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I learned old-school printing in high school. We had a press with a flatbed and screw. More to the point, we had lower and upper cases filled with steel type, i
by OliverJones 9y ago
I learned old-school printing in high school. We had a press with a flatbed and screw. More to the point, we had lower and upper cases filled with steel type, including lots of different dashes and spaces. Our teacher was a traditionalist. He taught us such things as how to justify a line of type. Narrowing a line involved switching "thicks" (nominal space slugs) for "middles" in an artful way. Widening it involved switching thicks for two "thins", and so forth.
We had plenty of dash characters--we had hyphens of course, and figure dashes, and en dashes, and em dashes. Figure dashes are one en in width, with the vertical position of the visible element is designed to match the numerals in the font. This let us set a sentence like so with subtle perfection.
Type designer John Baskerville (1706-1775) owned a printing-works and type foundry in Manchester.
Does anybody notice this sort of thing? Probably nobody except book designers. Does anybody care? Well, my mom said she cared when I pointed it out to her.
From that teacher I learned to respect the choices of the type designer and how to use those choices. His tradition--now mine--dictates that all these dashes be typeset closed, without leading or trailing spaces. In the OpenType era, a type designer may choose to leave a speck of white space around a dash, but it's up to the designer, not the typesetter.
Text rendering in software like web browsers and word processors is gradually catching up to the tradition. Adobe's InDesign product does a great job of all this. Recent versions of MS Word are great improvements.
It helps to know the HTML entities for these items if you'll play around with them in your web pages.
— em-dash
– en-dash
‒ figure dash (using en-dash is mostly acceptabe).
‑ non-breaking hyphen
  one em of space
  one en of space
the much-misused nonbreaking space (use an en space for   ktksbai)
  thin space (0.2-0.25em)
- leephillips 9y agoPeople who use [La]TeX tend to become a bit obsessive over typographic details, as well. What do you think of that program? (Very interesting comment, by the way.)
- kashyapc 9y agoFWIW, as a relatively novice LaTex (in combination with the Beamer program, largely for technical presentations) user, I can imagine why such people nit-pick over typography. The Computer Modern and its derivative Latin Modern fonts are beautiful---not to mention their inimitable flexibility. I'll blame two of my colleagues for indirectly 'inspiring' me to spend more time than justified, tinkering with LaTex and TikZ (it lets you produce "vector graphics from a geometric/algebraic description"). I'm not happy with the amount of time I spend with LaTex+TikZ, but I find the results to be satisfying and very convincing. Have to diligently chip away at it to get more productive with them.
- lstamour 9y agoThe hardest part about using LaTeX is getting to the realisation that to replicate InDesign, you might need OpenType support that might not ship by default, as well as needing to run it more than once. Once you have /latexmk.pl [1] and XeTeX [2], you can then achieve amazing results [3] with the right modules and some creativity. It's just not quite as fluid to use as InDesign for graphically-minded people. 1: https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexmk https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexmk 2: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/TeXOpenType http://nitens.org/taraborelli/TeXOpenType 3: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-bea...
- leephillips 9y agoOr you can use make, or a bash script. OpenType support has been standard for years; the preferred engine is LuaLaTeX: https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/ https://lwn.net/Articles/731581/
- WovenTales 9y agoSomething about LaTeX just doesn't click for me, and you'll never in regular use have any need for pure TeX. Luckily, there's ConTeXt which (unsearchable name and comparatively small support base aside) is a very enjoyable flavour and allows for some beautiful typesetting. Maybe not worth it to switch if you're already used to LaTeX, but if you've never used any of the family, I highly recommend giving one or the other a try.
- leephillips 9y agoIf by "pure TeX" you mean Plain TeX, I use it, as well as LaTeX (I know I'm far from alone here). i agree that ConTeXt is a great project, with many advantages over LaTeX.
- WovenTales 9y agoAh, didn't know it was still viable. Thanks!
- bartvk 9y agoThis comment made me smile, because it's so true :) After my college days using LaTeX, support for ligatures arrived in browsers and I would spot those (fi, ff, ij, ft, and perhaps others) and post them on Facebook.
- kps 9y agoUnicode (and so HTML) also has U+2008 ‐ HYPHEN U+2212 − MINUS SIGN HYPHEN is not much used since in most fonts it's identical to ASCII ‘-’. MINUS SIGN is meant to be visually congruent with +×÷=, etc (same stroke width and appropriate alignment). Personally I have - – — ‐ ‑ − on my usual keyboard layout.
- jsmthrowaway 9y agoHyphen is also a Western name separator, as in Jean-Luc Picard. Using a hyphen where a dash belongs, because of its ease of use on a typical U.S. layout keyboard, is a common mistake. A lot of people type two hyphens to make a dash, as well, partially because of ASCII, and it was nice to update my phone and Mac recently and see that Apple is now automatically fixing that by default without making me hold down the hyphen—disrupting my typing flow. You could add the translation before, but it’s cool to introduce a lot of folks who don’t know that to a proper dash.
- anjbe 9y agoCorrection: hyphen is U+2010, not U+2008 (which is punctuation space).
- kps 9y agoThanks. Too late for me to edit.