what formatting is used in news
Answers
Explanation:
8 FORMATTING
The purpose of the formatting process is to take an ASCII-based text, with optional illustrations, and render it into a pixmap that can directly be displayed on a bit-mapped computer screen. The formatted "image" contains elements of the newspaper metaphor, e.g., a headline, source indication, columns etc. Typography is a key issue.
A general problem when formatting news articles is that not all information is available when one needs it. For example, when selecting which headline font to use, it is, among other things, important to know how wide the article will be. To know the width of an article the formatter must know the number of columns. Before it selects the number of columns, the formatter should know what headline font is to be used--we're back where we started.
Another dilemma one faces when formatting text is legibility vs. word density. Newspapers use a high word density while legibility suffers. A good example is the front page of NYT [Merill 80] . There is a minimum of white space, and headline fonts are often condensed. Margins are minimal, and the overall impression is "dark". See also figure 22.
The Newspace project receives approximately 3000 articles a day from around 10 different sources. The articles all come in electronic form, but there is no established standard format. Therefore, they are first transferred into a common intermediate ASCII-based format developed for the Newspace project.
8.1 Input
The common intermediate file format used as a starting point for the formatter is based on the "datfile" standard. A datfile is technically a UNIX file system directory that contains a descriptor file and a data file. When used to store news articles, the data file contains the content of the article. The descriptor file contains various information relating to the data file, e.g., the headline, author (if known) and source.
This file format is the starting point for the formatting process that ends in the rendered pixmap displayed on the screen.
8.2 Soft Fonts
All text rendered by the formatter uses soft fonts, also known as fuzzy fonts, antialiased fonts or grayscale fonts [Negroponte 80] [Schmandt 80] [Bigelow, Day 83]. Grayscale fonts introduce a new way of thinking about text on computer displays. The monitor is no longer considered a discrete device with a fixed matrix driving it. Instead, the characters are scaled onto a continuous space; any partly covered pixel by the edge of a character is quantized into a grayscale value. Soft fonts don't improve resolution, but rather, improve addressibility of the existing resolution. This is important to properly render the letter forms, as well as position the letter forms on the display. Ergonomic studies show that they are easier to read [Bender et al. 87] , and without the use of soft fonts on the display it would be much harder to claim competitiveness with paper.
All soft fonts used in the Electronic Publishing group are derived from 320x320x1 pixel master fonts, which corresponds to a pointsize of 230 on the 2k display. Two proportionally spaced font families are available; Helvetica and Century-Schoolbook. They come in roman, italic and roman bold variations and can be scaled to any size. Ideally, the formatter should have access to any point size. This scheme would require either large amounts of disk storage capacity (Helvetica 160pt. uses more that 3Mb of storage space) or an excess of processing cycles. Unfortunately, none of the above are available. Instead, the current implementation keeps a limited set of soft fonts in memory at all times. This minimizes both processing and disk transfers, while providing a variety of typefaces, both for headlines and body text.
To improve legibility and appearance, the formatter kerns all text. Two-dimensional kerning tables have been computed by other members of the Electronic Publishing group. The simple algorithm that generates the data works well with smaller fonts, but could be improved for bigger fonts and certain letter combinations.