one space or two?

One space or two after a full stop?  Many would have us believe two spaces is WRONG, and was introduced due to eeeevil typewriters, and we should return to the One Right Way. Heraclitean River delves into the history: it always was two spaces, until the eeeevil publishers and their Linotype machines demanded something simpler, and rewrote history!

Use one, use two, as you see fit – but do be consistent!

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Typography in ten minutes

Yesterday I came across Butterick’s Practical Typography. It promises to make you “a bet­ter ty­pog­ra­ph­er than 95% of pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers and 70% of pro­fes­sion­al de­sign­ers” in ten minutes, by reading 5 rules (and, presumably, then following them). I instead read the whole thing – it’s fascinating (if you are fascinated by typography).

At one point, when advocating using wider margins, and making better use of white space, he sets an exercise, of making 2 documents with the same text.

Document A is the usual default style, and has the following format: “page mar­gins of one inch per side, font is Times New Roman, point size is 12, line spacing is “Double” [...], first-line indent is half an inch, and no space be­tween para­graphs.”

Document B follows Butterick’s strictures, and has the following format: “page mar­gins of two inch­es per side, font is still Times New Roman, point size is 11, line spac­ing is ex­act­ly 15 points, first-line in­dent is still half an inch, and still no space between para­graphs.”

He claims that B looks more like a professionally typeset book, is more comfortable to read, and contains more words per page. And he's right. Here are A and B (using Lorem Ipsum, so neither is particularly comfortable to read!).

(left) document A, default margins, double spaced; (right) document B, wider margins, better spaced, more text

Then today I had to write a 250 word “vision” document. I heeded what I had learnt. I initally wrote the text in the Word default layout. Then I tweaked it, by changing the font, and increasing the margins and linespacing. I made the margins as wide as I could, and still get all the text on one page. The result:

(left) 250 words in Word default format; (right) the same words, after some minor formatting tweaks

I’m sold!

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why proofreading is hard

Proofreading is hard, because there's a lot of processing going on between seeing and reading.

After reading the
the sentence, you are
now aware that the
the human brain
often does not
inform you that the
the word 'the' has
been repeated twice
every time.

We are pretty insensitive to letter shape (fortunately, given the plethora of fonts), so can quite readily overlook O-0 and I-l-1 problems, although these are worse in some fonts than in others.  An extreme example doing the rounds at the moment (although it's not new), based on maximal substitution of digits for letters, is:

‎7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3 Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17

By it's not just doubled words and simple substitution that we can overlook.  The most extreme example I've seen is:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Spell checkers, though, are a boon for many of these problems.  So today's proofreaders can concentrate on higher-level issues

---

Sources:

1. After reading the...
2. an early reference to 7H15 M3554G3
3. the research behind Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch

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rough fonts

I was reading the Boing Boing post about fonts that look like graphs. More interesting was the link to "postscript hacks to render slightly differently every time". I followed up, and discovered the Beowolf font family, with parameterised roughness, caused by adding some randomness to the PostScript rendering process:

Beowolf family, from MyFonts 

What's great about this site is the number of different kinds of text you can choose to display the various fonts.  I find the mid-rough R22 style most pleasing to my eye. 

A 2008 post on the Typographica blog gives some interesting historical background to this family.  (There's a blog all about fonts!?!  I may never get anything useful done again...)

This reminds me of "roughness", which is one of Christopher Alexander's 15 "generative properties", from his Nature of Order work, used to produce architectural structures that exhibit "wholeness".  We did some work a while back trying to formalise a few of the other properties, through BlobWorld, and were interested to discover an optical illusion that led to an appearance of roughness emerging.  Rough brickwork, or rough wall alignment, okay.  But rough fonts?  Neat.

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FatFonts

Edward Tufte advocates using minimum ink to maximum effect in displaying quantitative information, and designing graphic displays to have both macro (distant) and micro (close-up) readings.

One technique he describes that fits his philosophy is the "stem and leaf" plot. Let’s say you have two sets of 50 exam marks as percentages, and you want to examine the data.  One way to see the spread is to plot the marks, maybe as a histogram. That shows the distribution, but loses the information of the specific scores.  The stem and leaf plot provides the best of both worlds: a graphical overview and close up values.  The "stem" shows the tens values, and the "leaves" show the remaining digit values.

stem and leaf plots, of 50 values generated randomly from a normal distribution, with:

 (a) mean 50, std dev 20; (b) mean 70, std dev 10

This plot looks like a histogram from a distance, but closer inspection shows that the bars are made from digits with meaning.  So we can easily see that in the first case, the marks range from 9 to 96, and in the second case, the marks range from 54 to 94. 

Stem and leaf plots can also be used to good effect for bus and train timetables. In this case the "stem" shows the hours, and the "leaves" show the minutes when the transport is due.  For example, Nottingham tram timetables use this approach.

You can immediately see, with a distant macro-reading, on weekdays the most trams are at rush hour, on Saturdays they are more evenly spread , and they are rather more infrequent out of hours and on Sundays.  Then you can look closer for a micro-reading, and see the actual tram times.  

These plots have been around for a long time.  The latest New Scientist (2 May 2012) reports an analogous approach for greyscale plots: "FatFonts", conceived and developed by Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs, and Sheelagh Carpendale.

the "Rotunda" FatFont

With a FatFont, the amount of ink used to print a digit is proportional to the value of the digit: so a 9 uses nine times the ink as a 1, for example.  Instead of plotting a greyscale pixel on a graphic, plot the actual value using the FatFont.  For more numerical resolution, simply use a second digit one-tenth the area of the first (and a third digit, one tenth smaller again, if needed, and so on, until resolution fails). From a distance, the macro-reading is a greyscale image; closer up, the micro-reading shows the digits, showing the numerical values. 

Here's an image of the terrain around Etna on Sicily, from the FatFonts galley page: 

A FatFont plot is to a greyscale image what a stem and leaf plot is to a histogram.

Typewriter art, ACSII art, and photo mosaics achieve a given picture (macro-reading) by using very many small characters or picture "tiles" chosen to have the right density or colour.  But with those techniques, the micro-readings are not usually of interest.  FatFonts, on the other hand, give a useful graphical tool.

It’s a really neat idea.

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