3 ms·

For those uninitiated to the artistry and elegance of careful compositing and layout, do you have any examples? It seems to be fairly easy to find exemplar typ

For those uninitiated to the artistry and elegance of careful compositing and layout, do you have any examples? It seems to be fairly easy to find exemplar typesetting on the internet (probably due, at least in part, to the phenomenal effort that has been poured into TeX/LaTeX and their ilk) but it's hard to find much that is considered to be a good representation of what careful human composition and layout can produce. The only example that I could think of would be many of the books by Edward Tufte but I think much of that compositing has/was automated and "just" guided by a particular style that the author wanted to achieve. The algorithmic approach to replacing human judgement has definitely resulted in a sort of race-to-the-bottom simply due to the economics (think about how few eyes would review a story before "print" today versus when this video was shot) so I wonder what sort of skill might've been lost and how it might be able to be recovered.

acqq 6y ago
> For those uninitiated to the artistry and elegance of careful compositing and layout, do you have any examples? I often see both the examples of the older "pretty" typesetting and the examples of older "just make it fast" practically "no" typesetting texts (e.g. the material typed on the cheap typewriter and additionally "fixed" with the hand). The last I've seen, at the moment on HN first page is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 Printed in 1975, I don't believe it's "desktop publishing" and even if it at the first sight it looks like a bland Word document made with Times New Roman or whatever, I believe I see some differences, e.g. in the tables? See the plus sign there. I'm not an expert in typography though. For more interesting examples, look at the stuff printed e.g. 300, 200 or 100 years ago. I believe I always see the interesting examples of care of details or simply somehow "prettier" use of typefaces or something that looks differently -- it's hard to me to explain what, but that simply disappeared since.
- acqq 6y ago
  I've took a second look: on the first page look for the first "pay off" words, then analyze the look of the ff shapes there. See "effort" and "official" there too. If all this is not surprising to you, for something you surely haven't expected, see all the occurrence of "employees". Do you notice something? It's so obvious there's something different going on, compared to what we are used to today.
- jbay808 6y ago
  When I bought my first e-reader, I loaded it with free PDFs of old book scans from the internet archive that I searched for keywords of interest (science, machining, novels, etc). Since the works out of copyright are all a hundred years old or more, I ended up reading through volumes and volumes of old books about blacksmithing, precision metalwork, life in the countryside, and all sorts of other things. One thing I was struck by (for the PDF versions) was that the typesetting were sometimes absolutely gorgeous, and often used fonts I'd never seen before.

acqq 6y ago

> For those uninitiated to the artistry and elegance of careful compositing and layout, do you have any examples? I often see both the examples of the older "pretty" typesetting and the examples of older "just make it fast" practically "no" typesetting texts (e.g. the material typed on the cheap typewriter and additionally "fixed" with the hand). The last I've seen, at the moment on HN first page is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 Printed in 1975, I don't believe it's "desktop publishing" and even if it at the first sight it looks like a bland Word document made with Times New Roman or whatever, I believe I see some differences, e.g. in the tables? See the plus sign there. I'm not an expert in typography though. For more interesting examples, look at the stuff printed e.g. 300, 200 or 100 years ago. I believe I always see the interesting examples of care of details or simply somehow "prettier" use of typefaces or something that looks differently -- it's hard to me to explain what, but that simply disappeared since.

acqq 6y ago
I've took a second look: on the first page look for the first "pay off" words, then analyze the look of the ff shapes there. See "effort" and "official" there too. If all this is not surprising to you, for something you surely haven't expected, see all the occurrence of "employees". Do you notice something? It's so obvious there's something different going on, compared to what we are used to today.
jbay808 6y ago
When I bought my first e-reader, I loaded it with free PDFs of old book scans from the internet archive that I searched for keywords of interest (science, machining, novels, etc). Since the works out of copyright are all a hundred years old or more, I ended up reading through volumes and volumes of old books about blacksmithing, precision metalwork, life in the countryside, and all sorts of other things. One thing I was struck by (for the PDF versions) was that the typesetting were sometimes absolutely gorgeous, and often used fonts I'd never seen before.