Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#21

Post by ilammy » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #17

jjgreen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the (a) way that TeX would hyphenate it: $ tex This is TeX, Version 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2016) (preloaded format=tex) **\relax *\showhyphens{typographer} Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) detected at line 0 [] \tenrm ty-pog-ra-pher

Thanks, that’s interesting! So it breaks all of the morphemes? I’d prefer typo-grapher or typograph-er to the above options. I wonder if people who are more or less visual would have different preferences. I’m visual, so perhaps I optimize for the visual appearance of morphemes as opposed to the syllable breaks?

> So it breaks all of the morphemes?

Not really. TeX uses Knuth-Liang algorithm which does not do any morphological or semantical analysis.

You basically feed it a corpus of words, it learns substrings that contain word breaks more often, condenses this information, and uses that to guess where an arbitrary word could be hyphenated.

In particular, TeX's hyphenation data contains lines

    y3po
    5po4g

which strongly suggest that when TeX sees substrings “ypo” and “?pog” they can be hyphenated as “y-po” and “?-pog”. (Odd weights allow hyphenation, even weights discourage it.)

That's why “typograher” is hyphenated like that, since it's not in the exception list.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#22

Post by 1f60c » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

Is there a list of changes somewhere?

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#23

Post by neolog » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 11:04 AM UTC

ilammy wrote: post #21

gnicholas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that’s interesting! So it breaks all of the morphemes? I’d prefer typo-grapher or typograph-er to the above options. I wonder if people who are more or less visual would have different preferences. I’m visual, so perhaps I optimize for the visual appearance of morphemes as opposed to the syllable breaks?

> So it breaks all of the morphemes? Not really. TeX uses Knuth-Liang algorithm which does not do any morphological or semantical analysis. You basically feed it a corpus of words, it learns substrings that contain word breaks more often, condenses this information, and uses that to guess where an arbitrary word could be hyphenated. In particular, TeX's hyphenation data contains lines y3po 5po4g which strongly sugges…

Is there a morpheme-aware version?

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#24

Post by bjoli » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 11:29 AM UTC

I think Matthew is doing great work. I have a lotmof respect for what he does and how he goes about it. I find that many things he says are good ways to make pleasant to read (and legible) documents. But:

Please do use Arial. I find it better than about 95% of the choices done by "people that care about typography". Or even better, let other people that care about how their web experience looks chose for themselves. I had the habit of not allowing websites to use their own fonts, but since about 5 years this has led to so much breakage because apparently I HAVE to download 700kb of fonts to render the site properly.

Even though browsers have started rendering web fonts OKish the last couple of years, I still encounter sites daily where I would prefer a monospaced font to whatever abomination the site is using. A bad choice of font is worse than an ok font that make a minuscule group think "this guy doesnt care about typography".

... And don't get me started on ligature abuse...

Edit: for some reason though, people seem to produce better in-print material than web material. Maybe the tooling is better, or people just think it through better.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#25

Post by snoopen » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 12:17 PM UTC

bjoli wrote: post #24

I think Matthew is doing great work. I have a lotmof respect for what he does and how he goes about it. I find that many things he says are good ways to make pleasant to read (and legible) documents. But: Please do use Arial. I find it better than about 95% of the choices done by "people that care about typography". Or even better, let other people that care about how their web experience looks chose for themselves.…

I am okay with people choosing whatever font they like, it's their content and their artistic freedom to do so. You HAVE to download their font to the same extent you have to download their images and CSS.

There's always reading mode for when their choices aren't compatible with a given configuration.

Having said that, I haven't come across many if any sites that don't render well because of poor font choices.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#26

Post by jhanschoo » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #17

jjgreen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the (a) way that TeX would hyphenate it: $ tex This is TeX, Version 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2016) (preloaded format=tex) **\relax *\showhyphens{typographer} Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) detected at line 0 [] \tenrm ty-pog-ra-pher

Thanks, that’s interesting! So it breaks all of the morphemes? I’d prefer typo-grapher or typograph-er to the above options. I wonder if people who are more or less visual would have different preferences. I’m visual, so perhaps I optimize for the visual appearance of morphemes as opposed to the syllable breaks?

Something I learnt a while back is that the dots that punctuate headwords in dictionary definitions aren't there to show you morpheme or syllable boundaries, they're there to indicate hyphenation points.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#27

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

bjoli wrote: post #24

I think Matthew is doing great work. I have a lotmof respect for what he does and how he goes about it. I find that many things he says are good ways to make pleasant to read (and legible) documents. But: Please do use Arial. I find it better than about 95% of the choices done by "people that care about typography". Or even better, let other people that care about how their web experience looks chose for themselves.…

> Please do use Arial. I find it better than about 95% of the choices done by "people that care about typography".

It may be better than 95% of the choices done by people who try to differentiate by picking a non-default font for the sake of picking a non-default font, which is certainly worse than just keeping the default, but I doubt very much that it is better than even 5% of the choices made by people who care about typography.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#28

Post by aasasd » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

It seems Valkyrie is again the default font, which is great. With it, the site is the most beautiful thing on the whole web, every interval and spacing on it being just right—or at least having been so in the first edition, as I'm not yet seeing what's different now. I'm repeatedly consumed with envy at the author, not so far able to achieve such perfection myself.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#29

Post by gwern » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

epse wrote: post #10

gnicholas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed it was some sort of algorithmic choice to allow hyphenation that leaves only two characters on one line. I would set the threshold for this to be greater than 2, assuming no other 'intelligence' is used. For example, it could be OK in some circumstances, in the case of the word "irredeemable". But even there, I think it would be jarring to see "ir" at the end of a line, and I would rather just have the whol…

He has written and uses (at least for the last edition) a Racket library / language for this book that also automatically adds unicode soft hyphens where appropriate in words, so I assume this is one of them

Incidentally, this is no longer necessary. Gwern.net used the same trick but we removed it last week (to much rejoicing).

The main reason to auto-add soft hyphens is because, unlike almost all other browsers, desktop Chrome has for decades not supported hyphenation (even though mobile Chrome does!). But they finally shipped support last year, and now market support for hyphenation is around 95%+ according to CanIUse. So you can just drop the soft hyphen pass and rely on normal CSS to specify justification.

This is good because it simplifies HTML creation, makes the HTML noticeably smaller & better compressing, makes it more readable, search/replace more reliable, buggy screen readers no longer pronounce soft hyphens (another real WTF moment for me), doesn't require hacks like the JS copylistener to strip them out...

Anyway long story short, if you've been using the soft hyphen trick, I suggest revisiting the decision now.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#30

Post by bovermyer » Mon, Apr 05, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

What's new in the second edition, from the Introduction:

> New in the second edition: emoticons and emoji, metrics vs. optical spacing, free fonts, century schoolbook alternatives, grids, screen-reading considerations, responsive web design, how to work with a designer, the copyright status of fonts, how this book was made, and typographic humor.