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This is an interesting topic and glad to see someone experimenting. I spent some time on code typography a few years ago and wish I could have spent more time o
by asolove 11y ago
This is an interesting topic and glad to see someone experimenting. I spent some time on code typography a few years ago and wish I could have spent more time on it. I like a lot of these ideas and hope we will see both structured editing and structure-informed reading be more popular.
That said: this project could benefit from working with an actual typographer. Even people who agree with the principles of these ideas will likely revolt at the examples shown and think it's because the ideas are bad.
There is tons of purely optical tuning that could be done to make the snippets look better. The leading needs to be increased if the horizontal spaces are going to be so wide. The parenthesis should be centered around lowercase letters, kerned more loosely, and made thinner at the curves. Many of the operators and special characters could also benefit from a programming-specific take. Typographic detail might also suggest other opportunities: for example, spaces between items in a list might be made wider than those of sub expressions within each item.
In my work I started by laying out the results I wanted in TeX, giving tons of power over small typographical details, and it paid off. Even though some of the ideas were duds, the presentation was aesthetically pleasing enoug that many people were willing to try it.
- ansgri 11y agoCan you show your work? Advanced LaTeX code typography is a very interesting topic, especially for writing programming textbooks.
- mgr86 11y agoI'm geuninely curious, is this how these books are typeset? I was at a conference a few years back and one of my favorite presentations was a guy from O'Riely. Up to that point most of their works were converted from docbook with XSLT to pdf,epub, or html. He had been working on HTMLBook[1] to write books in asciidoc, convert to (x)HTML5 and the conversions were written in CSS and used an antenna house processor. It was an XML conference, so all things latex was a bit taboo. But in general, we handle a lot of XML in publishing. [1] : https://github.com/oreillymedia/HTMLBook https://github.com/oreillymedia/HTMLBook