Re: Does the Crystal Goblet apply?

On Wed, January 1, 2014 9:42 pm, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-01 at 19:58 +0000, Tony Graham wrote:
>> I received a copy of the 1937 pamphlet of "Printing Should Be
>> Invisible" by Beatrice Warde [1] yesterday.  I got it to see how well
>> it lived up to the ideals of its text.  Based on the title alone, it
>> should have been 12 blank pages.
> Hah! And a wineglass should be empty? I don't think that's the right
> idea :-)

Isn't that the goal?

>>   Based on what is says in the text, I
>> shouldn't be able to remember anything about the formatting, only the
>> words, but the placement of the page numbers struck me as odd on first
>> reading (though I've since come up with a rationalisation for their
>> position).
>
> Does your copy have the original formatting? The essay was widely
> reprinted. I don't remember where the page numbers were now, it's been
> too long :)

It is an original 1937 version.  The original original (other than what
she read from when she made the speech) was "Six days after she presented
it, the lecture appeared in print again in The British & Colonial Printer
& Stationer, a weekly newsletter dealing with the printing trade." and I
have no idea how invisible that text was.

The page numbers are just below the text block and have the same line
height, but they are indented from the outside edge of the text block,
which is why I thought they weren't as invisible as they could have been,
but my current rationalisation is that if they had been at the outer edge
of the text block so they wouldn't make another vertical line, it might
have been possible to try to read them as the 29th line of text, which of
course wouldn't make sense to read.

>> So what?  I don't think that we should recast the 'CG' in 'PPL CG' as
>> 'Crystal Gobletiers', but to what extent should we be about the
>> practice of typography rather than be just about the mechanics of
>> making it possible to practice typography?  Should be we aware of the
>> three types of window that Warde describes?
>>
>>    The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the
>>    reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author's
>>    words.
>
> It's useful to understand how typography fits in to graphic design, and
> how a good design takes the content and intent of the text into account.
>
> But for my part i don't see a W3C CG being a useful Style Police
> Agency :-)

I didn't suggest that, I said we shouldn't be 'Crystal Gobletiers'.  To be
Style Police is not a good idea, nor is it remotely possible.

...
> Any book typographer ought to strive to be able to format text so that
> the formatting is invisible, I think, at the very least to understand
> how the design works so they can then do something different.
>
> Any computer system for serious typography needs to support those
> designs, which seems to me to be where a CG does come into play.

Dave Cramer's "Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination" [1] is
to cover "requirements for pagination and layout of books in latin
languages", and the XSL-FO spec and various CSS modules are about how to
instantiate pagination and layout, but there is a middle ground for
material about how to do a good job at pagination and layout.

The DPUB IG, with its focus on Publishers, might assume that professionals
know all about these things, but it seems to me that there's lots of
people who aren't professional designers and who don't have the strictures
of a S1000D telling them how to lay everything out who could do with some
help.

An idea that I've had for a long time but never had the time to act on is
to produce an XSLT function library to make it easier for someone sitting
in an office somewhere to produce pages with proportions based on a
chromatic scale (as Bringhurst seems to like) or margins with the "sound,
elegant and basic medieval structure" (Bringhurst, again) of Villard de
Honnecourt or based on a modular scale, rather than just thinking
"Margins?  Hmmm, '1in 1in 1in 1in' will suffice."

Now that CSS has variables [2], it should also be possible to do something
similar with making a CSS stylesheet module that computes margins based on
keywords in the @class attribute for the element representing the page.

Regards,


Tony.

[1] http://w3c.github.io/dpub-pagination/
[2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-variables/

Received on Thursday, 2 January 2014 12:29:19 UTC