Tag: typography

When will we have real print-on-demand?

I’ve been thinking it for a while, but have needed to write it down for ages—particularly from my experiences with older manuscripts.

In an age of print-on-demand and reflowing text, why in goodness’ name don’t we have the ability to print almost anything we buy and are going to read in any font size and format we like?

Why couldn’t I have a presentation copy sized version of The Paris Review?

Why shouldn’t I be able to have everything printed on bible-thin pages of paper for savings in thickness?

Why couldn’t my textbooks be printed with massively large margins for writing notes into more easily? Why not interleaved with blank pages? Particularly near the homework problem sections?

Why couldn’t I buy my own hardcover, custom edition of Annotation with massive five inch margins to really make having a handwritten easier? (C’mon MIT Press, I know it’s part of a pre-existing series, but editorial considerations should have necessitated leaving at least an inch!)

Why can’t I have more choice in a range of fonts, book sizes, margin sizes, and covers?

When are publishing platforms going to give us this?!? 

How far has humankind fallen to have gone from the ☛ manicule indicating active thought in manuscripts of the 12th century  to the all-too-frequent thumbs up in the 21st century indicating a passive action with almost no thought at all?
Read Between the Lines (American Lifestyle Magazine)
On the corner of San Juan Avenue and Fourth Street in Saguache (pronounced Suh-WATCH), Colorado, stands a building the color of daffodils, with green trim and many windows, and if you tap on the glass, you might just get invited in. On most days, one can find Dean Coombs—the third-generation publisher of the Saguache Crescent—tinkering on a Linotype machine inside. The Crescent is the only Linotype newspaper in the country, and maybe even the world. Talking to Dean Coombs is like getting a history lesson and a tutorial on newspaper printing at the same time. Coombs has only lived away from Saguache for four years, making the sixty-eight-year-old newspaper publisher a de facto historian of sorts as well.
Interesting story about the last linotype machine in regular use.
Read -30- (Wikipedia)
-30- has been traditionally used by journalists in North America to indicate the end of a story or article that is submitted for editing and typesetting. It is commonly employed when writing on deadline and sending bits of the story at a time, via telegraphy, teletype, electronic transmission, or paper copy, as a necessary way to indicate the end of the article. It is also found at the end of press releases.
Read Tombstone (typography) (Wikipedia)
In mathematics, the tombstone, halmos, end-of-proof, or Q.E.D. symbol "∎" (or "□") is a symbol used to denote the end of a proof, in place of the traditional abbreviation "Q.E.D." for the Latin phrase "quod erat demonstrandum", meaning "which was to be demonstrated". In magazines, it is one of the various symbols used to indicate the end of an article. In Unicode, it is represented as character U+220E ∎ END OF PROOF (HTML ∎). Its graphic form varies, as it may be a hollow or filled rectangle or square.
Read The Plain Text Project (plaintextproject.online)

Do you need big, feature-packed, and sometimes complex tool for your work, to stay organized, or keep track of your tasks?

Maybe not.

Maybe all you need is plain text. Yes, simple, old fashioned, unadorned, boring text. It sounds scary or alien, but it's not.

Plain text isn't just for the geek or the techie. Plain text isn't just for the academic or hardcore productivity hacker. Plain text is for anyone.

Read Redesigning my Blog Post Pages by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
I had a great time in the sessions at IndieWebCamp West yesterday! Today is project day, so I started the morning off listening to some chill tunes with other folks on the Zoom "hallway track" deciding what to work on. My blog post permalinks have been bothering me for a while, I feel like they are...
Bookmarked Type Scale - A Visual Calculator (type-scale.com)

A type tool by Jeremy Church

How to Use

I like to enter the base font-size for paragraph text. Then I select from the surrounding values for headers and small text.

There are no rules. Just experiment and have fun. Try using the values for line-height, margins or whatever, and see what works.

hat tip: gRegorLove
Watched Play this Game! The Elusive Letter G by Len Turner (Johns Hopkins Office of Communications) from Johns Hopkins University | YouTube

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say most participants in a study couldn't pick out the correct form of lowercase g, a letter shape most of us have seen millions of times. Play this game to find out if you can spot the right g.

Read The ligatures in Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
The Museum of Science and Industry is renaming the museum to be the “Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry” Sounds pretty silly right? Look at how long that name is. Plus, Chicagoans notoriously hate renaming buildings. The Chicago Tribune ran an article with selected Twitter reactions from Chicagoans. A typical Chicago response: Me? …
Bookmarked Relative Font Weights Considered Harmful by Den McHenryDen McHenry (denmchenry.com)

Not exactly, but who can resist writing a "considered harmful" article when you can get away with it?

The real harm is that you can very easily conceal the semantics conveyed by font-weight depending on the font that's rendered, which is not always in your control. This all depends on how you define the base weight to which your relative values refer, and (1) whether that base weight is actually available in the rendered font and (2) which value is substituted if it isn't.

You get a webmention, and you get a webmention, and…