
Byrne’s Euclid – A reproduction of the celebrated work from 1847 - akalin
https://www.c82.net/euclid/
======
weinzierl
Tufte reproduced one diagram and the accompanying text as an example in one of
his books. It might have been "Envisioning Information" but I'm not sure.

If I remember correctly he had lots of praise for the visualization and said
that appart from the font it had a very contemporary look despite being from
the 19th century. Tufte also showed a variant that added colored labels, but I
don't remeber if he recommended it. Another thing I remeber is a sidenote
about how complicated it was to get the colors right in print.

EDIT: I was wondering if Tufte's book was the inspiration for this but
couldn't find a reference at first. The making-of blog post mentions Tufte's
work:

> Byrne’s work was largely ignored and criticized at the time of publication
> but it has gained renewed interest in recent years in part due to a mention
> from Edward Tufte in Envisioning Information and a reproduction by Taschen.

[..] > Inspiration

> I can’t recall when I first learned of Byrne’s edition but it was likely
> from Tufte or seeing Taschen in passing.

[https://c82.net/blog/?id=79](https://c82.net/blog/?id=79)

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lambdadmitry
There is also a version in ConTeXt (arguably a bit higher quality and with
some very impressive programmatic typography):
[https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-
euclid](https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid)

~~~
theoh
The typography is definitely competitive. It's unfortunate that TeX and
Metafont are so dated and so austere in terms of what they offer the
programmer. It's a big barrier to figuring out what is going on. The author of
the c82.net version is obviously a meticulous graphic designer, but his
priorities are clearly so far away from the mindset needed to enjoy writing
complex TeX that the comparison is a bit difficult to make.

Where the ConTeXt one falls down, aesthetically speaking, is the lettrines
(which, by the way, are more usually called initials in English). They show
the marks of having been procedurally generated rather than hand-drawn, for
example in the way that the line width doesn't vary, and the way the curves
appear to be piecewise circular arcs.

It's not possible to make beautiful organic arabesques with a few piecewise
circular arcs, it just ends up looking crude and mechanical. Mathematicians
are inclined to be insensitive to this problem.

Take the following invented curve, for example. The junctions between
different arcs aren't smooth enough. No typographer would accept it, although
it goes without saying that typeface design is not a highly complex
intellectual activity comparable with math—it's about judging things by eye.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-
numb...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-
numberland/2015/jan/13/golden-ratio-beautiful-new-curve-harriss-spiral)

It's a shame that fragmentation of expertise means that the mathematicians and
the typeface designers don't generally communicate.

------
reggieband
I have an edition of this published by Taschen [1] and spent some time going
through it (about 3/4 of the way through).

My main frustration is there are many mistakes. In an effort to keep the text
aligned with the original, those mistakes are in-line and the corrections are
at the beginning of the book in a prefix. This makes following the proofs a
bit difficult since once you get far enough along the mistakes compound. The
later proofs are built on earlier proofs. There are some instances where Proof
C has a mistake that relies on Proof B that has a mistake, etc. And then
flipping back to the corrections and keeping track of all of them is a bit
difficult.

It's not a problem if you are just enjoying the book for its aesthetics but
since I was very carefully checking my understanding of the proofs it was
annoying.

I still recommend the book.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Byrne-Six-Books-Euclid-
Multilingual/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Byrne-Six-Books-Euclid-
Multilingual/dp/3836559382/ref=sr_1_1)

------
jhbadger
Interesting that the book uses the old-fashioned "long s" (that somewhat looks
like an "f") despite being from 1847. The "long s" was already falling out of
favor by the late 1700s.

~~~
tokai
The publisher William Pickering was apparently a publisher of high quality.
But I have seen Byrne been described as eccentric. Maybe he demanded the use
of the long s. It was still used in handwriting regularly that century.

~~~
leoc
Oddness and lavish mid-Victorian colour printing did seem to go together, yes:
[https://books.google.ie/books?id=SugpRWf_FB4C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA...](https://books.google.ie/books?id=SugpRWf_FB4C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=%22the+invention+of+tradition%22+%22any+method+of+colour-
printing+subsequently+invented%22&source=bl&ots=Ne-
uOhqRFR&sig=y4woaYEzLPKgLSbZBzYTV3DJF_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYp_Gj7qbfAhUCqXEKHbOwAzYQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22the%20invention%20of%20tradition%22%20%22any%20method%20of%20colour-
printing%20subsequently%20invented%22&f=false)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum)
. Like the frilly initial letters it's clearly an archaising choice meant to
hark back to early printed Euclids (see the one in
[https://www.c82.net/euclid/about/](https://www.c82.net/euclid/about/) ): part
of the nineteenth-century craze for style revivals.

