More mighty Mezz monkeyshines

A number of things determine how newspaper copy appears on a page: leading, paragraph indent, word spacing, hyphenation, tracking, last-line of paragraph.
All of these things are fiddleable in Quark®, the pagination software we used at the mighty Mezz.
Someone may have already set up the Quark template for that, or it may have been a default.
I should mention in advance the two ways of laying out copy in a column: ragged-right (or left), and justified. —There is also “centered,” but it’s rarely done.
“Justified” is column-width. The line of copy is expanded to fill the column. Spacing between letters (“tracking”) is expanded.
“Ragged-right” is lined up against the left edge of the column, and then equal spacing between letters; the right ends of a line fall where they may. (This here blog is ragged-right.)
Ragged-left is the opposite.
Centered is ragged at both sides, but centered in the column.
—Tracking is the spacing between letters. Increase it, and the spacing increases; make it a negative number, and the letters step on each other.
Tracking is always the same in a typewriter, and the width of letter-slugs is always the same. That is, the width of an “m” is the same as an “e,” and an “i” the same width as an “e.”
Doesn’t have to be that way in ‘pyooter text. The “e” is wider than the “i,” and the “m” wider still.
For a typewriter to work, letter-width has to always be the same, and a ‘pyooter can mimic that.
But the text in a ‘pyooter can be just like book copy; varying widths per letter.
Our newspaper’s tracking looked okay.
—Paragraph-indent also looked okay. That’s the indent of the first line of a paragraph.
—Word-spacing was the hairball; the spacing between adjacent words. If only two words could fit a justified line, the gap between adjacent words was too large.
If the paragraph was ragged-right, this didn’t happen. But if it was justified, it could.
—It looked like hyphenation had been turned off — that is, no hyphenation. Hyphenation could be set at one-to-three syllables, or none. Someone may have set it at “none,” so I wasn’t inclined to reset it.
—Leading was the vertical spacing between lines.
Make it a negative number, and the lines stepped on each other.
Leading looked okay, so I left it alone.
Also fiddleable was the spacing (“leading”) between paragraphs.
This looked okay, although I fiddled it in my Senior Calendar. I increased the leading between paragraphs.
—Last-line was whether the last line of a paragraph justified or not. I forget how this was set; but had (have) seen the last line justify the width of the column.
This looks awful; should be ragged-right. The rest of the paragraph could justify, but not the last line.
Shortly after we ‘pyooterized, the copy in the newspaper looked a bit wonky.
The spacing between words on a line was too wide.
I pointed this out to BossMan (Bob Matson, Executive-Editor), and he agreed, but said it was something we had to just live with.
I’d seen page-editors generate the same hairballs, and then throw up their hands. A solution was to fiddle each gap manually, but that added hours to page-generation.
So my wife and I thought we’d experiment. I had the same Quark software at home.
We fiddled a bit with the template the newspaper used, and came up with a new word-spacing amount that didn’t look so awful.
Showed the result to Matson, and what ho, it seems they started using my template.
Years have passed since then, and I’m sure various Quark templates have gone into use since mine.
Although occasionally a last line justifies across the column-width.
Looks silly, but how much time do ya wanna waste fiddling for appearance when the printing deadline is looming? (I was doing that experiment at home, free of a deadline.)

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over three years ago. Best job I ever had.

“Quark®” is the computer pagination software our newspaper used. At that time it was version 4.1; I still have 4.1 on my computer —it’s enough for what I wanna do. I’m sure The Messenger uses a more recent version; Quark-8 is available.

The “Quark template” determined how copy-text flowed into a Quark page.

“Senior Calendar” was a calendar of events for senior-citizens for our weekly Seniors Page. I was the one who did this.

“‘Pyooter” is computer.

RE: “Shortly after we ‘pyooterized......” —When I began, the newspaper-pages were “pasted up” on cardboard page dummies, waxed copy-galleys attached. Then the completed page was photographed by a large camera to make a negative a printing-plate could be burned from. —Later during my employ, the newspaper computerized: the newspaper pages were entirely generated in a computer, which then sent the completed page to an image-processor, which created negatives for burning printing-plates. —A better process would been “direct-to-plate,” whereby the computer sends the completed page to the printing-plate; but this costs megabucks.

My wife of 41+ years is “Linda.” The employ she retired from was as a computer-programmer.