Typophile - Typography for books recommendations? - Comments

piticu — Mon, 6 Dec 2004 00:39:40 -0800

> That was URW rather than Monotype

true. my mistake.

hrant — Sat, 4 Dec 2004 11:41:46 -0800

If I told you I'd have to distribute you.

hhp

Thomas Phinney — Sat, 4 Dec 2004 10:15:24 -0800

> it's the algorithm taken from hz program developed for monotype by Hermann Zapf. adobe bought this program early in 90s.

That was URW rather than Monotype, and the mid-90s, I think.

Hrant, who licensed the patent from URW before Adobe bought it?

T

charles_e — Fri, 3 Dec 2004 11:10:07 -0800

<quote>omega deals happily with 16bit fonts.</quote>

But Omega seems to undergo al lot of change, it isn't "finished" like TeX.

And (unless I'm wrong yet again) if you have ALL the words over 5 letters that occur in a book you are setting in an exception dictionary, then you have control -- it doesn't matter what the algorithm might do, as long as the exception dictionary is checked first. Of course, if the author re-writes in proof . . .

Charles

hrant — Fri, 3 Dec 2004 07:21:06 -0800

Actually, Adobe isn't the only party that has rights to Hz...

hhp

piticu — Thu, 2 Dec 2004 22:49:44 -0800

<quote> One of the reasons we are (probably) leaving our TeX engine has to do with a need for 16-bit fonts (Unicode)</quote>

omega deals happily with 16bit fonts.

<quote>InDesign in a week or so. But it has many, many features that will be hard to overcome knocking out the existing hyphenation routine (I believe it is an algorithm),</quote>

it's the algorithm taken from hz program developed for monotype by Hermann Zapf. adobe bought this program early in 90s.

<quote>so you have control over all hyphenation.</quote>

in theory, never InDesign

charles_e — Thu, 2 Dec 2004 08:33:31 -0800

Not to minimize your problems, but they are solvable with TeX (but not always easily). As for fonts, we always made a

42ndssd — Wed, 1 Dec 2004 17:19:34 -0800

I appreciate all the thoughtful comments and sincere feedback.

I agree 100% you can't "learn" good typography from reading, as it's more art than science at this point. I'm not looking for magic formulas or rote approaches, because I don't believe there's any one answer to what is "good book design".

I do feel that contrasting and comparing various approaches is very helpful, and just in the last few days I've gained new insights into how various people regard the problems. And I appreciate seeing other people's opinions on what constitutes good design, as I figure it won't hurt.

The issues I have with TeX are legion, and I've been using on a regular basis since 1986. Honestly, it's time to say goodbye and move on. It hasn't kept pace with the world around it, and trying to drag it into the 21st century just isn't worth the personal effort to me. I don't need the advantages it offers (a community of users and existing styles).

What broke the camel's back was when I went to install Yet Another Font and realized what a horrible mess it was to use "non-standard" Type 1 fonts with TeX. Then I thought about the style I need, which uses lots of flowing parallel text; this is a non-trivial problem for TeX. And, its page-break algorithms are not that good... multilanguage support is iffy at best... and so on. All of TeX's weaknesses came to a head on this particular project, and none of its strengths. I know people are valiantly trying to make it work in modern times, but I believe the fundamental design is inadeqate given the amount of change which has taken place around it.

I totally agree that the tool doesn't make one a good typographer, because almost anything can be used to produce good documents. Heck, I could write raw Postscript if I had to, or bludgeon something like groff into doing what I need, or even scribble words on a page with a pen. My problem is that I need to format some very large documents, ones which will be updated frequently from a database, and I can't afford to spend the time setting each page by hand. (Tweaking, of course I expect that; but only a reasonable amount.) I need something that can generate decent output and handle the complex formats I've wanted for years without having to jump through TeX's ridiculous hoops.

Charles, thanks for the recommendation for The Art of the Book, and I'll be sure and take a look. I have my personal collection of rare books as well, many of which are beautifully printed (and others which are simply awful )

I have my own appreciation of what consistutes beautiful typesetting; the education for me is that many people disagree, not only with me but with each other as well.

charles_e — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:44:55 -0800

I think you are looking in the wrong forests. I

piticu — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 22:49:10 -0800

1. [42nd SSD] is because I'm writing my own typesetting engine.

Aren't you tryin to reinvent the wheel? i mean yes its true that some defaults in TeX aren't pleasing for everybody but you can change easily. and that's, in my opinion, the best advantage of TeX vs, let's say, InDesign.

2. [robin huston] Knuth, who knew nothing about typography when he started the project

im not so sure about that. one cant possibly write a system as TeX without knowing nothing about typography.

3. without the glue, TeX paragraph composition algorithm will be useless, isnt it?

4. why not use interline extra space if its so little that the eye is fooled and if the result will be more pleasant as a whole? the same question about extra compression/expansion of types pdfeTeX can do.

5. ragged-right paragraphs: i use this setting for its side effect - fixed interwords spaces (or is the other way - using fixed interword space have the side effect of ragged-right paragraphs?). so, if using hyphenation will give me a more straight left margin, why not using it?

6. [42nd SSD] what i want from a typesetting engine is this: first - complete detachment between form and content, second - let me choose/change anything (i dont use TeX and friends for their defaults, but for their full or almost full customization), third - dealing gracefully with various input/output systems/media etc.

although i encourage u with ur project, my personal opinion is that such effort deserve other purpose. have u consider joing etex/pdftex/omega team?

speter — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 18:25:30 -0800

Don't forget that the defaults for TeX were set in the early 1980s, and that just because they are the defaults doesn't mean you can't change them. For example, if you don't like the extra space after a sentence, just put \frenchspacing in your preamble. That's no more difficult than setting up InDesign. (And yes, TeX and InDesign are my two main typesetting systems.)

As for the "glue" in between paragraphs, I agree it can be dangerous (and I frequently have to "defeat" it when I typeset with TeX). Systems built on TeX, such as ConTeXt, offer good facilities for typesetting on a grid.

And while Knuth did do a lot of research on typography while developing TeX and Metafont, I wouldn't use the TeXbook as my typographic guide except for matters mathematical. Bringhurst is a much better guide. (And I agree with you, Robin, about the ragged-right hyphenation issue.)

puffinry — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:40:37 -0800

PS. The documentation for Peter Wilson's Memoir class contains a lot of reasonably sane advice about book typography.

didudi — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:37:25 -0800

Instincts...

I agree, it is respectable to learn form past experiences but future of type ore anything ells is not decided and not known from past as they created it from they past not present as we must do now. Learn from past not fours it to be present roles. Some mistakes ore wrongs of past could be correct now

puffinry — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:22:16 -0800

I think it's pretty widely accepted that some of the default settings in TeX run contrary to what most people nowadays would regard as good typographic practice. (You can't blame Knuth, who knew nothing about typography when he started the project, and whose prime exemplars were mathematical journals from the early 20th century.)

For example, I've never seen a serious typographer argue that it's a good idea to add extra space between sentences. Certainly the majority would disagree rather forcefully, I imagine!

The whole business of stretchable vertical space is interesting, because of course such a thing wasn't generally possible with earlier technologies, so it was a reasonable thing to experiment with at the time. But I think (and I'm not so sure here, but I would guess I'm in a substantial majority again) that the results of using this are not usually effective. I don't think the leading between lines is stretchable by default, but the spacing between sections and paragraphs certainly is.

Similarly Knuth's recommendation to use a spaced-out em dash for punctuation is rather eccentric. Most people would use either a spaced-out en dash or (less commonly) a pretty tight em dash.

Bringhurst is a much more reliable guide on matters of style, in my humble and rather ignorant opinion. (The only suggestion in Bringhurst that I find completely baffling is his insistence that, in a ragged-right setting, it's best never to break words. Would anyone care to convince me of this?)

42ndssd — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 16:16:12 -0800

Popescu,

Tschichold spends several paragraphs in a detailed discussion of using closely-set type and avoiding excess spaces. For example, he makes specific recommendations against extra spaces after sentence endings, and insists that using fixed spacing between lines is (in general) the right thing to do. I was also surprised to learn that he felt widows were less of a sin than using extra spacing, and I don't necessarily disagree with that.

By default TeX uses extra and variable spacing all over the place: spaces after sentence endings are 1.5x the width, flexible "glue" is usually inserted between lines, spaces after other punctuation marks are given extra glue, and additional complexities are used. I've never particularly cared for the resulting appearance yet I've always felt my judgement was a bit off. Turns out at least one other person agrees with me, at least to some extent.

The reason I'm asking about typography books is because I'm writing my own typesetting engine (hopefully it'll be available someday--for free, of course), and I'm looking for various opinions on what constitutes good and bad typography so I can try to make it flexible enough to accomodate them. I'm also thinking about other approaches to the whole "is this a good layout?" heuristic analysis than the somewhat simplistic ones used by most of the other systems I've worked with. Looking at "optical spacing" is a start, but it seems there may be additional information that would help to guide the process.

While human intervention is always going to be necessary for truly beautiful results, I want to try and get as close as is reasonable. And while WYSIWYG systems are an excellent choice for many things, the project that prompted me to do this just isn't feasable with such a system.

Soon I should have some output worth showing, and then people can tell me how full of crap I am and I won't feel so bad about criticizing Felici or Bringhurst

Typography for books recommendations?

42ndssd — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 10:46:52 -0800

For reasons which shall currently remain nameless, lately I've been reading many books on typesetting and page layout. Two which have stood out are Tschichold's The Form of the Book, and Bringhurst's much-recommended opus. (Far less memorable is Felici's Complete Manual of Typography, which is not complete, not a manual, and not "a guide to setting perfect type", whatever that is.) I've also read a collection of Eric Gill's essays, and several other miscellaneous works.

To cut to the chase scene, does anyone have any other recommendations? I'm looking for works along the lines of The Form of the Book, namely specific opinions on what constitutes good and bad typography for books. I feel the best way to learn one's preferences is by experimenting, but more opinions are always interesting if not useful. Like, I agree with a lot of Tschichold's advice wrt spacing issues yet much of this runs contrary to Knuth's decisions in TeX, so I've always doubted I knew what I was talking about. (I still do, but that's beside the point. )

Now for the useless rant.

Why is it the modern editions of many of these works touting good typography practices are, shall I kindly say, less than optimally set? The most notable oopsie I've run across was in the Hartley & Marks edition of Form of the Book, page 95:

quote:
Three-to-em spacing must be used in all headings and espe-
cially in setting text. Care must be taken to make the spaces
between the words in a line optically equal, in particular
when type is being handset.

Overall the book is set in a loose "modern" style with a goodly dose of leading, but that unfortunate paragraph is made all the worse by its subject matter. The first thing I noticed on the page was the phrase "optically equal" surrounded by whitespace and lines of tighter text above and below it. I want to believe it was deliberately done this way as an ironic example, but the book has too many other issues for this to be credible. (For example, I noted a few places where widows were "avoided" by the less-than-impressive device of using a three-character hyphenation to make two lines out of one.)

Then there's the Felici book, which to my untrained eyes looks as if it was

designed to use the maximal amount of paper with the least amount of content. I

realize much, if not all of this is all about personal opinions, but I haven't seen

many books set with more spacing. Lines with sufficient decenders aren't that

bad, but other paragraphs lend an unfortunate resemblance to corn furrows.

(Not even considering that the book will date itself in five years... "Our motto is, 'From publisher to trashcan in less than a decade!'" And the wacky square page format doesn't work; who has that much room on their desk? It would make a nice seagull though--simply attach a head and a tail.)

I contrast these against, say, Morison's pamphlet First Principles of Typography, which is closely set with a sensible amount of leading, a solid workhorse font, and a comfortable page layout. It doesn't stand out as a remarkable work of typography, but to me that's precisely the point: it does its job, and does it simply and efficiently.

It is a challenge for me to swallow advice from people who produce modern books such as these. (But I certainly can't blame Tschichold for what happens in a translated edition of his work published long after his death.) Am I just confused? Hopeless?