
Rubrication Design Examples - sillysaurusx
https://www.gwern.net/Red
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nkurz
Halfway down there page there are some historic example alphabets. They looked
very normal to me at first, but when I looked closer, I got confused.

The capitals in the "Lombardic Alphabet" start off looking like a modern
English alphabet, but I found a lot of the letters to be hard to
differentiate. Capital C and capital E both have an "extra" vertical stroke on
the right that closes them. The difference between a capital A and a capital F
seems to be solely that the A has double horizontal strokes. Was this
standard?

The Lombardic lower case letters are closer to current typography (with an
additional long-s) but I was surprised that some letters seem to exist only in
lower case. Were there simply no words that used capital J, capital X, or
capital Z?

In the next image (Plate 67, Tymns) there are also differences between the
capital and lower-case letters. But they seem to be different omissions than
the first example: no capital U, V, W or X, but there is a capital Z. And the
capital I (or at least, whichever letter that is between H and L) looks very
odd. What's happening here?

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aasasd
I'd think that a person with this attention to typography would ditch
justified text in a blink. Looking at justified text from a distance: nice
blocks of ink. Reading justified text: what are these huge spaces, where's
carefully adjusted rhythm of word spacing? Even with hyphenation, it's plainly
noticeable, especially on a phone.

~~~
bobcostas55
Why are people so bothered by justification when reading on a screen, while
it's clearly preferred when it comes to books?

Is it just because the automated justification algorithms are so terrible?

~~~
aasasd
Afaik specifically browsers' hyphenation algorithms aren't made for optimal
output. Software like InDesign or TeX spends some time juggling the text to
find the best layout for an entire page or several of them, taking a bunch of
factors into account. Meanwhile, a browser has to slap a paragraph together in
a few milliseconds.

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gwern
I don't think speed is the main problem. People have reimplemented the TeX
algorithm in JS and it's fine. After all, Knuth was doing pages per second
back in the 1970s, and it's 2019. But the problem there is that it breaks some
sort of CSS property and so the browsers adamantly refuse to use it and the
devs say that not much can be done to improve things.

~~~
aasasd
Ah, yes, I've heard about this: proper justification with even spacing is
incompatible with the CSS spec, as iirc the spec pretty much says a paragraph
must take minimum vertical space. Alas exact details elude me, as well as why
a spec change wouldn't fix this.

~~~
gwern
Yes, something like that. Greedy layout is required. As for a spec change -
changing the standard? And who knows what it would break at this point? Might
as well wish for a pony.

~~~
aasasd
Eh, from the level of discussion on such issues it seems that every detail of
rendering is figured out even outside browser teams. And since afaik it's
browser implementors who are defining the spec nowadays, I have some hope that
they'll see the light.

