[Sure enough, this is #armory.]
Vruba nods to all and picks up a crossbow.
Platypus: Vruba. (Said with just a tad more respect than usual.)
Vruba: Platypus, you said something about X-Chat Aqua (hereinafter XCA) being annoying about removing all them mode buttons up top. Did you find a way to do that eventually?
Platypus: No, I just decided to hate it a little.
Vruba: Goood.
Vruba: I really don't need any of the buttons it supplies me with. Text commands and menus are good enough for me.
Platypus: It's still the least sucky IRC client. With the new less-obnoxiously-large tabs it's better than Athena.
Vruba: Yeah. I do like it. It's 20% transparent right now, which it really handy; I can watch my compiles through it.
Platypus: Yeah. I'd just stick with IRSSI if it weren't for the scrollbars and paned user lists.
Platypus: Heh.
Platypus: "You know what people like to use a lot when they're on IRC? The mouse!"
Vruba: Yeah!
Vruba: And to stare at lots of letters there for no reason!
Vruba: Mm-mmm! Let's exploit peoples' reading instinct!
Platypus: It should strobe every once in a while just to keep the ol' adrenaline pumping.
Platypus: &chat; &chat; &chat; &fightorflight;! &chat; &chat;
Vruba: Heehee.
Vruba has been making those endorsement logos.
Platypus: Which, the seal of approval?
Julieclipse: "Communication turned out to be the biggest part of my job. It's really a unique situation to be in, I think I was the common link between visiting researchers (smart, PhD types), management (common sense smart but not college educated types), and trainers (talented, operate by gut reaction types). I also had to find ways to accurately explain research in a way that could be digeseted by the general public."
Julieclipse returns from a long discussion about digital media and copyright law with a coworker.
Platypus: heh.
Vruba: Fun. Who said that thing in the quote?
Vruba calls ideas "things".
Julieclipse: Wendi. Platypus and I were discussion what the job I want would involve.
Julieclipse: s/discussion/having a discussion
Julieclipse: So that's the biggest part of the job.
Julieclipse: The remainder is:
Julieclipse: "second major part included critiquing research proposals. I think you'd be great at that ... the rest was just making sure that the things that were needed for running sessions got done--making stimuli, generating data sheets, analyzing data"
Julieclipse: So that's what they mean by "research staff"
Julieclipse: The official description is "This is an entry level position and the primary job function is to support the department with on-going research projects at DRC. Duties include equipment set-up, operation and breakdown for research sessions; troubleshooting and maintenance of research equipment; data collection, analysis and preparation of summary reports and; create and/or locate props needed for research sessions."
Julieclipse: So. That's what I know. Working with disabled kids or working with dolphins would be more fortuitous than exactly what I'm supposed to do.
Julieclipse: But the dolphins are right there. Lots of them. Very accessible.
Julieclipse: RH: 1.400 cCPS, 7.6% error.
Platypus: W00t.
Vruba: (http://rheme.net/approved.tiff is a quick sample. The fuzzy antialiasing on some of them (e.g., letters looking a little too short) will be fixed in the rasterizing process. Comments invited.)
Vruba: (I couldn't make a convincing "stamp" icon. I can try again, I guess. It would really have to rely of PNG transparency to look decent.)
Julieclipse: (Swell.)
Vruba: (For hours of narcissistic frustration, try making a convincing outline of your own head.)
Julieclipse: (Bound to be a coveted token.)
Julieclipse: (Heh. Mmm.)
Platypus: ++
Vruba: (Yes ... Platty and I were saying earlier that a "seal of approval" would be great.)
Julieclipse: Indeed. Now, I'm not working here at the moment, so I must flee.
Vruba: "++"--. Which ones are best?
Vruba: Ta.
Platypus waves
Vruba: I should really work a thumbs-up in somehow.
Platypus: The speech balloons are quite swell.
Julieclipse: I like the light green one that's second from the right hand top.
Vruba: Thanks.
[Julieclipse leaves: Quit: escape! now!]
Platypus: Be sure to stick a copy of the Vruba head somewhere on rheme.
Vruba: A huge one that blinks.
Platypus: Yes. But stick with the tight-lipped smile rather than the little grin.
Vruba: Okay.
Platypus: It's got a smug-Tintin sort of thing going.
Vruba: Yes. I've been reading a lot of "Tintin" lately.
Platypus: Goood.
Vruba: [It's highly derivative|Herge is one of my influences].
Platypus: "Criterion of excellence"++
Vruba: Heehee.
Vruba: Hmm. The gray one in the center had a "Vruba attests:" or something in the empty place between title and the balloon.
Platypus would be hard-pressed to make something to rival these (which is my excuse to be lazy!)
Vruba: Bah, humbug.
Platypus: I'll at least need a digital camera handy...
Platypus: (You know, a camera-handy... camerahandies.com)
Vruba: You have the m4d talents, and Illustrator is a schweet tool. Try.
Vruba: Would it be horribly patronizing for me to give some tips on that sort of thing?
Platypus: I have yet to develop the m4d talents, and need some source material. Perhaps I can borrow your soul capturing devide for a few minutes this weekend.
Platypus: Yes, please proceed.
Vruba: Mom took it, sadly.
Vruba: Right ... especially for small stuff like that, you really want to use some kind of grid.
Vruba: I think I had a gridline every five pixels there.
Vruba: Something between four and eight is usually good.
Vruba: (It's under the main prefs -- "guides and grids" or something.)
Vruba: Toggle the display and snap-to with command+' and command+shift+'.
Vruba: When you have something oddly shaped, like a severed head, snap-to is a pain. You can also move stuff carefully with the "Transform" miniwindow.
Vruba: Anyhoo, follow the grid religiously. Make everything possible work in a multiple of whatever your unit is (e.g. 5px).
Vruba: Things look messed-up, or at least a little funny, when one of four margins is a pixel off.
Vruba: Thus, when you do depart from the grid (unavoidably, in unjustified text), try to make it obvious.
Vruba: When exporting stuff from Illustrator, I recommend rasterizing explicitly (under the Object menu), and "save for web"ing.
Vruba: For small text, it's often better to rasterize artwork-optimized (not type-optimized/hinted).
Vruba: For instance, the tops of the letters in the icon of mine Juliclipse liked will only display that way as live type and when rasterized as such.
Platypus nods
Vruba: Speaking of which, try to keep type live (i.e., as a type object) for as long as possible. The Character and Paragraph tabs can do some pretty powerful.
Vruba: Don't fool yourself into believing you can adjust bulk characters any more easily when they're objectified (command+shift+o). I tell myself that all the time, and I'm always wrong.
Vruba: s/powerful/excellent stuff, so learn 'em well./
Vruba: Get some good colors and drag them to the swatch window.
Vruba: Most fonts should have a little more letterspacing and a little less wordspacing for screen display. That goes double for all-caps.
Vruba: (Caracter and Paragraph tabs again.)
Vruba: Don't be afraid to hand-tune the kerning in tricky combinations like "LY".
Platypus: I'm not so much afraid as I don't know what constitutes "good"
Vruba: Heh. The volume of white-space should be approximately the same between adjacent letters. Most fonts will make "MM" too close, but "TA" too loose, for instance ... just go in there and tweak it until it looks right.
Vruba: As a rule of thumb, combinations that can overlap, like "LY", "Ty", "RW", etc., should do so slightly with a letterspacing ("AV" icon) of 0.
Vruba shugs. Ignore that. "Fix it if it looks wrong, and don't worry about looking good per se" about covers it.
Vruba: s/shug/shrug/ # A good advisor, I am.
Platypus suggests making a "how to not suck with Illustrator" web-compatible document some time.
Vruba: Heh. Please tell me what's helpful and what's not, and share any goodness you find or invent.
Vruba thinks. That's about all the wisdoms for now.
Vruba: I usually work at about 200% zoom, but check 100% periodically.
Vruba: The keyboard is actually really helpful. "v" is select, "a" is point-select, "m" is rectangle, "z" is zoom, etc. The toolbuttons have mouseovers.
Vruba: s/mouseovers/tooltips/
Vruba: command+click on anything switches out of any tool and into selection. When you're done editing text, save a half-second by command-clicking on blank space instead of mousing over and clicking on the arrow button.
Vruba: Wait, no, command+click only switches you to the selection tool for as long as you have command down.
Vruba: option+move duplicates, which is really handy. I think my single most productive habit (well, in Illustrator) is making lots of copies. It really speeds things up in the long run; you have fewer ten-second hammer-on-undo sessions, and you can easily compare stuff.
Vruba: command+] and [ move things up and down the z-axis; those plus shift move to the top or bottom. You can get something buried visible by area-selecting everything nearby, then shift-clicking everything visible out of the selection, and moving it up with command+shift+].
Vruba: </obvious?>
Vruba: Try holding down shift inclusive-or option while resizing something; those can be very useful.
Vruba doesn't really know either how proficient you are at Illustrator or how useful his wisdoming is.
Vruba: Questions and comments are in both our self-interests.
Platypus knows the stuff that's ~common to Illustrator and Photoshop. Constraints on selection/resizing, etc. I picked up the duplicate thing watching you work on the Jennings account.
Platypus: Point editing continues to escape me. I'd really like to draw arbitrary curves with the tablet without needing to produce a closed shape, but I can't find a good way to do it.
Vruba: The pencil tool, "n".
Platypus: Hmm... closer, but the pencil tool still wants to close my shapes.
Vruba: The pencil tool's options can be quite useful. By default, if you draw a pencil-line over any selected line, it tries to do what you say. You can smooth curves by holding down option in the pencil tool, and edit the curve directly with the "a" or "p" tool (drag on the tool sto rip their variation miniwindows off).
Platypus: I can get a simple line by choosing a black stroke and a blank fill, but that seems kind of kludgy.
Vruba: Nope, that's the way. Blank, not just white.
Platypus: Yeah, that's what I'm doing. That's acceptable, eh?
Vruba: (White + red stripe = blank.)
Vruba: Yeah.
Vruba shrugs. A line with no fill is a proper line.
Platypus nods.
Platypus: Okay, so if I draw a curve, then try to draw another curve where that one left off, it erases the first one...
Vruba: Deselect it or mess with the tool's settings (double-click its button).
Platypus: Fair enough.
Vruba: Illustrator treats all objects (except placed images) as splines. There's no difference between a pencil line or a circle or a rectangle; the drawing tools are all basically just the pen tool with adjusted settings. Open or closed doesn't really matter. A rectangle with no fill is just as valid as a rectangle with a color (or gradient or either and transparent) fill, so a line is the same way.
Platypus nods
Vruba: One thing that frustrates me is that you can't ask the stroke the be on the inside or outside of closed objects. I realize it raises some topological problems for things like figure-eights, but I wish they'd fake it somehow. As it is, a 40*40 rectangle with a 2pt stroke rasterizes to 42*42, and that's annoying.
Platypus nods
Vruba: I recommend making all documents RGB by default, and getting used to adjusting colors with the RGB sliders.
Vruba: HSB can be enlightening sometimes, especially if you want to, say, make a color darker without disturbing the hue.
Vruba: Almost all numeric input boxes accept simple math, so you could tell each RGB value to whatever it was *.8, for instance, but hey.
Vruba: s/tell/set/
Platypus: Sweet.
Vruba: Yeah, that's really handy for resizing stuff.
Vruba: (Switch color models with the little droplet-arrow menu in the top right of the color miniwindow. Those menus all have goodies.)
Vruba: If you're doing freehand stuff, it may look nicer with the stroke caps rounded -- there are little icon buttons for that in the top right of the stroke tab.
Platypus nods
Vruba: Oh, and it can be really handy to make a big rectangle as a a background and then lock it -- command+2. Command+option+2 unlocks everything. It's also nice if you're concentrating on one thing and want select-all to be useful.
Vruba: Lock = can't be selected.
[julieclipse joins #armory]
Platypus: julieclipse.
julieclipse: Platypus.
Vruba: julieclipse.
julieclipse: Vruba.
Vruba: I've just been patronizing Platypus with pseudo-wisdom about Adobe Illustrator. Want some pseudo-wisdom about typography?
Platypus thinks of it more as "~wisdoms".
Vruba is flattered.
Platypus: I think you mean "~flattered."
Vruba: ~Yes.
Platypus is going to be rude until he gets a "Vruba-approved" image for something he's done.
Vruba: There aren't even any yet. Soon, soon.
julieclipse: Yes, I would like such wisdoms.
julieclipse smirks.
Vruba: Right ... is there some particular wisdom-zone you'd like to visit, or would a tour be more ... uh ... salubrious?
Platypus scrounges enough loose change for coffee, and departs to read the last essay in latest reprint of "True Names". So long, suckers. Winter, you stay here and absorb Vruba's typography wisdoms for me.
Platypus: s/latest/the latest/
julieclipse: A tour would be good. I've learnt random bits and pieces that don't form much of a cohesive, practicable whole. Summarize for me whilest I file things.
julieclipse: (Yeah, we're an absent audiance, but a loyal one ...)
Vruba: Comin' up.
Platypus: You'll get thoughtful but out of context questions over the next few days.
Vruba: Yay!
Platypus: Yeah, it'll be great.
Vruba: Right. A-wun, a-too, a-three....
Vruba: Typography is not printing, bookbinding, or calligraphy.
Platypus is away: My freedoms are in danger, you say? Tell me more, RMS!
Vruba: Heh.
Vruba: People assume I hate their handwriting because I "know so much" about typography. Not so, for two reasons.
Vruba: 1. Calligraphy and graphology are pure art. Typography is also engineering. "Typo" is from a Greek word that means, among other things, "footprint". Typography is at least pseudo-mechanical. It works with type, which is discrete and mass-produced.
Vruba: 2. Typography is mostly descriptive, not proscriptive. On the other hand, linguists tend to use good grammar.
julieclipse grins fondly re: social linguistics.
Vruba: Some things are 'good' typography and others are 'bad' typography, but again its like language. Is "I be hungry" simply a bad version of The One True Posh London English, or is it a valid Black dialect?
julieclipse: The latter, of course.</liberalcollegestudent>
julieclipse: But what little typography I've encountered has had some pretty serious human factors research underpinings.
Vruba nods.
julieclipse: "Do it this way, because this way works, because ..."
julieclipse: Which never really comes up in structure of spoken language ... it doesn't need to, language IS human factor, no extra work.
Vruba: But you'll hear people argue that various dialects and simplifying trends in English (like not declining "be" in the first person) are unclear.
julieclipse: It does come up in written language structure.
julieclipse: That doesn't hold up experimentally.
julieclipse: experimentally or observationally, as the case may be.
Vruba: Well ... individual languages are learned. "Clear" for one person is not the same as for another person.
julieclipse: Well, sure, but a language is for those who speak it.
Vruba: Quite, quite.
julieclipse: And ultimately, they all worked equally well, despite enormous efforts at certain points in recent history to find evidence to the contrary.
Vruba: Unfortunately, with typography, you never know who's going to read it. You can't handshake (in the protocol sense), like you can in conversation.
Vruba nods.
julieclipse: Right. So, as in written language structure, some rules make sense.
Vruba: For these and various other reasons, legibility studies are imprecise and not to be trusted entirely.
julieclipse: (Make sense EVEN when they're pretty dumb solutions, like English spelling.)
Vruba: (Well, yes.)
Vruba: For one thing, legibility is usually measured in the rather unintelligent sense of recognizing individual letters. This is how sans fonts got so popular in the 30s. The absolutely most legible typography is often really ugly, which makes it less legible in the long term.
Vruba: Warning signs, nutrition-information labels, and books are working in different contexts. There is no one legibility.
julieclipse nods.
Vruba: I stress this because many people never get (what I my smug way call) past the "more clear equals more good, period" phase. Looking beyond the idea of legibility will often do it better service than harping on it.
Vruba: s/I my/I in my/ # sweet irony
Vruba: It's obvious to everyone that typography should be clear, if not entirely invisible. It's not so obvious that it can go too far in the opposite direction.
Vruba: Setting something (i.e., "typographying it", from "setting type") is kind of like reading someone else's poetry to an audience. Speaking in a monotone for "clarity" is a little short-sighted.
julieclipse nods.
julieclipse: Form along with function.
julieclipse: Surely everyone really loves some less legible ... uh ... sets.
Vruba: Right. You really can't make form go away, so you may as well acknowledge it.
Vruba: Heehee. Yes.
julieclipse: (Mmmmm. A lot of my poetry loses quality if it's not monospaced.)
Vruba: Form v. function is kinda like analog v. digital ... my digital computer is made of analog parts made of discrete atoms in analog relationships ... it's not productive to try to eliminate one side of the equation.
julieclipse is amused to learn that the "K" in Julie K. Morris stands for "Kay."
Vruba: (Questions of interpretive philosophy are discussed in Leonard Cohen's "How to Speak Poetry" -- http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=604426)
Vruba: Like Homer!
julieclipse: Yep. :)
Vruba: So anyhoo, typography is all about glyphs.
Vruba: Glyphs are renderings of characters.
Vruba: Characters are letters-and-then-some.
Vruba: Letters are addressed with a keyboard.
Vruba: You know this, but I want to establish some kind of continuity.
Vruba: The business of typography is thoroughly abstracted from typing.
julieclipse: (Mmm, Leonard Cohen. That is a lovely essay, but sad; it is not in my nature to accept it.)
Vruba: (I suspect there are a couple layers to that one. I'd like to hear him speak it.)
julieclipse smiles at the term "glyph."
Vruba nods. Lots of confusing and conflicting definitions here.
Vruba: In this sense, a gyph is just a shape.
Vruba: A character is what actually gets transmitted; a glyph is what gets rendered.
Vruba: For instance, some fonts have a "final z" with a long swirly tail. If a "z" character ends a word, it uses the "final z" glyph; otherwise a default glyph. There are at least as many glyphs as characters.
julieclipse nods.
Vruba stalls.
Vruba: Hmm.
Vruba: Right. Proportion.
julieclipse prods. "Yeah, c'mon, get to the good stuff."
Vruba: Have you heard of the golden section?
julieclipse: Yes!
Vruba: Good.
Vruba: As you know, it's inherent in zillions of mathematical and natural systems, and can be proven to be pleasing to the eye.
Vruba: It's its own reciprocal, and the most irrational number; phylotactic systems use it to avoid overlaps. It can be derived from the square, the Fibonacci series, and abot anything else.
Vruba: There are two major proportions in typography: 1:1 and 1:phi, where phi is 1.618....
Vruba: If you set the margins on a letter-size paper to 1in top and 1.44in sides, the text will form a golden rectangle.
julieclipse smiles.
Vruba: You'll notice that a lot of books are 5*8in, etc.
Vruba: There are various other "good" proportions, but you know 'em when you make 'em.
julieclipse: A while ago I stumbled upon that standard paper sizes are intentionally such that half a sheet is proportional to a whole sheet (etc.) ... with some rounding for standard/metric whole numbers.
Vruba nods. The Euro A system of paper has a proportion of 1:sqrt(2), or 1:1.4142..., so folding them in half leaves the proportion.
Vruba: A4 just means an industrial-sized sheet folded (or cut in half) 4 times.
Vruba: Any rectangle self-1-harmonizes on alternate cross-folds (which is just another way of saying that, obviously, if you fold a sheet of paper in half either way, the four rectangles will be exact quarters).
julieclipse: These are comforting thoughts when one is utterly surrounded by varied slips of paper covered in text.
Vruba: Heh.
Vruba: Right. The size of the page and the textbox are the first things to worry about. Next comes leading.
julieclipse: And one is supposed to arrange the slips into a sensible arrangement, which they are currently not anywhere near. I'll remember that if I look at them more closely or from a bit of a distance, a lot of sensible-making has already been done by others long since.
Vruba: "Leading" is the space between lines. It's pronounced "ledding", from when strips of lead spaced lines of type.
Vruba is glad he is not you.
julieclipse files, 'listens' ...
julieclipse is glad she is herself, so it all works out.
Vruba: The size of a font means little. There's really no standard about what "12pt" means, for instance. Leading, however, is easily measured: just go from the bottom of one line to the bottom of the next line.
Vruba: Oops. "pt" = "points", or 1/72in; "pc" = "pica", or 12pt.
Vruba: (It used to be 1pt = 1/72.01823482743837434in or something, but Adobe said "This is fuckingly evil; from now on a point is a pixel and send all complains to our lawyers". Adobe++.)
Vruba: In general, lead a font with 1.1 to 1.4 times its point size. For instance, 12pt with 14pt. This might be called "12 on 14" or "12pt/14pt" or whatever.
Vruba: Word processors do that automatically, and to some extent modern fonts can supply a preferred leading.
Vruba is kinda wishing he'd sketched out a lesson-plan.
Vruba: The space between words is called -- cryptically -- the word-space.
Vruba: It should be about the same as the width of an "i", in general.
Vruba: Too much word-spacing gives a page "rivers", or white lines that run vertically across lines.
Vruba: Rivers are often caused by software trying to avoid hyphenating by prying words apart.
Vruba: Smart software (a) isn't afraid of hyphenating and (b) will decrease word-spacing as well as increase it -- both within reasonable limits.
Vruba: Justifying text is usually foolish. Ideally (in my opinion), all text would be ragged-right, flush-left (a.k.a. left-justified) and not hyphenated at all except on hyphens already present.
Vruba: Justifying text makes pages superficially more clean-looking, but at the expense of even spacing while you're actually reading it.
Vruba: (Oh, and it makes it easier to loose your place.)
Vruba: Er ... I take back that "Ideally". Everywhere except books.
Vruba: Books have longer lines, which makes it easier to tuck a little here and stretch a little there. Really good justification algorithms can do incredible things with 80-character lines.
Vruba: The ideal line is a matter of some dispute, but 50-80 characters is the zone of not-suck for text of reasonable length.
Vruba: Obviously, some things make more sense with only a couple words a line -- for instance, marginal notes.
Vruba: Poetry is of course a special case. It's usually centered on the longest line, which sound like a bit of a kludge but usually works really well.
julieclipse: Huh. I didn't know that.
julieclipse peers at a photocopy of a journal article with justified text.
julieclipse: Mmm, APA style.
Vruba: I can see a journal justifying. It's things like justified letters that give me the subliminal heebie-jeebies.
Vruba: That's why books of poetry usually have especially opaque pages: otherwise, the show-through would be horribly distracting.
julieclipse: Yeah, this is easy to read, except it was reduced in photocopying slightly to fit two pages onto one 8.5x11.
Vruba: Yeah.
Vruba: One sign of the idiocy of justifying things like memos it that they take up exactly the same amount of vertical space either way (with consumer-grade hyphenating algorithms) -- it's just yanking the right ends out and stapling them down for no reason.
julieclipse hangs her head in shame. "I'm one of those (many, many) people who writes poetry without actually reading a lot of it."
Vruba would be snooty except he's only read one book of poetry all summer, plus yours & one or few odd ones in magazines etc.
julieclipse smirks a little.
julieclipse: What about newspapers and newsletters? They justify a lot. All those neat columns.
Vruba: One of the symptoms of a well-designed book is that if you hold a page up to the light, the show-through will still be fine, because the lines back each other up; they fall on the same places measured absolutely from the page-edge.
Vruba: Close columns are often justified to keep the columns clear. That sort of thing depends a lot on the font.
Vruba: ... which we'll get to in a bit.
julieclipse obligingly holds up some book pages to the overhead lights.
Vruba: Of course, that's partly the responsibility of the printer.
Vruba: But it does effect the quality of the book for the reader. Little articulate-looking ghosts between the lines are a pain.
Vruba: s/effect/affect/ # Augh! Hara-kiri!
Vruba: However, insofar as it's the responsibility of the typographer, it shows that they were sticking to their leading.
Vruba: Poorly set books ("books" hereinafter means "bound publications of a reasonably book-like nature") will leave the leading after paragraph breaks or block quotes, and stay off for the rest of the page.
Vruba: That causes all sorts of ugly -- for instance, the lines won't line up across the page.
Vruba: (Once again, it also relies on good printing and binding.)
Vruba: A reasonable solution to block quote woes is to set them, say, 10 on 11 and vertically centered in the smallest gap in the main text that leaves at least one lead of the main setting on both the top and the bottom.
Vruba: Don't bother trying to parse that; it's pretty reasonable.
Vruba: As for paragraphs, the one true way of paragraphing in printed text is to indent. Leaving the leading is barbaric.
julieclipse goes through the ESP bookshelf and finds examples of good and bad.
Vruba: Unfortunately, HTML 1.0 (as such) didn't provide for such a thing as a tab, and the first browser didn't interpret <p> that way, so we were boned until CSS came along, but hey.
julieclipse parses it.
julieclipse: Yeah, that sucked.
julieclipse: I ignored it except I ... well, for the fiction, I added space characters because it just made me too unhappy otherwise.
Vruba: (Skipping a line is actually not an entirely evil method if the line could be 200 characters long, like most pages render by default, but ... well, it's a tricky situation. For now, we're just talking about print design.)
Vruba nods.
julieclipse: What about skipping a line in print?
Vruba: Bad. Use it for section breaks, but not for paragraph breaks.
Vruba: This is one of those shibboleths, like "whom", "shall", "alright", and the subjunctive case. It's changing quickly, for various reasons. I'm siding with tradition on this one.
Vruba: I invite you to form your own opinion after experimentation, but I'm committed to line-break plus indent.
julieclipse nods.
Vruba: Two more units of space: the en is taken from (the width of) the letter "n", and is half the point size of the font. The em is twice that, or approximately the width of the "m" and exactly the point size.
Vruba: The two popular indent for paragraphs are an em or the leading. 10/12 text might be indented 10pt or 12pt.
julieclipse: Hm!
Vruba once had a fifteen-minute discussion with Box-Of-Rain once explaining that en and em are relative (to the point size), not absolute like points.
Vruba: More of an indent is wise for long lines, but that should never come up, right? ;-)
Vruba: Presumably, despite your generally liberal attitude toward language, there are certain usages in certain situations which kind of tick you off. Adding extra leading to paragraph breaks is like that for (most) typographers.
Vruba: It does serve to differentiate the paragraph, but it's a slap in the face of the leading. It's like a beat (or rather a rest) in a song that goes on for just a little too long.
Vruba: A proper page has a comfortable rhythm, and an indent is enough -- especially because it will almost always come after a noticeable blank on the right.
Vruba: Oop.
Vruba is away: Makin' a smoothie for the siblings.
[You have been marked as being away]
julieclipse: Mmm, smoothie.
julieclipse: I have a sense that I've frequently seen more indentation than that (em/leading).
julieclipse: Which is somewhat borne out by a quick sampling of books from this bookcase.
julieclipse: This book has many section breaks with headings set in larger type than the text, but after the section heading the text is right back into the normal leading.
Vruba is back (gone 00:32:37)
[You are no longer marked as being away]
Vruba nods.
Vruba: My preference if for an indent of a lead, just because it's nice to stick to a unit, but I'm not opposed to an em or two ems.
Vruba: Weird paragraphing can be annoying, but it can also be just a harmless symptom of crude thinking.
Platypus is back (gone 02:11:13)
julieclipse: Platypus.
julieclipse finds an unusually thick bit of spiderweb, very much sans spider.
julieclipse twists it into about three inches of thread.
Vruba: Text, textile, and texture are the same word. I espouse that text should share the other words' connotation of continuity and self-marking. A good font teated well is the right amount of interesting; pulling it into justification and then trying to make up for the monotony with overzealous paragraph and section marking seems foul. It's like taking sugar, getting the molasses out of it, adding it back in, and calling it more natural.
julieclipse: Mmmm. Elastic.
julieclipse grins.
Platypus: julieclipse.
julieclipse: Textiles I know.
Vruba: Text is already full of meaning. You don't have to worry about adding it.
Vruba nods.
Vruba: Platypus.
Platypus: Vruba.
Platypus thoroughly digs the backlog.
Vruba: Right ... where are we now? Let's say punctuation.
julieclipse: Punctuation!
[wheel joins #armory]
Vruba: The standard punctuation is !?&*()[]{}-/:;,. plus dagger, double dagger, pilcrow (paragraph marker), and two each double and single quotes.
julieclipse: Hey dude.
wheel gathers HVARs and flame pistols.
Vruba: wheel.
Platypus hopes Vruba gets around to the one true ellipsis there.
Platypus: wheel.
wheel: Yo.
Vruba slaps his forehead -- ellipsis too.
julieclipse: em-dash isn't standard?
Vruba slaps his forehead again -- that's why he brought this up -- em and en dashes too.
Vruba: I'm glad you two are here or I'd never teach you anything.
julieclipse giggles.
[wheel leaves: Quit: leaving]
[Wheel joins #armory]
Vruba: Terminology: {braces}, [brackets], (parentheses). Braces are rarely used. Brackets are for editorial insertions -- you should only use them when quoting someone. Parens are, you know, parens.
[Wheel leaves #armory]
Vruba knows he's covering known ground, but you can't top him!
julieclipse will finally have to break the habit of calling braces "set brackets" ...
Vruba: Heh. They're so rare in English typography that there are tens of names for them. In retrospect, they aren't really "standard".
Vruba: But as for dashes. En dashes are for ranges, and can be emulated with hyphens: "13th-14th". They're also a superhyphen in the way semicolons are supercommas: if you want to hyphenate an already-hyphenated phrase, use an en dash for the looser bond: "I like kippered-herring–breathed men".
Vruba: (– is it's character entity, of course (it's aliased to – or –).)
Vruba: Em dashes are used for cut-offs, like "I never eat cantalo--", and can be emulated with double hyphens.
Vruba: (Hyphens, of course, are for compound words, adverbial phrases like "razor-backed", and splitting across lines.)
Vruba: (The "minus" character may be either hyphen, en dash, or its own character.)
Vruba: Now, the sentence dash, for parenthesis and caesura as in "I love -- love! -- ice cream" or "I'm a fiend -- an ice cream fiend" can be either en or em.
Vruba: "The Chicago Manual of Style" and most other Victorian-typography-based authorities say to use an em dash with no space.
Vruba: "The Elements of Typographic Style" and most other Neu-Typography-based authorities prefer an en dash with spaces.
Vruba: (Either way, it's longer than, and usually thinner than, a hyphen. They should never have been confused, but that's ASCII for you.)
Platypus: And Vruba prefers an em dash with spaces?
Vruba: Well. There's a tricky one.
Vruba: Theoretically, as a typographer of the Jan Tschichold rather than the Stanley Morrison dharma, I should prefer en dashes, spaced.
Vruba: However, most fonts' en dashes are a little on the short side, and I can't bear to look like I'm using a hyphen.
Vruba: On the third hand, em dashes without spaces irk me. They make my "how text works" model itch.
julieclipse: So basically you're overcompensating?
Vruba: You might say that, but I prefer to rationalize it, thankyouverymuch.
Vruba: So I generally use the em dash character spaced, and tell myself I'm using an en dash spaced but most fonts' dashes are too short.
Vruba: s/generally/digitally/
Platypus nods.
Vruba: In print, en dashes are usually enough, especially because I use good fonts.
julieclipse nods.
julieclipse: I've gotta head home.
Vruba: So long.
julieclipse hugs Vruba impulsively.
Vruba hugs back less impulsively.
julieclipse snugs Platypus more predictably.
[julieclipse leaves: Quit: And then she bikes into the night.]
Vruba: That's my ugliest habitual hack, really -- I've relied on it for a while now, and this is the first time I've revealed it as such. I'm sure people've wondered about it before, but no one's called me on it.
Platypus is little more than habit! :D
Platypus: There's been some talk, yes. We don't hold it against you.
Vruba: My brain-to-spinal-cord signal consists of little more than "&instinct;&instinct;&instinct;&instinct;&instinct;&instinct;".
Vruba: It usually renders pretty well.
Vruba: And it's semantically correct, so hey.
Vruba 's body is like his CSS.
Platypus: Goood.
Platypus: Hmm. From the sounds issuing from the kitchen, I gather that we are now in possession of salsa that is too hot even for my father. This warrants investigation. Back shortly.
Platypus: (Keep teachifyin')
Vruba teachifies!
Vruba: Tell it, Vruba!
Vruba: Right ... ellipsis.
Vruba may be unannouncedly away to help his father with the PC.
Vruba: "Ellipsis" is Greek for "an omission", or "something disappeared", and is related to "eclipse".
Vruba: The idea originally was to mark where something was left out of a quote, either in literary use where something was clipped for clarity, or in reported speech to indicate that there was some action (i.e., thought) taking place not conventionally renderable in text.
Vruba grammars himself up a tree.
Vruba: Jan Tschichold had a great little essay about how bad it was to use them in one's own nonquoted writing.
Vruba: His point was essentially that it's something like putting "It's my opinion that" in front of everything. The point of text is that you don't have to sit through the other person's thought-pauses, and that we have plenty of more meaningful punctuation around.
Platypus eats a burrito, tears of "joy" streaming down his face
Platypus nods. I try fairly hard to keep 'em out of persistent texty things, but IRC is supposed to be rather more speech-like that most.
Platypus: I suppose they should stay out of technical discussions, even on IRC. I'd argue that they're a more elegant ~emotional flag than most of the standard "chat" tricks. Compare:
Platypus: <Box-of-nerek> I hate you and always have.
Platypus: <Shadredridel> ...
Platypus: vs.
Platypus: <Box-of-nerek> I hate you and always have.
Platypus: <Shadredridel> :/
Platypus rapidly goes nowhere with this. Shuts up.
Vruba returns from attempting to explain tabbed browsing to a 48(?)-year-old.
Vruba: Right, right. I should have explicitly declared it, but I'm mostly talking about persistent text things here.
Platypus: Score!
Vruba has been using plenty of ellipses lately.
Platypus: So I gathered. I simply enjoy getting all defensive.
Vruba: Good!
Vruba: More interesting than usage debates is ... uh ... other usage debates. How are them dots to be spaced?
Vruba: Various texts will try "a...b", "a. . .b", "a . . . b", and "a ... b". Keep in mind that there are more spaces than the space character; my examples reflect letter-spacing more than word-spacing.
Vruba: I prefer "a ... b", and "a.... B" to end sentences.
Vruba: It's its own character on the Mac (option+;) and in Unicode, as you know.
Vruba: My rule of thumb is not to end sentences with ellipses unless I have a really good reason. This is just pathetic; it's a transparent ploy to be evocative instead of actually doing to work of making my writing evocative....
Platypus is aware.
Vruba: Anything besides fonts I haven't covered?
Vruba: (If I ever adapt this log into a page of some kind, remind me to explain proper punctuation around parens.)
Vruba is away: Teachifyin' the elder.
[You have been marked as being away]
Vruba: I'm not sure if there's a four-dot horizontal ellipsis in Unicode. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
[You are no longer marked as being away]
Vruba: Fonts.
Vruba: There are three dimensions to an alphabet: serifedness, boldness, and italicness.
Vruba: Boldness is irrelevant to good typography except when you're making lists or tables. I hereby dismiss it.
Vruba: I subscribe to a pseudo-renaissance model of typography. In those days, a designer would use one font if possible, or two if the text needed it.
Vruba: They would be contrasting, of course: one rather formal, the other more like handwriting.
Vruba: Dream sequences or introductions might be in the more fluid one, and the main text in the formal one.
Vruba: "Formal" is a goodish thing in this case; it means something like "more comfortable for long reading".
Vruba: However, the two fonts were essentially partners. Either of them might be used alone for a whole book.
Vruba: Slowly, font-cutters began to issue pairs of fonts, with one "roman" and one "italic" (quite the contrasting names).
Vruba: Since the italic was used less, it was considered the subsidiary, and less appreciated.
Vruba: There was a particularly ugly trend among the Victorians (who are the villains of many typographical stories) to explicitly identify the italic with femininity. Girls were taught to write with lots and lots of emphasis, and boys to avoid it.
Vruba: The italic was relegated to a frilly appendage of the "real font", and things were ugly.
Vruba: Now (good) fonts are released with good italics, and the forest is happy again.
Platypus: (Miyazakying it up a bit there?)
Vruba: No; I was speaking literally.
Platypus: Oh, right. Sorry.
Vruba: The events aren't connected. It was just a single sentence that happened to contain one statement about Adobe Systems, Inc. (and certain other content providers), and one about the emotional state of sylvan environments.
Platypus: Yes, I misunderstood. You can stop rubbing it in.
Vruba: Well, actually, on second thought, I was Miyazakying it up a bit.
Platypus: I was going to say "++", but now you've lost my endorsement.
Vruba: (Where's the meaning now? Under this cup? Or /this/ one?)
Vruba: Curses!
Vruba: Anyhoo, I guess my point was that ideally fonts can both mix with other fonts, but come in complete sets.
Vruba: s/both// # A remnant of an abandoned sentence structure.
Vruba: In the Renaissance, polyglot geniuses would publish books that had three or four fonts by necessity, because they were, say, Italian commentaries on a Frenchman's translation of something from Greek to Latin.
Vruba: Still, only one size of each font would be used.
Platypus nods
Vruba is disorganized. ("Where was I going with this?")
Platypus: You were telling me about the time you beat jury duty.
Vruba: Oh yeah! The secret is to say you're prejudiced against all races.
Vruba: Eventually it was decided that each font would handle only one alphabet, but have both a roman and italic.
Vruba: It would behoove the reader to remember that it could have gone the other way -- which it has now, in Unicode.
Vruba: You need two complete versions of the character set to have a Unicode roman and italic. Most fonts give up, especially because only Latin, Cyrillic, and a few others (actually, I'm just hedging; I don't know about any others) even have the concept of an italic.
Vruba: (Or indeed any kind of pervasive variation for emphasis other than perhaps bold.)
Vruba: And how do they give up? Well, they just slope. Never mind that sloping has nothing to do with the actual definition of italic.
Vruba: That rather ticks me off.
Vruba: I can't blame them, but hey.
Platypus: Sure you can.
Vruba: Hey, thanks!
Vruba blames them.
Vruba: Actually, ATSUI may have some kind of layering such that the Roman (etc.) planes can have italic variants without waste.
Vruba: Sans fonts appeared around 1880 in advertising.
Vruba: The modernists in the 1920s loved 'em. They fit in with the minimalist philosophy.
Vruba is away: Arrgh.
[You have been marked as being away]
Vruba is back (gone 00:04:34)
[You are no longer marked as being away]
Vruba: The most rational of the modernists, Jan Tschichold (yes, he's a hero of mine -- shut up) eventually recanted and said typographical modernism was profoundly dehumanizing.
Vruba: That was its aim at the time: to take full advantage of "The Machine" and "efficiency", and discard notions of man-as-the-measure.
Vruba: After the Second World War, Tschichold pointed out that reading was not a field in which it was desirable to attempt to imitate robots, and in later life was a kickass humanist.
Vruba shrugs.
Vruba: Modernism had a number of valid points, and it did establish a tabula rasa after the Victorians fouled everything up.
Vruba: Rather like the "Revolution" rhetoric of the 1960s was profoundly wrongheaded, but helped slap some sense into the conformity and hypocrisy of the post-WWII boom. (Well, that's the Standard Interpretation, and it makes a good analogy.)
Platypus nods
Vruba: Minimalism is good. Sub-minimalism is not good. (Tschichold actually went so far as to compare the Modernist mania for order to the Nazi ditto, which is rather extreme. He did live through both of them.)
Vruba: At http://rheme.net/font-samples you will find samples of some fine, fine fontage.
Vruba: I've given the name (the one I called Baskerville is actually called Mrs Eaves, but it's a better Baskerville than the font of that name), and some extra characters I favor for speccing fonts. Those with italics have 'em.
Vruba: Uh, right, sans vs serif.
Vruba: Herman Zapf designed both Palatino and Optima, which are as close as any two fonts of the same family.
Vruba: The distinct thing about sans fonts is that they have unmodulated strokes. That implies being serifless, but it's even more general.
Vruba: Then again, it's not necessarily true. Lots of sans fonts have things which could be called serifs, and Optima there is quite modulated.
Vruba: Er, "modulation" in this sense means the thickness of the stroke. Usually it's on an axis of perhaps 15 degrees, because that's how right-handed scribes held pens.
Vruba: It's often said that serifs are leftovers from when all letters were hand-written, but that's extremely misleading. Of all those fonts, only the Jenson and Palatino italics approximate any reasonable handwriting.
Vruba: Serifs are not leftovers of anything today; they're just serifs. We do it that way because that's the way it's done.
Vruba: (Any more than "A" is a leftover from a picture of a ox because the Phonecian aleph was.)
Vruba: (History++, but you gotta take your glyphs as they are. Trying to denounce things as "illegitimate" is not as productive and constructively re-evaluating stuff.)
Vruba: I estimated not long ago that I'd read several tens of million words, and perhaps a hundred million characters. There's actually some validity in the "because it's always been this way" argument. See the above conversation about linguistic description vs proscription.
Vruba: One of the ~functions of serifs now is to bind words together. Good readers read familiar words by outline more than letter-by-letter, and serifed fonts help keep words words.
Vruba: Look at Helvetica: the "a", for instance, it turned in on itself. The "e" is barely open. The letters were designed individually, and they don't set into words easily.
Vruba: Helvetica might be a good font for beginning readers or labels, but it would drive a fluent reader nuts after about a paragraph.
Vruba: One of the finest burst-reading fonts (i.e., what Helvetica is trying for, or at least does best) is Interstate, the well-known road-sign font. (Imagine it reading "Seattle" or "Elm St.".)
Vruba: Note that its letters point at each other, and the curves flow into one another. Helvetica was mostly made out of near-circles and right angles.
Vruba: Simplicity is not clarity. Interstate's "p" has that sharp leg; I think that approaches brilliance. It pulls the eye toward the center of the line, correcting for errors and keeping things moving. The Helvetica "p" just draws a flat line across the gaze's path.
Vruba: That "p" is modulation, in a sense, and makes Interstate a more "hand" font than Helvetica. I'm sure that would make both their designers happy.
Vruba: Similarly, in Syntax and Verdana, two of my favorite sanses, the letters are open to each other.
Vruba: One place I can wholly support the use of Helvetica in in cement. There's something delicately brutal about a company's name cast in cement.
Platypus nods thoughtfully
Vruba: (Oh, by the way, everything there is in 60/72.)
Vruba: Now my arm is tired and I'm going to go downstairs and grab some potato chips, so ask some questions.
Platypus consults images.google.com to convince himself that interstate signs actually have the sharp "p". Well I'll be.
Platypus is lame and has no questions. Expresses vaguely defined satisfaction that the typography lesson is taking place in the "armory".
Vruba nods.
Vruba: But you must promise never to use this knowledge except in the pursuit of justice.
Vruba: If it were to fall into the wrong hands....
Platypus: Do I get to use my own definition in determining what is "just"?
Vruba thinks.
Vruba: No. My definition.
Vruba: Which is "what benefits Charlie the most".
Vruba: Thanks for asking. I would have forgotten.
Vruba: Moving right along.
Platypus: Curses.
Vruba: Verdana and Galliard are by the same designer.
Vruba: "The New Yorker" is in Caslon.
Platypus: "Yep, I'll just turn in this paper in triple-spaced 14pt MS Comic Sans. But wait ... am I doing right by Charlie?"
Vruba nods. That's the spirit.
Vruba: If you're extra-good, I'll let you define justice for a while.
Platypus actually finds long bouts of the New Yorker slightly exhausting to read, but likes the way it looks from a few feet back.
Vruba: I suspect that's the narrow columns more than the font, but I dunno.
Platypus nods.
Vruba: Caslon is famous for being kinda clunky and kinda funny-lookin' but strangely versatile and hard to mess up. G. B. Shaw instructed that it be used for all his books, and Benjamin Franklin popularized it in the US.
[Missmarple joins #armory]
Vruba: I think "The Audubon Magazine" is in it too, but I may be thinking of the Nature Conservancy mag.
Vruba: Missmarple.
Missmarple greets all of good will
Vruba has been holding forth on typography for the edification of Platypus and julieclipse (when she gets sent the log, I guess).
Platypus: Missmarple.
Vruba: Ooo, my family is watching "Casablanca". I may check out briefly to watch Peter Lorre.
Platypus: (Yes, she stopped back for a few minutes before sleeping and specifically requested it.)
Vruba: That shows wisdom on her part. I'm proud on her behalf.
Missmarple envisions a future tome entitled "The Log Files: How the Revolution Started"
Vruba is going to be very sure he gets to help edit that.
Vruba: Oh, and note that the hypothetical "make this roman italic" transform can sometimes cause nonintuitive weirdness. Open a word processor (or Illustrator) and type "uv" in Palatino at some huge size, then copy that to the next line and italicize it.
Vruba steeples his fingers.
Missmarple remarks, apropos of nothing, that she is starting to hate small children...also, large children...and, in particular, disturbed fifteen year old boys...
Vruba: If I don't miss my guess, the italic "u" will actually be sharper than the italic "v". And yet you'll find that's never ambiguous when you're actually reading.
Vruba: </stupidtypographytrick>
Missmarple: I do not possess this Palatino whereof you speak. Alack!
Vruba tsk-tsks.
Vruba: "Palatio" or whatever the Windows pseudo-version is should work.
Vruba: The point of this exercise is simply to demonstrate that your eyes don't always agree with your intuition as to what makes a letter distinctive. In this case, the stem of the "u" and the first serif of the "v" are much more important than the obvious "round" and "pointy".
Vruba: The implications regarding the readability of sans fonts are, I hope, obvious.
Vruba yawns at himself. So tiresome. Let's play "Hungry Hungry Hippos".
Missmarple makes thoughtful noises
Vruba: Next to discuss (noted here so as to be in the log): when to italicize, the relation of the upper to the lower case, and quoting.