3 ms·

Not a bad article, but the layout of the article itself has some flaws (numbered lists are indented negatively, ...). I wouldn't normally complain about that, b

Not a bad article, but the layout of the article itself has some flaws (numbered lists are indented negatively, ...). I wouldn't normally complain about that, but I will in an article that tells us how to format text.

ddelphin 16y ago
And the space above the quotes is too much in comparison to the space below... it bothers me.
mikeklaas 16y ago
As other have stated, this is actually "correct" typographic practice. I have absolutely no clue why this is the case; to me it looks absolutely atrocious. Why not indent instead?
wvl 16y ago
I am quite sure that is done deliberately. I can't find a good resource to point to, but this article by Mark Boulton describes why you would do that with bulleted lists. I would assume that the same applies to ordered lists: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-better-typography-part-2 http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st... > With the advent of desktop publishing it became suddenly very easy and cost-effective to produce bodies of text. The problem was these bodies of text work within a box. Every character in this box had to be within the box, Hanging Punctuation requires characters to be out of the box. This was a problem for the software and as a result was ignored. An important aspect of typesetting just swept under the carpet like that. It’s a great shame. And: > A ranged left body of type is pretty much destroyed, aesthetically, when punctuation isn’t hung. The eye looks for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it destroys the flow of text.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  What i don't understand is why there's incongruity between the numbered headers and the numbered lists. Surely if you're going to stick the list numbers in the margins, the header numbers should be in the margins as well?
  - po 16y ago
    I don't think so. The numbers in the header are more like an outline of items. The numbers in the list are not part of the outline. Hanging the numbers in the gutter is the typographically "proper" treatment there.
- verysimple 16y ago
  I'm not a typographer, but I am a reader and I don't agree with his opinion that the list with hanging bullets makes it more legible. I find them slightly confusing. Maybe it's my programming background, but it just makes sense to indent something positively to emphasize context. I do agree though that the hanging bullets add sophistication, but when I write that's not really my primary concern.
acon 16y ago
There is nothing wrong with indenting lists negatively. In fact some say it is more correct: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-better-typography-part-2 http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...
- Chris_Newton 16y ago
  Sometimes I wish Mark hadn't published those articles. They have taken on a kind of cult status, like the interview with 37 Signals about their A/B testing and the words "See plans and pricing". Now lots of people seem to be taking these specific practices as gospel, but they've missed the point: it's not that what works for someone else will necessarily work for you, but that some things can be changed that might not have occurred to you, perhaps yielding much better results. <obligatory> Also, just because 37 Signals and Mark Boulton have popular blogs, that doesn't actually prove them right. </obligatory> Mark's web site doesn't seem to have comments there any more, but I'm pretty sure I left one at the time pointing out that you want a typeset list to have a clear break between items (otherwise why are you typesetting it as a list?) and therefore hanging list markers the way you might hang punctuation seems exactly the opposite to what you are trying to achieve. I would argue that the same series of articles makes the same mistake with hanging quotation marks, for the same reason. If you read some of the early thinking about hanging punctuation, the goal of this kind of microtypography was to give visually clean lines to the edges of where text is justified. If you position glyphs mechanically, as computer typesetting inevitably does by default, you actually get a visually uneven margin where you have glyphs that "stick out", such as quotation marks, dashes, and the crossbar on a captial T: the whitespace above and/or below the "sticking out" part breaks the straightness of the margin to a human eye. Instead, you can hang the glyph slightly (not necessarily entirely) in the margin, to give a line that is mathematically irregular but visually straight to the human eye. Somehow this idea has transformed into hanging glyphs, usually punctuation marks, being some sort of trendy typographical effect, which might still make sense if you're talking about setting displayed type such as pull quotes. Unfortunately, it has then crossed a bridge too far, becoming "this is the Right Way To Do It(TM)" for even regular text, which is just dogma without any sort of aesthetic and/or usability justification.

ddelphin 16y ago

And the space above the quotes is too much in comparison to the space below... it bothers me.

mikeklaas 16y ago

As other have stated, this is actually "correct" typographic practice. I have absolutely no clue why this is the case; to me it looks absolutely atrocious. Why not indent instead?

wvl 16y ago

I am quite sure that is done deliberately. I can't find a good resource to point to, but this article by Mark Boulton describes why you would do that with bulleted lists. I would assume that the same applies to ordered lists: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-better-typography-part-2 http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st... > With the advent of desktop publishing it became suddenly very easy and cost-effective to produce bodies of text. The problem was these bodies of text work within a box. Every character in this box had to be within the box, Hanging Punctuation requires characters to be out of the box. This was a problem for the software and as a result was ignored. An important aspect of typesetting just swept under the carpet like that. It’s a great shame. And: > A ranged left body of type is pretty much destroyed, aesthetically, when punctuation isn’t hung. The eye looks for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it destroys the flow of text.

knowtheory 16y ago
What i don't understand is why there's incongruity between the numbered headers and the numbered lists. Surely if you're going to stick the list numbers in the margins, the header numbers should be in the margins as well?
- po 16y ago
  I don't think so. The numbers in the header are more like an outline of items. The numbers in the list are not part of the outline. Hanging the numbers in the gutter is the typographically "proper" treatment there.
verysimple 16y ago
I'm not a typographer, but I am a reader and I don't agree with his opinion that the list with hanging bullets makes it more legible. I find them slightly confusing. Maybe it's my programming background, but it just makes sense to indent something positively to emphasize context. I do agree though that the hanging bullets add sophistication, but when I write that's not really my primary concern.

acon 16y ago

There is nothing wrong with indenting lists negatively. In fact some say it is more correct: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to-better-typography-part-2 http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...

Chris_Newton 16y ago
Sometimes I wish Mark hadn't published those articles. They have taken on a kind of cult status, like the interview with 37 Signals about their A/B testing and the words "See plans and pricing". Now lots of people seem to be taking these specific practices as gospel, but they've missed the point: it's not that what works for someone else will necessarily work for you, but that some things can be changed that might not have occurred to you, perhaps yielding much better results. <obligatory> Also, just because 37 Signals and Mark Boulton have popular blogs, that doesn't actually prove them right. </obligatory> Mark's web site doesn't seem to have comments there any more, but I'm pretty sure I left one at the time pointing out that you want a typeset list to have a clear break between items (otherwise why are you typesetting it as a list?) and therefore hanging list markers the way you might hang punctuation seems exactly the opposite to what you are trying to achieve. I would argue that the same series of articles makes the same mistake with hanging quotation marks, for the same reason. If you read some of the early thinking about hanging punctuation, the goal of this kind of microtypography was to give visually clean lines to the edges of where text is justified. If you position glyphs mechanically, as computer typesetting inevitably does by default, you actually get a visually uneven margin where you have glyphs that "stick out", such as quotation marks, dashes, and the crossbar on a captial T: the whitespace above and/or below the "sticking out" part breaks the straightness of the margin to a human eye. Instead, you can hang the glyph slightly (not necessarily entirely) in the margin, to give a line that is mathematically irregular but visually straight to the human eye. Somehow this idea has transformed into hanging glyphs, usually punctuation marks, being some sort of trendy typographical effect, which might still make sense if you're talking about setting displayed type such as pull quotes. Unfortunately, it has then crossed a bridge too far, becoming "this is the Right Way To Do It(TM)" for even regular text, which is just dogma without any sort of aesthetic and/or usability justification.