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Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

practicaltypography.com

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Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#11

Post by motiejus »

I spent an evening reading this, it was enjoyable. It was more enjoyable than an "average" pre-covid entertainment I could get for $19. So I sent $19 for the author, all for a very enjoyable evening.

My favourites:

1. https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html strong thoughts on Arial font.

2. https://practicaltypography.com/the-cowardice-of-brave.html very strong thoughts on Brave browser.

3. https://practicaltypography.com/websites.html author bashing hamburger menu (and some other current-day fashions). Although I disagree with custom fonts for websites -- fonts for that page alone are a whopping 713KB compressed. See https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

4. https://practicaltypography.com/why-you-should-pay.html meta: about paying for a free book.

There is also good educated advice on font recommendations. I also like his fonts, but don't have a use for them yet.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#12

Post by gnicholas »

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

How does it decide where is appropriate? Is it based on the length of the potential fragments, the length of the word, some sort of ratio, or something else?

I'd rather have a hyphenation algorithm err on the side of fewer hyphenations, but perhaps that's just me. My understanding is that a ragged right edge can improve visual tracking ability because it makes the paragraph less visually uniform. No one wants things to be too ragged, but in this case two chars doesn't seem like it's worth the tradeoff.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#13

Post by jjgreen »

gnicholas wrote: post #4

I have enjoyed perusing this in the past, but when I see the word "typographer" split across two lines as "ty" and "pographer" [1] in the first paragraph of the "Typography in ten minutes" page, [2] it gives me pause. What is the point of having two letters (especially these two, which do not form a morpheme) on the first line? I find this to impair readability and not to enhance aesthetics in any meaningful way. Is…

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

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#14

Post by 1_player »

"For instance, please don’t adopt the slogan “A Design Firm Unlike Any Other” and then set it in Helvetica."

I feel vindicated. Helvetica might have been cool when it was invented in the 50s, but nowadays it's the most overused and overrated font around. I dislike it with a passion.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#15

Post by aiilns »

This might seem like useless criticism but oh well.

In "straight and curly quotes" it says:

"By replacing the curly opening and closing quotes with ambidextrous straight quotes, two slots became available for other characters."

But surely one slot became available. If two were used for curly quotes and then one for the straight ones, only one would become available.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#16

Post by dragonwriter »

aiilns wrote: post #15

This might seem like useless criticism but oh well. In "straight and curly quotes" it says: "By replacing the curly opening and closing quotes with ambidextrous straight quotes, two slots became available for other characters." But surely one slot became available. If two were used for curly quotes and then one for the straight ones, only one would become available.

> But surely one slot became available.

Two is correct.

> If two were used for curly quotes and then one for the straight ones, only one would become available.

Yes, but in fact four slots would have been required for curlies, while two were used for straights. Single and double quotes are two different characters when straight, and two different pairs when curly.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#17

Post by gnicholas »

jjgreen wrote: post #13
gnicholas wrote: post #4

I have enjoyed perusing this in the past, but when I see the word "typographer" split across two lines as "ty" and "pographer" [1] in the first paragraph of the "Typography in ten minutes" page, [2] it gives me pause. What is the point of having two letters (especially these two, which do not form a morpheme) on the first line? I find this to impair readability and not to enhance aesthetics in any meaningful way. Is…

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?

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#18

Post by Jenz »

yuchi wrote: post #3

The first edition literally changed the way I type and gave me additional paranoid behavior other than kerning awareness, which I already obtained. I kept it as a reference for years until most habits became ingrained. Attention to non English writers: always ensure what your language’s typography rules requires for every topic. You may find subtle and huge differences!

> You may find subtle and huge differences!

Quotation marks especially vary, see wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#19

Post by aiilns »

dragonwriter wrote: post #16
aiilns wrote: post #15

This might seem like useless criticism but oh well. In "straight and curly quotes" it says: "By replacing the curly opening and closing quotes with ambidextrous straight quotes, two slots became available for other characters." But surely one slot became available. If two were used for curly quotes and then one for the straight ones, only one would become available.

> But surely one slot became available. Two is correct. > If two were used for curly quotes and then one for the straight ones, only one would become available. Yes, but in fact four slots would have been required for curlies, while two were used for straights. Single and double quotes are two different characters when straight, and two different pairs when curly.

Ah thanks. Haven't ever seen a typewriter and ingorantly assumed you'd get double quotes from pressing a single quote twice.

Re: Butterick’s Practical Typography 2º Edition

#20

Post by RobertKerans »

gnicholas wrote: post #12
epse wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does it decide where is appropriate? Is it based on the length of the potential fragments, the length of the word, some sort of ratio, or something else? I'd rather have a hyphenation algorithm err on the side of fewer hyphenations, but perhaps that's just me. My understanding is that a ragged right edge can improve visual tracking ability because it makes the paragraph less visually uniform. No one wants things…

Uses Knuth/Liang hyphenation algorithm, which prioritises prevention of incorrect hyphens over perfect output (which is not practical -- dictionary size has to be limited). It's never going to be completely correct, the trade-off for having a few weird hyphenations is that overall it's generally ok, and yes, the alternative is ragged right. By default minimum length is two, and I assume the output is using that (haven't checked).

Edit: found the overview from the docs -- https://docs.racket-lang.org/hyphenate/index.html

And Liang's thesis (PDF): https://tug.org/docs/liang/liang-thesis.pdf

Edit edit: from memory (and it's been about 9 years since I last worked in print so a bit foggy), for print it's generally best to set either 2 or 3 as a minimum: 4 is pushing it and tends to cause issues. With print, set using the hyphenation algo then worked forward from the start of the book fixing any spacing issues. With web can't do latter and width is changeable, so there are always going to be issues with justification. I can't imagine any situation where the browser could operate fast enough to render accurately hyphenated text without using a huge amount of resource.

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