anything remotely like this power to control the final appearance of
his or her work. Knuth's TEX typesetting system has become well-known and
available in many countries around the world. By contrast, his METAFONT
system for designing families of typefaces has not become as well known or
available.
In his article “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, Knuth sets forth for the first time
the underlying philosophy of METAFONT, as well as some of its products. Not
only is the concept exiting and clearly well executed, but in my opinion the
article is charmingly written as well. However, despite my overall enthusiasm
for Knuth's idea and article, there are some points in it that I feel might be
taken wrongly by many readers, and since they are points that touch close to my
deepest interests in artificial intelligence and esthetic theory, I felt compelled
to make some comments to clarify certain important issues raised by “The
Concept of a Meta-Font”.
Douglas R.
Hofstadter
Donald
E. Knuth
Edward
R. Tufte
Hermann
Zapf
close
Donald E. Knuth
Thus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not
only be the implementer and first large--scale user; the designer should also
write the first user manual.
The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TEX significantly.
If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds
of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have
thought of them or perceived why they were important.
But a system cannot be successful if it is too strongly influenced by a single
person. Once the initial design is complete and fairly robust, the real test begins
as people with many different viewpoints undertake their own experiments.
Douglas R.
Hofstadter
Donald
E. Knuth
Edward
R. Tufte
Hermann
Zapf
Adaptive buttons Defining styles
close
Edward R. Tufte
We thrive in information--thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday
capacity to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge,
harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose,
categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate,
discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend,
inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate,
outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse,
glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow
the wheat from the chaff and separate the sheep from the goats.
Douglas R.
Hofstadter
Donald
E. Knuth
Edward
R. Tufte
Hermann
Zapf
close
Hermann Zapf
Coming back to the use of typefaces in electronic publishing: many of the
new typographers receive their knowledge and information about the rules of
typography from books, from computer magazines or the instruction manuals
which they get with the purchase of a PC or software. There is not so much
basic instruction, as of now, as there was in the old days, showing the differences
between good and bad typographic design. Many people are just fascinated by
their PC's tricks, and think that a widely--praised program, called up on the
screen, will make everything automatic from now on.
page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5
Later we will see an instance with some more randomness in the graphics. While writing this
style, the random alternative made me think of those organic buildings with non equal windows
—we have a few of those in The Netherlands—, so I decided to label this style as pre-organic. If
you use CONTEXT, you can load this style with:
\usemodule[pre-organic]
At the end of this file, there is a small test file, so when you process the file s-pre-19.tex 14 with
the options --mode=demo and --pdf, you will get a demo document.
We use one of the standard screen ‘paper' sizes, and map it onto the same size, so that we get a
nicely cropped page. Other screen sizes are S4 and S5.
\setuppapersize[S6][S6]
Like in this METAFUN manual, we use the Palatino as main bodyfont. This font is quite readable
on even low resolution screens, although I admit that this style is developed using an 1400 × 1050
pixel LCD screen, so the author may be a little biased.
\setupbodyfont[ppl]
The layout specification sets up a text area and a right edge area where the menus will go (see
chapter 6 for a more in depth discussion on the layout areas). Watch how we use a rather large
This style is the 19 th presentation style. Those numbered styles are internally mapped onto more meaningful names like
in this case pre-organic.
Douglas R.
Hofstadter
Donald
E. Knuth
Edward
R. Tufte
Hermann
Zapf
close
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