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The Typography of Legal Opinions
- mproud 4y ago> Greater precedents have been overturned. Indeed.
- nikolqy 4y agoThis might be weird, but when I'm bored I like to make documents style like lawsuits etc. Obsessed with the fonts and layouts!
- chazeon 4y agoUpon reading the supreme court's Dobbs v. Jackson Decision, I was quite intrigued by its meticulous, book-like typesetting. Intrigued as I am, I inspected the file properties in Acrobat Reader, it only tells it was created using Acrobat Distiller. Interesting, I was expecting LaTeX or InDesign. Nevertheless, the beautiful typesetting make me want to read the whole thing. The linked article answers many questions of mine. It provide a wonderful context on typesetting in other courts. It is good, and also not surprised to know that "best-designed court opinions" is produced by the supreme court. It is also good to know that "Times New Roman is forbidden" in supreme court. The supreme court's opinion looks better than Congress documents as well.
- pyuser583 4y agoI found an article that claims the “Century-only” rule isn’t about aesthetics- the court just wants to be have a meaningful word count limit. That requires limits on typeface. https://www.cocklelegalbriefs.com/blog/preparing-your-brief/legal-brief-format-century-font/ https://www.cocklelegalbriefs.com/blog/preparing-your-brief/...
- jrochkind1 4y agoI don't understand, isn't the number of words in a text the same regardless of what font it's set in?
- Veen 4y agoIt’s easier to estimate word counts in printed documents when the font is consistent. You can’t assume all parties have access to a digital copy.
- pyuser583 4y agoIt’s about verifying the word count by looking at the number of pages. Making X pages roughly equal to Y words (or at least characters). By itself, typeface/font doesn’t matter. But typeface/font, combined with character size and white space rules (indents, line spacing, spaces after commas, etc.) are necessary for word counts to have meaning. Otherwise, a lawyer could use a very small font, low size, or very little white space to cram more words in the same space. So really it’s about being able to verify the word count by looking at the paper and not counting the words.
- MrVandemar 4y ago> Upon reading the supreme court's Dobbs v. Jackson Decision, I was quite intrigued by its meticulous, book-like typesetting. Apparently you can polish a turd.
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y agoCan you please explain for us non-Americans why that's a turd?
- MrVandemar 4y agoI refer to the fact that, however beautifully typeset the document is, the substance of the document is abhorrent and objectionable. So: a beautifully presented piece of horrific fucking shit. I'm not American either (thank goodness).
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y agoThat doesn't explain anything. Why is it so abhorrent and objectionable?
- wheybags 4y agoIt's the ruling that rolls back roe vs Wade, the old ruling that forced all states to allow abortion. Unless you're living under a rock, I'm sure you've heard of this, perhaps not by the name of the ruling though. (I'm not American btw)
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y agoThat still doesn't explain it. I read the text, not all of it, but at least the most important bits. Then I went to https://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm https://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution... and did a Ctrl-F for "abortion" and found nothing, so the reasoning checks out. It seems perfectly justified to roll back Roe v. Wade, regardless of what your position on abortion as a nationwide right is. This is what I struggle to understand about the outrage over Dobbs v. Jackson.
- layer8 4y agoAcrobat Distiller is a conversion tool and can be used as a printer driver. The typesetting may still come from a software like InDesign.
- gnicholas 4y agoI can't take seriously a typography webpage that hyphenates the word "typography" between the "g" and the "r". Why split up a morpheme like this? It really undermines the author's credibility to the casual reader, even if it might make the page look prettier to some. EDIT: lower down, it breaks the same word two chars later, between the "a" and "p". I have never seen such aggressive typography in my life.
- a_e_k 4y agoI think that's the browser doing the hyphenation. I see the same thing in Firefox, but varying the page scale makes that hyphenation come and go, and setting `hyphens: none` on the CSS via the inspector disables it.
- jhanschoo 4y agoMerriam-Webster agrees that these are the places to hyphenate the word typography: ty· pog· ra· phy. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/typography https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/typography
- chrismorgan 4y agoThat’s marking syllables, not hyphenation opportunities. There are many places where conventional hyphenation doesn’t line up with syllables.
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- jbverschoor 4y agoI'm not a fan of justified text.. It's harder to read and follow than left-aligned. Maybe less lo when using hyphens, as it optimizes the horizontal use. Big fan of 2 spaces at the beginning of each sentence.
- chrismorgan 4y ago> Generously large page margins. You know how awful large margins are if you have a PDF and a screen that isn’t large enough to display the full page at a readable size? You want to display one page at a time so j and k or Left and Right or whatever work to go to the next page rather than messing around with scrolling, but this actually means that you want to crop every page to throw away the ridiculously large margins, and most PDF viewers don’t support doing that. (To make it worse, add unbalanced left/right margins.) I wish for a world where document formats don’t support page margins at all, in favour of choosing margins at display or print time. (Yes, I know that at the extremes this starts to conflict with static pagination which is sometimes even more valuable, but humour me anyway in contemplating what you’d change in such a world.)
- mormegil 4y agoI _think_ you want a feature where the reader removes any margins in the document for display. Basically, a "crop the paper format" function. And... yeah, I'd want my reader to have that! (And my Kindle! When sometimes reading a PDF, this would be great!) Does any PDF reader support something like that?
- chrismorgan 4y agoI think I’ve seen it on some desktop PDF software before, though I can’t think what, and the reMarkable can do it.
- drifkin 4y agoGoodReader on iPad has this (though you set it for the document manually). It even lets you choose a different view-time crop for odd and even page numbers.
- red_trumpet 4y agoFor Android, Librera is able to do that.
- jchmrt 4y agoOn Android, KOReader is able to do this (and free and open source). It can even reflow the text quite well so that it fits on a smaller display like a phone, if needed.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoIn the post "Why does typography matter?" referenced from that page, there's a great passage: "“But I don’t have visual skills. I don’t know anything about graphic design.” That’s like saying you can’t dress properly for court because you don’t know anything about fashion design." It's worth bearing this in mind. A kind of cookbook approach to style works well enough for many things, especially if you don't care about being perfect. As Molly says in Neuromancer, "You look like you care enough to fake it."
- layer8 4y agoOne thing I’d argue against is justified text, especially with narrower columns (wider margins), because that has zero benefits for readability — it’s merely an aesthetic device — or rather, the word spacing variations it introduces even with hyphenation can still be detrimental to the reading experience. Microsoft Press uses left-aligned text in their books for that reason. It can also be easier to remember where in a long paragraph you were when the right edge has some structure.
- sharikous 4y agoI am probably in the minority but I like the old format more. More content in less space and much less distracting (for me). But then, I guess I am not a fan of good typography.
- binarymax 4y agoI like the compression of the former but the contrast of that weak mono space font is terrible.
- roelschroeven 4y agoI think there certainly are improvements possible to the old format, but like you I don't like the direction the new format takes. Why so much empty space? To me it looks like the text could easily use a larger font. Or maybe use two columns per page.
- ben_bai 4y agoOh please don't center align text. That's just hard to read. Also the constant change of standard/bold/italic font styles with changing fontsize. why? Make it an ASCII text file.
- Daneel_ 4y agoWithout touching on the rest of the article, can we please stop bashing on the use of two spaces after a full stop? It makes new sentences much more distinct. I've yet to see any convincing argument for single-spacing. Edit: I note that HN automatically compresses my double spaces to single ones. Sigh.
- criddell 4y agoHTML ignores multiple spaces and since HN is built on HTML, I’d guess that’s why it’s happening.
- Veen 4y agoIt makes sentence boundaries more distinct, but a period and a single space already makes them sufficiently distinct, provided you aren’t using a monospaced font. The argument against double-spacing is not that fails to achieve its goal, but that it is unnecessary.
- bombcar 4y agoDouble spacing after a period works best in a fixed font or typewriter. With a variable width font and justification it’s not as noticeable or useful. Of course, justification may have no justification itself.
- jrochkind1 4y ago> Edit: I note that HN automatically compresses my double spaces to single ones. Sigh. That's what HTML does with ordinary consecutive spaces, not an HN choice. It's been this way for the entire history of HTML I believe. If you see anything else on the web (which I think you rarely will), the text set in HTML has unusual whitespace characters in it, either entered manually or algorithmically. Or maybe using some unusual application of CSS `white-space`, I'm not sure if there's a way to use that to preserve your inter-sentance whitespace without other probably undesirable side effects.
- maxerickson 4y agoIf you are using a typesetting engine, you will likely get the best results by following whatever practice it recommends.
- throw0101a 4y agoIs there a LaTeX package for court rulings document class? * https://ctan.org/topic/class https://ctan.org/topic/class
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoThe Supreme Court literally typeset its opinions, including drafts for circulation and editing within the court, for many decades before digital composition was an option. I believe tthat their published opinions have been professionally typeset from the inception of the court, although I have been unable to find a reference documenting this. So, they never really had a tradition of typewritten documents to abandon.
- specialist 4y agoLegislation has similar layout & typography. Picking a bill at random... CA State Senate 2021-22 SB-54 Here's the human readable version, with changes inlined (a nice touch). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB54 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... Here's the same in the official format. Note the line numbers in the left margin. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billPdf.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB54&version=20210SB5496AMD https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billPdf.xhtml?bill_... As a noob, I'm not crazy about monospace, huge margins, and single column. But it's a terrific UX for paper-bound parliamentary processes predating digital media. Similar to law books, the page and line numbers allow unambiguous content addressing. Do we even have a digital standard? Purple numbers? https://communitywiki.org/wiki/PurpleNumbers https://communitywiki.org/wiki/PurpleNumbers XPath expressions or CSS selectors?
- donatj 4y agoI prefer the monospaced. It’s easier for me to read, easier to find my place if lost. It’s a downgrade.
- spoonjim 4y agoThe idea that hyphenation is “better” is pure opinion. I hate hyphenation and much prefer ragged text or justified with big whitespaces.
- einpoklum 4y ago> which one would you rather read? No one fails to pick this one. I actually liked the first one better. Sure, it had to "contend" with a not-so-easy-on-the-eyes monotype, but I liked its organization and I very much liked the ASCII art divider line at the top. The second one felt like someone was too much in love with the "Center" alignment.
- cryptonector 4y ago> “Wait—it looks like the Supreme Court is using two spaces between sentences.” It appears so. Yeah, they're not animals. > And who knows? The Supreme Court might still switch to one space. Greater precedents have been overturned. My amicus brief is ready. Please no. When parsing text, I find that ". " is an unambiguous sentence ending, while "<stuff here>. <more stuff>" can be ambiguous -- maybe the '.' is part of an acronym, say, or the author might be ending DNS TLDs with '.', say. Text is much clearer with two spaces, or one wider space, after sentence-ending periods.
- dragonwriter 4y agoDinosaurs are animals.