eBooks – linear, interrupted

I’ve been happily reading G. K. Chesterton’s The man who was Thursday on my iPad. Happily, because the only print edition I own is the 1938 Penguin edition, which is set in 10/11pt Monotype Times New Roman in a style which decided pre-dates Tschichold’s Penguin composition rules: extra spaces between sentences, no word division to help justification, spaced-off punctuation, etc. Print isn’t always lovely.

Using Stanza, I could format the Project Gutenberg text pretty much as I wanted to – with indents, not line spaces to separate paragraphs, the ability to alter line feed independently of face size; yes, I managed to format quite a happy page. The iPad choice of fonts is restricted but in this case, with little italic or anything more exotic in the text, Apple/HTF’s Hoefler Text looked ok.

So why did I enjoy Thursday when I’ve previously ranted about the typographic problems with eBooks? It all comes down to the configuration of the text.

Although a fantasy (‘nightmare’ is Chesterton’s description), Thursday is pretty much a standard prose novel. A few poetry extracts (we’ll come to those later), and more than a dozen chapter headings, but otherwise just paragraphs of text. No subheadings, no pictures, no lists, no tables, no notes. Using the schema devised by Michael Twyman to describe the possible configurations of verbal graphic language, the bulk of Thursday sits firmly in the category labelled ‘linear interrupted’.

‘Linear interrupted’ means that the text just runs on, in a linear fashion, within each paragraph unit. Paragraphs themselves are ordered in a linear sequence, with no differentiation. The ‘interruption’ is only imposed by the external constraint of the frame in which the text is composed – in metal, the text area formed by the page chase, in digital page layout by the text box and its margins, or the area available on the screen in which text can be rendered. Line breaks are arbitrary, and understood by the reader as such. The arbitrariness is reinforced in traditional print by the choice of justified setting, which neatens everything up into a block, so the only deviation from a regular left or right margin is the (meaningful) white space that indicates a paragraph start or break-line.

(Of course, many typographers argue that even word spacing – even at the expense of an aligned right-hand edge – is an even better indication of linearity, through the evenness of rhythm it indicates, than the squaring up of text. But these are just two ways of indicating to the reader that the stuff just runs on.)

And even in traditional typesetting, the idea of being able to reflow a text into a given space is a common one. Books are always being reset, reformatted, larger, smaller – my Thursday is, I’m sure one of dozens of typographic presentations of that text. But as a nearly pure piece of linear interrupted, it is eminently reflowable, and fits the reflow model of the dynamic-layout eBook very well. While every book designer thinks they have hit on the perfect page for their publication, you can’t deny the need for more than one solution.

So where does the reflow model break down? Well, even in Thursday, it breaks down whenever a paragraph isn’t a ‘normal’ one. It doesn’t have to, because the text could have attributes, or the text engine rules, that prevented the following problems:

Chapter heading becoming detached from the following text. Stanza doesn’t seem to observe keep options, or maybe the headings are not properly coded as headings – after all, the one defining attribute of a heading is that it belongs with what follows, not what went before.

Poetry being ‘over-displayed’. I mentioned that you could decide whether to indicate paragraphs by vertical space (staccato) or no space and indents (traditional, more linear). Well, you can for main text, but not for displayed text, which was coded/rendered with a line space between each line of quoted verse.

Hyphenation. I left this on, and most of the time it worked. It broke capitalized words, though, and didn’t seem to mind breaking a very short word (the hero’s name is Syme, or Sy- | me as it was often rendered). The text is also short enough to read in about 3 or 4 sittings, so the lack of headlines wasn’t a bother (Stanza doesn’t bother you with an over-intrusive ‘where you are in the book’ indicator, though you can see a percentage read if you want to.)

So far, the Stanza implementation of Thursday was, as I said, reasonably happy. Better than a cramped pre-war Penguin. But as you can see, even in this text, anything that verges out of the pure linear interrupted mode starts causing problems. Enlarging the type, I forced the lines of poetry to turn over. The turns align with the start of the line rather than indenting – but while this is not as good as a hanging indent, it is, I suppose, better than having the start of the line indented with the continuation full out, which would really blur the distinction between prose and verse.

You will also have noticed from the screen-shots that the quote marks are straight throughout this text, which is a pity given the generally good appearance of the type.

To conclude, Michael Twyman’s schema gives us a useful checklist of the configurations that demand spatially sensitive, rather than arbitrarily reflowing, presentation. A list (and you can define poetry as being more list-like than continuous prose-like) needs its list-iness preserved. Headings are also a kind of list, in that they have text nested beneath them which, if hidden, renders the headings as a list of contents. A play or poem with line numbers is not continuous prose, but some kind of matrix, where the alignment of rows across columns must be preserved if the text area is resized. One could go on. But I would argue that being more analytical about the configuration that the individual elements that a text contains will lead to better designed eBooks through better design of the composition rules that render them.

Michael Twyman, ‘The graphic presentation of language’, Information Design Journal, Volume 3, Number 1, 1982, pp. 2–22

Diagramming remembrance

¶ Two interesting articles here and here.
With acknowledgement to Jessica Hagy

Steve Jobs on design

‘Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.

‘We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

‘We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.’

Wired, Issue 4.02, February 1996

¶ Thanks to Alison Black for pointing me to this article.

Understanding the past, designing the present

This was the presentation I gave at Researchers’ Night at the University of Reading on 23 September 2011

I’m a researcher in, and a practitioner of, typographic design – that is the way we present language visually on the written, printed, or electronic page and in the environment – and my main concern is how very complex texts, such as works of reference, can be made easier for the reader to use.

So I’ll talk about my work that is concerned with the history of English dictionary design, and how that connects with the design of dictionaries today; and also how looking at important early editions of the Book of Common Prayer led to the design decisions necessary when producing a scholarly text of the book for widespread publication.

Lexicographers, the people who write dictionaries, are very close to leading edge research in linguistics. Dictionaries in the popular mind are prescriptive – is it in the dictionary? – and there is an annual publicity fest when publishers announce which words are in (flashmob, crowd source) and which are out (charabanc, aerodrome). This is good fun, but it hides the real descriptive nature of dictionaries. Underlying every dictionary is information about the connections between words, about the patterns in language.

In Samuel Johnson’s day, this information was evidenced by the collection of literary quotations that he researched and collected. Today the evidence is contained in corpora, large collections of written, printed, and broadcast texts that have been transcribed and tagged so that they can be sorted and searched. Corpora have transformed dictionary making, allowing quantitative evidence to replace the lexicographer’s inevitably partial reading or prejudice.

Dr Johnson acknowledged the mutability of language – in his Plan of an English dictionary (1747) for the dictionary he implied he would ‘fix’ the English language (in a bid to obtain funding through the prospect of a concrete result), in his final Preface to the published work (1755) he admitted language was beyond fixing. Corpora can change with the use of language, and dictionaries can stay abreast of how we, the people, use words.

Johnson’s dictionary, of course, was reprinted and effectively rewritten many times in the century or so after its publication. And its presentation changed, too. Nineteenth century dictionaries developed a habit of presenting the supporting quotations – the actual evidence of usage – in smaller type, in order perhaps to save space. Looking back at Johnson’s original page design, we see just one size of type: and equality is implied between the evidence and the interpretation, and between the original authors and the dictionary maker: indeed, the author names, carefully arranged at the right of the column, can be seen as alternative access points into the text, balancing the capital headwords on the left.

I was able to use some of the insights gained by looking at Johnson’s dictionary when working on the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and a range of school dictionaries. In the Shorter, it became clear that the compression of illustrative quotations into banks separated them – often by some distance – from the relevant definitions. The design task stemming from a decision to restore the link was to re-sequence the material in the SOED database so that a more immediate connection could be made.

The downside was that this system increased the number of paragraph breaks and therefore the number of lines the text occupied. To counteract this, we looked at the shapes of letters that were more amenable to being slightly condensed, that is made narrower. Gerard Unger in our Department has designed many fonts with a flat, horizontal join between vertical strokes and curved strokes, and it was this design feature that allowed the type to be made narrower without becoming less readable, and compensating for the extra lines – in fact the design allowed a considerable increase in the number of words to be contained without increasing the number of pages in the dictionary.

Another project concerned with adding real-language illustrative quotations, the design of the schools dictionary used the same approach to font choice, and also looked back to paragraphing structures in 18th and 19th century dictionaries. 20th century dictionaries were reviewed to consider features which unified or disrupted entries, in order to make it clear to the reader how the page was divided up into individual entries.

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most important early modern texts that has survived to the present day. I was involved in the design of a new edition by Brian Cummings which contains three texts – those of 1549, Cranmer’s original transformation of the Catholic rites into a new but still transitional protestant form; 1559, the more firmly protestant edition that would have been familiar to Shakespeare and Milton; and 1662, the compromise between ritualists and puritans that followed the restoration after the civil war.

The typography of each of these individual printings is different: but, for a modern edition, they are similar in one respect: they are set in black letter, or gothic type. This is the type that was used for English language texts in early printing, whereas scholarly books, almost always written in Latin, were set in roman type. The aim was not to produce a facsimile, but to produce a text that was easy for today’s reader to understand, while allowing direct comparison between the three editions. Clearly the new edition could not be set in black letter. What became clear through consulting the original printings in the Bodleian library and on online sources was the distinct different in other aspects of typography: 1662 is altogether a grander affair, a real statement of a settlement of opinion and the victory of a particular approach to services in the Church of England. It is larger in format, has not one but two impressively illustrated engraved title pages, and makes use of large displayed roman type to divide the text into sections for each service.

This provided a starting point for the design solution. There are elements which are consistent between the editions – all divide prayers into those which are essentially dialogues between priest and people, and those said by the priest alone; there are readings directly from scripture; and there are ‘stage directions’ (how to perform actions or read prayers) and notes (what needs to be done to prepare the church, what the meaning of a service is, and importantly where there is scope for deviation from the text, etc.).

These common elements were given common typography between the three texts. In general, this meant that the headings, which are written very differently in the editions, could then carry come of the weight of indicating to the reader which text they were currently reading. It was decided to present these line for line, using the same type as the original, observing the quirkiness of word division and the frequent change, in the early editions, between black letter and roman. This in turn reflected the rather hasty production of the early editions, and allowed something of the grandeur of the presentation of the 1662 edition to come through.

The resulting design explains to the reader, I hope, something of the change in typography in this crucial period – a move away from the manuscript tradition of black letter, very compactly set, with an emphasis on creating shapes and gradations of size that do not relate to the logical structure of the underlying text – so that the biggest type on the page might be used for the least important word, and the emergence of a more rational approach which tends to emphasis the important words. This chimes with the editor’s decision to observe the original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of the texts – which sounds alarming but is actually very easy to read.

I hope these examples show how historical research and an understanding of the techniques and practices of the past can provide a framework for thinking about contemporary design decisions, whether in presenting text more rationally or allowing the reader to appreciate some of the flavour and original presentation of an historical text.

In the grass, snake

This young grass snake appeared in our garden today, shimmying across a path, curling up and hissing!

Where to locate a Pile of Poo

If you’re looking for a bunny girl or a pile of poo, look no further than the new Unicode version 6.0, which, among many other more serious changes, now includes

1F46F 👯   WOMAN WITH BUNNY EARS
1F4A9 💩   PILE OF POO

You can now typeset Hugh Hefner’s fantasy or a steaming pile with the confidence that anyone around the world will be able to render your intent precisely – as long as someone designs a font with the right characters on the right code points.

Upper-case spooks

Do spooks type hunt-and-peck style, with the caps lock held firmly down? Do we shout at foreigners, typographically? Or is lower-case too democratic for dealing with a repressive regime? I think we should be told.

Image from the Guardian

Inside the weave

Laura Ellen Bacon is artist in residence at Compton Verney, and is creating a wonderful white tape cocoon among the interstices of some trees in the Capability Brown park. The work seems quite different from the woven forms she has previously produced: there is no inherent strength in the material, so the smooth inner compartment (an implied shell or nest?) is literally held in place by the tension of a multitude of tied lengths of tape, using the trees as anchoring points.

Starting off as straight lines, they are tensioned into curves by further attached strips in a way that is not dissimilar to the use of control points on bezier curves in type design. This results in a certain randomness from the outside, as the smooth internal effect is most clearly seen when you actually enter the structure – it’s big enough for two people to stand in comfortably. The work will last a season – perhaps more? Today it was the home of a young robin and a mouse (who did not stay around to be photographed).

More images here.

Digital focus

I’m looking forward to reading Sophie Goldsworthy’s new Rough Guide to Digital Photography. Look for the lovely images of Tuscany and Indian tea plantations on her website here.

Berating your client

Following on from the brief we’d all like to have received, here is the letter of desperation to the client that we’ve all probably composed in our head, but never sent. Augustus Pugin did send this letter, though, when his client had the temerity to suggest the addition of a gallery (a solecism in a Gothic church):

‘… here are no Less than 5 protestant archdeacons pulling down galleries of every kind, all the works of the Camden & oxford societies denounce them & now after I had ingeniously got rid of the organ Monstrosity your lordship proposes to erect a gallery in the only perfect revival that has been accomplished. what Can I say or do, the gallery would not hold 20 people if crammed full & it would utterly ruin the church. all the Learned men will flock to this church as a Model & then they will see this Monstrosity. what a miserable fate awaits every architect of this wretched country. I have Lived to see almost every building on which I have set my heart either upset or ruined & now a gallery at Cheadle. perfect Cheadle. Cheadle my consolation in all my afflictions. Mercy I entreat.’

Pugin’s client relented. The gallery was not built.

Rosemary Hill, God’s architect: Pugin and the building of romantic Britain (London, 2007) p. 268

Reading the signs

Rob Waller’s provoking piece in Eye and its associated illustrations on their blog raise interesting questions not just about reading buildings, but about affordance and consideration for the user in any typographic form.

Making the Prayer Book fit

Occasionally there is a need to make a new edition of a book, or a new setting, match an earlier one as closely as possible. Here is an excellent description of the problem as encountered by Peter Ducker, designer at CUP of a re-set Book of Common Prayer.