TYPOGRAPHY AND ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

PAGE-MARKUP

Collecting letters to form words and filling words onto lines is the most basic operation of any word processor. However, simple algorithms does not offer satisfactory result in laying out the text properly so that it is visually easy to read. Several algorithms were developed recently to address this issue. They are very elaborate and each has different efficiency in solving their respective problem area like line filling, margin adjusting and hyphenating. From lines and paragraph of texts, we move one step forward to the level of page make-up or page assembly. Here, we have to worry about more objects like blocks of text, section headings, figures, tables, notes, page headers and footers. Unlike the issue of lines and paragraph, objects are not lined up as a stream and they may or may not be related to each other.

• What is page markup?
  • The arrangement and use of text, graphics, fonts, white-space, alignment and line breaks on page.
• What is white space?
  • The use of blank areas on a page to make the page legible and artistically pleasing.
• What is alignment?
  • The arrangement of a string of words on a line including center, left, right, and full justification.
• What are line-breaks?
  • The use of hyphenation to breakup sentences when they need to be wrapped.
  • Artful use of text wrap.
    

There are some problems associated with study of page markup:

• Widows and orphans:
  A widow is the last line of a paragraph which appears on the first line of a page, whereas an orphan is a title or first line of a paragraphg which appears on the last line of a page.
• Multiple columns:
  In a multiple-column work, it is desireable to have the columns aligned at the top and at the bottom with all the columns have similar lenght for balance. A columned text normally includes other full-length text like normal paragraph , headers and footers.
• Footnotes:
  Footnotes have the problem of being too long and lack of space on the page to comfortably fit on page.
• Illustrations:
  Illustration usually cannot be broken up and they may extend to more than a page wide. (Eg: facing pages and pull out pages) It must be possible for the user to move and relocate the picuture and anchor it anywhere on the document.