4 ms·

Are you thinking of the print edition? Both books are typeset using TeX, and both are printed by MIT press, so this is a pretty surprising claim.

by samth 9y ago

brudgers 9y ago
By "books as books," yes, I mean the print editions. The first edition of HtDP specifically since that is the one I own. By "typesetting" I mean the entire process of producing a physical artifact from an edited manuscript. Thus, I am including aesthetic considerations such as typography, cover design, and binding. TeX is a technology. In the context of my literary criticism, citing TeX and MIT press is analogous to "styled with CSS and hosted on GoDaddy" in regards to a website. TeX is a tool. MIT Press is a good publishing house and its catalog contains quality, but some of its books are still better than others in terms of typesetting (in the sense described). The differences can reflect authors' goals; publishing economics; and just the times (HtDP came about in the era of the commercial web). Personally, I find the unconventional physical format of HtDP (8" x 9") awkward. It's unbalanced. The pages are too wide. The compensating increase in font size makes the lines so tall that there is low information density on each page. As a reader, the amount of head/eye movement for a disrupts my concentration. The gutters are far too wide. I suppose that the wide gutters were to accommodate the Lambda icon, but these peter out in the first quarter of the book. Because these could be taken away with little effect their inclusion is a decision that could have been revisited and a more conventional layout considered. The typography is haphazard. Code on page 191 uses san-serif. Code on page 322 is set in four faces; a mix of serif and san-serif, bold, and italics; and boxes. Page 299 has its own notation. Often its complexity obscures the big ideas: on page 278 the unimportant ideas are in bold (local is irrelevant to the local point of f's referent) [1] and the diagram's arrows connect the thinnest term and the thinnest term is typeset in italic. Please don't take my remarks personally except in so far as I think HtDP is a book worth owning and reading and that the world is better for it existing in its current form. It's useful and supports an important project that I like. Thanks. [1] Page 279 uses nested boxes to express locality. These have semantics distinct from boxes on page 322.
svat 9y ago
I'm not the person you're replying to, but that's not really pretty surprising. Merely typesetting a book in TeX does not guarantee good typesetting. TeX is just a program that makes it possible to typeset like “real books”; one still needs to know (and care) enough about book design (as Knuth did) to actually produce something aesthetically pleasing. (For an extreme example: if you just run TeX and don't pay attention to the warnings, you'll have plenty of underfull or even overfull lines, resulting in even worse typesetting than you'd get from something like Microsoft Word.) The standard LaTeX classes also make some poor typographic choices, because Lamport unlike Knuth was more interested in logical/structured markup than typesetting. Nor does being published by a reputed publisher guarantee good typesetting. The story of TeX is itself a good example: TeX came into existence because Addison-Wesley, whom Knuth had chosen specifically for their great typesetting, was compromising on their typesetting for the 2nd edition of TAOCP vol 2 as they moved away from hot-metal typesetting. I'd expect that things are even worse today. In the case of HtDP specifically, just opening the print edition of the book and flipping through the pages, I can see how its typesetting is indeed below average for a textbook. Look at the ugly table on page 21 (and throughout the book), the uneven typographic “color” on pages like 23 and 31, and just the whole mishmash of mismatched fonts on most pages. The book also has a lot of short paragraphs (two or three lines long), so the choice of indentation for paragraphs in the book is an odd one. A good book designer would have changed a lot of this. Overall it's perfectly readable, and sure, all typographic subtleties fade away once a reader gets sufficiently engrossed in the content (which is what ultimately matters), but the book is not a delight to hold in one's hands even before that, as in the case of TAOCP. (Probably unfair to compare with something well above average (TAOCP), so compare with SICP which is probably at about the average for a textbook from MIT Press.)

Are you thinking of the print edition? Both books are typeset using TeX, and both are printed by MIT press, so this is a pretty surprising claim.

by samth 9y ago

Are you thinking of the print edition? Both books are typeset using TeX, and both are printed by MIT press, so this is a pretty surprising claim.

brudgers 9y ago

By "books as books," yes, I mean the print editions. The first edition of HtDP specifically since that is the one I own. By "typesetting" I mean the entire process of producing a physical artifact from an edited manuscript. Thus, I am including aesthetic considerations such as typography, cover design, and binding. TeX is a technology. In the context of my literary criticism, citing TeX and MIT press is analogous to "styled with CSS and hosted on GoDaddy" in regards to a website. TeX is a tool. MIT Press is a good publishing house and its catalog contains quality, but some of its books are still better than others in terms of typesetting (in the sense described). The differences can reflect authors' goals; publishing economics; and just the times (HtDP came about in the era of the commercial web). Personally, I find the unconventional physical format of HtDP (8" x 9") awkward. It's unbalanced. The pages are too wide. The compensating increase in font size makes the lines so tall that there is low information density on each page. As a reader, the amount of head/eye movement for a disrupts my concentration. The gutters are far too wide. I suppose that the wide gutters were to accommodate the Lambda icon, but these peter out in the first quarter of the book. Because these could be taken away with little effect their inclusion is a decision that could have been revisited and a more conventional layout considered. The typography is haphazard. Code on page 191 uses san-serif. Code on page 322 is set in four faces; a mix of serif and san-serif, bold, and italics; and boxes. Page 299 has its own notation. Often its complexity obscures the big ideas: on page 278 the unimportant ideas are in bold (local is irrelevant to the local point of f's referent) [1] and the diagram's arrows connect the thinnest term and the thinnest term is typeset in italic. Please don't take my remarks personally except in so far as I think HtDP is a book worth owning and reading and that the world is better for it existing in its current form. It's useful and supports an important project that I like. Thanks. [1] Page 279 uses nested boxes to express locality. These have semantics distinct from boxes on page 322.

svat 9y ago

I'm not the person you're replying to, but that's not really pretty surprising. Merely typesetting a book in TeX does not guarantee good typesetting. TeX is just a program that makes it possible to typeset like “real books”; one still needs to know (and care) enough about book design (as Knuth did) to actually produce something aesthetically pleasing. (For an extreme example: if you just run TeX and don't pay attention to the warnings, you'll have plenty of underfull or even overfull lines, resulting in even worse typesetting than you'd get from something like Microsoft Word.) The standard LaTeX classes also make some poor typographic choices, because Lamport unlike Knuth was more interested in logical/structured markup than typesetting. Nor does being published by a reputed publisher guarantee good typesetting. The story of TeX is itself a good example: TeX came into existence because Addison-Wesley, whom Knuth had chosen specifically for their great typesetting, was compromising on their typesetting for the 2nd edition of TAOCP vol 2 as they moved away from hot-metal typesetting. I'd expect that things are even worse today. In the case of HtDP specifically, just opening the print edition of the book and flipping through the pages, I can see how its typesetting is indeed below average for a textbook. Look at the ugly table on page 21 (and throughout the book), the uneven typographic “color” on pages like 23 and 31, and just the whole mishmash of mismatched fonts on most pages. The book also has a lot of short paragraphs (two or three lines long), so the choice of indentation for paragraphs in the book is an odd one. A good book designer would have changed a lot of this. Overall it's perfectly readable, and sure, all typographic subtleties fade away once a reader gets sufficiently engrossed in the content (which is what ultimately matters), but the book is not a delight to hold in one's hands even before that, as in the case of TAOCP. (Probably unfair to compare with something well above average (TAOCP), so compare with SICP which is probably at about the average for a textbook from MIT Press.)