Re: Stylings only possible with Tables

James Elmore wrote:

> On a side note -- before computers were able to handle fonts, font 
> experts had to be both mathematicians and designers and font sets sold 

That's even more true now that computers are used.  Before computers, 
one could scale fonts by eye. With computers one has to add hinting 
programs.

> for tens of thousands of dollars. Only a very few people could design 
> fonts. The number of people who understood and used fonts artistically 

Still true.  Many people can design poor display fonts, but very few
people can design good body text ones.

Whilst a font may cost a lot to design, before GUIs one could buy a golf 
ball with a good font for a few dollars, and before word processors, one 
could buy dry transfer lettering with good quality fonts.

> (and in what was considered the 'proper' manner) was still a very small 
> proportion of the population: probably near 1%.

That is probably also still true.  Unfortunately, in the early days of 
the commercial web, it was people who had self taught themselves HTML 
that dominated, and a lot of good typography was lost, because the 
experts were still using older media.

> valuable thought. Could styles be extracted from PDF as well? I mean, if 
> an author was told by his/her boss to match the company style, given a 
> PDF sample, could some sense of the correct style be extracted 

Not mechanically.  PDF is fundamentally presentational, but to meet 
accessibility requirements (and support PDAs) you can specify a document 
structure in parallel with the structure used for drawing.  In some 
cases the structures coincide, and the structural markup is inline, but 
it is also possible to assemble random chunks of presentational content 
to form a single structual component, out of line.


-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Saturday, 30 June 2007 20:34:17 UTC