

Typography on the iPad - nkm
http://fontfeed.com/archives/ipad-typography/

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acg
Reminds me of the Stanford address where Jobs claims that computers may not
have had typography if he'd not done a calligraphy course.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc> I'm sure the Parc guys that
founded Adobe would beg to differ.

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rimantas

      I'm sure the Parc guys that founded Adobe would beg to
      differ.
    

Maybe, but I am not sure how much. I'd say Apple played a major role in Adobe
becoming Adobe. It was Jobs who persuaded them to change initial plan to build
the whole package: computer + printer, and focus on software which Apple
needed for LaserWriter.

    
    
      "Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure
      we had the resources to stay in business, and Apple
      also bought a little less than 20 percent of the
      company, which quintupled the value of the original
      investors' money. Steve wanted to make sure that we
      finish this product, because it was critical for him
      to have the LaserWriter"
    
      "Fortunately, there was a young marketing guy at Apple
      named John Scull, who aware of what was going on (as
      were we) at Aldus up in Seattle, because PageMaker come
      out at the same time as the LaserWriter did. He came up
      with the idea of getting the three companies—Apple, Aldus
      and Adobe—together to put together a marketing campaign called
      "desktop publishing".
    

Source: Interview with Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems in
"Founders at work".

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mkinsella
Typography has always been a bit of a black art for me. In the end, I usually
just settle on something that (I think) doesn't look terrible. Anyone have
some basic and intermediate tutorials/guides, sites, and book recommendations?

~~~
oneplusone
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is an amazing book. It
is a very easy read and very educational.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style)

~~~
eswat
Yeah, it’s a great read and reference afterwards.

Here’s a companion site for applying the book to the web:
<http://webtypography.net/toc/>

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kanwisher
Typographers are an interesting breed, I would have never noticed any of these
details. But they make a big difference rather surprised apple isn't
interested in this area anymore

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tesseract
Idea: I should write a Knuth-Plass patch for WebKit!

 _takes a gander at RenderBlockLineLayout.cpp_

Never mind then. The number of special cases in there is frightening.

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joubert
Any one interested in typography, a good documentary to watch is Helvetica.

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acg
Although it's probably not the author's fault the typesetting of the article
is dreadful too. Because of this the article seems less authoritative.

~~~
asolove
How so?

~~~
acg
Reading the text is made difficult by the spacing used. The paragraph headings
for instance just look like bold text and could be spaced better to allow them
to be found in the page. The ragged right edge is too ragged and makes the
text difficult to read.

~~~
thingie
If it wasn't ragged, it would most likely look even worse than that Pooh
example in the article. It depends on the size of font, which you can't (on
the web) control. And he is right, justified paragraphs without hyphenation
are ugly, unless you have a lot of characters on a line. Which he has not
(around the images especially), and the example is even worse. I wouldn't even
think of displaying justified paragraphs for lines shorter than, say… 80
characters or with hyphenations [1]. But even printed newspapers give up
justification in narrow columns and has ragged right.

[1] I think that you could make it in javascript. With too few characters on a
line, display paragraphs ragged, with more, justified. Maybe someone already
did it.

~~~
acg
Too ragged was the criticism, which is different from not ragged. There is
enough control in CSS to make it look better, and many people do.

~~~
asolove
Really? I am not aware of a way to do this (other than just making the line
longer relative to the font size, which statistically makes the breaks more
even)

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nkm
An interesting read, imo.

Via MacStories [http://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-ipad-from-a-
typographer-p...](http://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-ipad-from-a-typographer-
point-of-view/)

~~~
Silhouette
Just to avoid giving the link-spammer any more free visitors, I confirm that
the link in the parent comment is nothing but a ripped excerpt from the
original with no extra content.

~~~
nkm
My apologies. Just wanted to give credit to site where I found the article
(which I have nothing to do with, by the way).

~~~
Silhouette
Sorry, I didn't notice that you were also the original poster, and mistook
your comment for link-spam (as, presumably, did the other down-voters).

~~~
nkm
No problem :), the comment makes it look like spam, actually.

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jff
I don't know about the rest of you, but attempting to open this in Chrome on
Linux totally toasts my browser, i.e. nothing will load any more.

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threwoff
Chorded keyboards didn't work because they had _keys_. Smartphones didn't work
because they had not enough _board_. So, if you come up with something that's
larger than a smartphone and can run a chorded keyboard without keys, you
use...

...yes, you use qwerty. It's not just the typography. Typing in iPad is
stupid, too.

~~~
eru
Why would I want to use qwerty?

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moe
It still baffles me that people _want_ to read books on the iPad in first
place.

Reading on a backlit screen is well known to tire your eyes very quickly, due
to the low resolution and (afaik) because the eyes' Rhodopsin depletes faster
while staring into a light source.

I have heard people arguing that we spend half our days in front of a
computer-screen anyways, but that is a different kind of usage. During
computer use the eye is mostly scanning and rarely reading chunks of text
longer than a page at once. Book reading is a different story, as anyone who
has tried to do that on a backlit screen can confirm.

Consequently this argument about (Book-)typography misses the point for me. If
you want a good reading experience then get an e-ink device or stick with
paper. Even the best font can only marginally reduce the inherent problems
with staring a backlit screen for extended periods of time...

~~~
KirinDave
Sir, I heartily recommend that you avoid making biological claims that you
clearly understand only dimly.

In any event, I have read numerous books and publications on my led backlit
monitor for my laptop and not experienced significant eyestrain. The amount of
eyestrain I feel is roughly analogous to reading in similar environments.

Modern display technology has come a long way from the days of CRTs. I think
this complaint is weak at best and unfounded at worst.

~~~
mhd
While I agree with the general statement that it isn't that easy, just
providing anecdotal evidence doesn't really help a lot.

The problem with all that is that there are a multitudes of factor in play.
Contrast, type size, surrounding light, age of the reader, frequency of
breaks... A college student reading his textbook on his iPad or Laptop in a
well-lit university is different from an insomniac septuagenarian reading
"Eat, Pray, Love" in bed, with the light set low to avoid waking hubby.

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/do-e-readers-
cause-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/do-e-readers-cause-eye-
strain/)

~~~
KirinDave
From your article: “First of all: doctors say that reading on a screen won’t
cause any harm.”

I feel like the post originating this discussion was somewhat alarmist. It's
definitely true that some conditions that ereaders (of varying types) present
can cause fatigue faster than reading a printed page in a well-lit room.

And please don't take my statements as proof, because I'm not offering
anything besides the null hypothesis: reading is reading and there isn't any
special magic to screen reading that makes it an eyeblaster.

~~~
mhd
I'm certainly not going for the "staring at a light bulb" argument... I think
in the end it's probably a rather minor difference, akin to bad paragraph
typesetting, bad fonts or even ligatures and hyphenation. Certainly not
roasted eyeball territory...

In the end, what people like will be more important. I remember reading some
studies where font choice on readability was tested, and the font that tested
best wasn't the preferred one. Probably the same for reading devices. Let's
say you compare the Kindle and the iPad for high school use. And let's say
independent tests made clear that reading comprehension for the Kindle is
better. Then you still would have to consider whether the kids aren't much
more likely to pick up the iPad in the first place. Reading slightly slower is
better than not reading at all. (Well, never mind that choosing more
interesting books would probably make a bigger impact. Friggin' Lord of the
Flies...)

