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Re: [Groff] Re: UTP paragraph spacing


From: Meg McRoberts
Subject: Re: [Groff] Re: UTP paragraph spacing
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 16:56:53 -0700 (PDT)

I'm loving this discussion, but how many of the rest of you are
interested?  Should we take it off-list if we want to continue?

--- Steve Izma <address@hidden> wrote:

> Meg,
> 
> Thanks for the reply. Even though I've been a typographer for 30
> years, I'm thoroughly re-scrutinzing my ideas in this field these
> days, largely through the influence of a couple of books on
> typography and printing written or edited by Robert Bringhurst. I
> highly recommend them ("A Short History of the Printed Word"
> [co-authored by Bringhurst] and "The Elements of Typographic
> Style"); they are useful even if you just peruse them.
> Bringhurt's background is as a poet and an anthropologist, so he
> brings a broad aesthetic to typography.

These sound fascinating -- I'll see if I can find them.
 
> The O'Reilly books, which I generally like (although mostly for
> their content and organization), prove my point it seems to me:
> when a paragraph ends a page, you need to think twice at the top
> of the next page as to whether you are about to read a
> continuation of the previous thought or whether you should pause
> and digest the previous paragraph.

An interesting thought.  Technical books use so many headers and
subheaders that I think I take my visual cues from them about when
the subject is changing.

My own academic training (and personal reading) is decidedly non-technical
(Medieval Jewish history, to be precise), but after many years writing
UNIX documentation, I live a very split-personality life and jump easily
between the style used in history books and that used in technical manuals.
 
> Bringhurst talks about the rhythm of the page: eveness and
> consistency of lines produces a rhythm that allows one to
> concentrate on the content and know about its continuity.

This is definitely true in poetry and anthropology but is it true
for technical manuals?  My impression is that much of the technical
audience is ill-inclined to read the whole page period -- I have often
handed a page to someone to review when the page was 2/3 text plus a
code sample, and they'll grab it, check the code sample, and hand it
back.  It seems that many technical people read displays, lists, and
code samples and ignore the rest of the prose.

> Vertical whitespace is a signal of interruption and I think should
> only be used as a sign for the reader to pause substantially, as
> in new sections, or around examples. Indented blocks or examples
> should have a different amount of indent than paragraphs in order
> to avoid ambiguity.

The problem here is with too many vertical lines on the page -- a page
can quickly look quite jumbled.
 
> I think that within the technical sphere, people are just used to
> using terminals where the clearest paragraph break is an extra
> hard return (like I am here). And page breaks don't really occur
> on the screen. Also, computer-oriented people tend to dump stuff
> out onto letter-sized sheets in one column, producing long lines
> (usually around six inches) that are very awkward to read,
> and an extra line space between paragraphs comes as a relief.

Technical people have also told me that the 5-space indent is unnatural
for them -- they are so used to the 8-space indent that is commonly used
in C code.  I was surprised by this but I honor it whenever possible.
 
> But in designing the typography for a book, I think we should be
> more concerned with these details. After all, even though I spend
> a good deal of my life getting used to the style of technical
> publications, the vast majority of my reading consists of
> published material that has more conventional and well-worked-out
> typographical styles. I think this is likely true of most of us.

Chances are that this is true for most of us on this list.  But it seems
that a large part of the technical community doesn't read a lot except
when absolutely necessary, so in many cases, the technical manuals are
all that they read.

And, the nature of many technical books is that there are a LOT of displays
and such on many pages, so it may be that the optimal layout is different
than it would be for books that are mostly text with occasional large indented
block quotes and perhaps an illustration here and there.  Now I'm curious --
I want to check a couple cookbooks to see whether paragraphs are indented
or not -- that's another type of book that has lots of displays and very
short paragraphs interspersed.

I do believe that the goal of the current project is to reproduce the original
book as closely as possible, but when we get to doing a rewrite, we may want
to adjust the typographical style.  The centered level 2 subheaders are another
element that is leading to the zig-zag on the left of the page...  Again, it
seems like most technical books these days are using left-justified headers
within chapters -- the chapter title is sometimes centered, sometimes not.

meg

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