#Using Type
14 messages in this thread
Kathleen,
I wanted to tell you I enjoyed your "Usage Ain't Style" article in the
October issue of Personal Publishing. The areas covered were very informative
and I appreciated the detailed descriptions. I wish there was room for more
illustrations, but the four samples were helpful.
If you have the chance, I would appreciate your opinion of the first
paragraph, on page 27, of the October MacUser. (The layout, not the content.)
Thanks
Scott
Scott,
(Hee, Hee) … and in the first paragraph of the Editor-in-Chief's article, no
less!
Brad
Ooof. Just looking at that page (p. 27 in the October MacUser) makes me want
to pounce. But I can (probably) restrain myself from asking too many
penetrating questions about the unfocused layout to comment as requested on the
first paragraph.
Monday-morning quarterbacking is easy, of course, but I think that first
paragraph would appear awkward to any reader. I would like to see the type
contoured against the side of the dropped A, especially since not doing so
created an awkward widow (the word 'sizes.' under the cap). Fitting the type
next to the cap would make the text read better. However, it is not MacUser
style to contour initial caps, and there are good reasons to stand by the style
book. Furthermore, it's a little old-fashioned to fit type around ornamental
letters, and many, many good-looking publications don't do it, including The
New York Times Magazine. Contouring is by no means required.
However, I think they were duty-bound to do something about the widow. Several
solutions come to mind. The easiest approach would be to change the word
'retailers' in line 5 to 'dealers'; then, with any luck, 'sizes' would wrap up
to end the line. If that didn't work, they could cheat the gutter between the
A and the text by 3 or 4 points. They could have considered merging the first
two paragraphs. Or they might have had to rewrite the first paragraph to add
enough text to run over at least three-quarters of the measure to support the
drop cap.
And thanks for the kind words. There would be more room for illustration, they
tell me, if I would write shorter.
And what did you think about the MacUser paragraph, anyway?
I dunno, Kathleen. It is possible to contour this particular paragraph without
too badly violating the style book. I've always considered the drop-cap "A" to
be an exception because of the unusually strong line the sides take combined
with the lack of visual weight at the top of the character and the resulting
space to the remainder of the word. For instance, I wouldn't contour a "V" or
"W" in this style specifically because the first word would still be unbroken.
In contouring to the "A" here, I would stick to the style by making sure that
the angle of contour very closely followed the right leg in creating a straight
line.
And I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! The _first_ thing to go when a designer
gets heavily into DTP is the ability to copyfit! <grin> The "sizes." widow is
15 points long. Changing "retailers" to "dealers" would only net 3 or 4 points
because you're dropping three narrow characters – "rti" – and replacing them
with a wide(ish) one – "d". You could cheat the gutter by 3 points (4 would
risk touching), but it wouldn't gain any line breaks ("in" in line 2 needs 5
points to break up to line 1, line 1 is already near minimum wordspacing), and
you still couldn't come up with the 15 points needed in line 4, since its
wordspacing is pretty tight, too. (Don't hold me _exactly_ to those
measurements – this is by eyeballing it, but it should be close nonetheless.)
My solution? "Air-out" lines 1, 4 and 5 by cranking-up the wordspacing a bit.
The net result would be two more words on the last line. Still not good, but
better than what's there. Either that, or rewrite the 'graph, or violate the
style.
…mm
Why not just change "Mac purchasers" to "Mac buyers" or even (pun intended)
"Mac users"?
Best, Dan
"Why cheat the design when a little sensible editing will do?"
Not bad, Mr. Musick. You're probably right about the 'retailers' to 'dealers'
change. If I weren't so lazy I'd set it up and try it, but I don't disagree
particularly. However, it does seem that any really graceful solution would
requre some reworking of the text.
This is a tough paragraph because so many of the words are those large
one-syllable ones that often cause problems.
In fact, to my eye, the whole page looks as if it were just thrown together
(autoflowed?). It's a nice case study to illustrate the point that page layout
and typography are really done by people, not automatically by machines. (Even
though a machine could learn to test for that widow, PageMaker can't.) This
page looks as if it were just run out and never seen until we saw it.
Is MacUser using DTP to do the magazine now? MacWorld has made a big deal out
of their conversion to DTP, but I can't remember if MU did.
The thought process on that paragraph was from the perspective of our
markup-based traditional system. In general, I see the page and the randomness
of the various elements as a typographer's nightmare using any system.
…mm
I think MacUser is using PageMaker on a Mac, but can't remember when they
started. Before MacWorld, though.
You brought up an excellent point but it can't be done in PM (i.e., change word
space for 1 line). I thoughtlessly tried that once at the tail-end of a long
document, only to watch it reflow for the next 5 minutes. It's that sort of
line-by-line, word-by-word control that DTP is often missing.
Actually, you can too do it in PageMaker, especially on a short line like that,
by using the Command-Shift-Delete 'unkerning' stroke (I know, I can hear you
groaning all the way from Phillie or Oahu or wherever you are); but it's not
literally true that "it can't be done in PM."
I agree that you could manually go in and kern character-by-character, but my
experience with changing the space band parameters has been disasterous because
it has a global effect. Changing space band and tracking parameters for just a
line or two is a common method for traditional typographers to "cheat" a line
(or blowing the measure slightly). It's relatively easy to accomplish in
Ventura simply by setting up a new tag, but PM treats word space as a global
variable, which is a pain. I haven't tried it with FH or Xpress so can't really
say how they handle the problem. I suspect FH could pull it off fairly easily.
Mostly, I just don't approve of global word space definitions; it's too
limiting.
Global tracking is definitely limiting, and I assume that's something that will
be changed in the future. Tracking should be something you set in the
Stylesheet; that way you can make the heads and text fit as they should without
a lot of fiddling around
I was suggesting that MacUser could have used PM's 'unkern' control to add word
spaces to that one line in that one case, not that any sane person would want
to do much of that sort of thing.
Aloha!
Well, let's hope the folks at Adobe and Aldus are listening … I tried
tinkering with the wordspace values in Xpress with similarly bad results.
However, it *is* possible to set up an alternate H&J definition and apply that
to an individual paragraph (or style) in Xpress. It's still clunky, though.
Thanks for the reply. First off, if you use less words in an article, then
there would be a necessity for more illustrations. Tell "them" I would like
your thorough descriptions to be more thoroughly illustrated.
Before my involvement in Mac DTP I never noticed type. Now I have gained an
awareness and appreciation for "unnoticeable" type. Now that most Mac
magazines are DT published it is obvious what a great job traditional
typesetters had been doing on earlier issues.
I still think it is great that more publications are choosing Macs and PCs for
magazine production, but for some reason the quality suffered. If it is the
limitations of software or just a mistake, then OK, they're doing the best they
can. But do you think this is a reflection of a greater problem? Take a look
at the photograph of Paul Somerson.
This is my area of expertise, photography. Why all the white space? and his
clothes look terrible. Is this a cheap in-house snapshot? Why is Robert
Wiggins' photo a color 3/4 view and Jim Seymour's B&W, head and shoulders?
This can't be blamed on the software, humans are making these decisions. I'm
worried that the ability to do this work on a PC and make last minute changes
has left some people overworked. The result is a page that, as you pointed
out, was probably just flowed without any time for adjusting widows and breaks.
Oh no! I think I may have blown this out of proportion.
Scott