Typography on the iPad | Hacker News Reader

Typography on the iPad

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116 pointsnkm38 comments

Reminds me of the Stanford address where Jobs claims that computers may not have had typography if he'd not done a calligraphy course. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc I'm sure the Parc guys that founded Adobe would beg to differ.

  I'm sure the Parc guys that founded Adobe would beg to
  differ.

Maybe, but I am not sure how much. I'd say Apple played a major role in Adobe becoming Adobe. It was Jobs who persuaded them to change initial plan to build the whole package: computer + printer, and focus on software which Apple needed for LaserWriter.

  "Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure
  we had the resources to stay in business, and Apple
  also bought a little less than 20 percent of the
  company, which quintupled the value of the original
  investors' money. Steve wanted to make sure that we
  finish this product, because it was critical for him
  to have the LaserWriter"

  "Fortunately, there was a young marketing guy at Apple
  named John Scull, who aware of what was going on (as
  were we) at Aldus up in Seattle, because PageMaker come
  out at the same time as the LaserWriter did. He came up
  with the idea of getting the three companies—Apple, Aldus
  and Adobe—together to put together a marketing campaign called
  "desktop publishing".

Source: Interview with Charles Geschke, cofounder of Adobe Systems in "Founders at work".

Wow, imagine if Jobs had taken a microbiology course. Apple computers would be able to cure cancer by now.

[TeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) was released in 1978, though I'm not sure as to the time line of the other developments.

Typography has always been a bit of a black art for me. In the end, I usually just settle on something that (I think) doesn't look terrible. Anyone have some basic and intermediate tutorials/guides, sites, and book recommendations?

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is an amazing book. It is a very easy read and very educational.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...

Yeah, it’s a great read and reference afterwards.

Here’s a companion site for applying the book to the web: http://webtypography.net/toc/

(By the way, “black art” is a old fashioned term for typesetting. Good choice of words there!)

typographica.org has type classifications (plus reviews). It's a good resource if you need to use a typeface somewhere (apps, pubblicatios). But I have to note that it's mainly used by designers for "inspirational purposes".

This is my go-to reference for web typography. It's simple enough that I can re-read the whole thing whenever I need to make things that aren't completely hideous.

http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-...

Despite the name which makes it sound like it's only for lawyers, I learned a lot from this website: http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/ .

Typographers are an interesting breed, I would have never noticed any of these details. But they make a big difference rather surprised apple isn't interested in this area anymore

Idea: I should write a Knuth-Plass patch for WebKit!

takes a gander at RenderBlockLineLayout.cpp

Never mind then. The number of special cases in there is frightening.

Any one interested in typography, a good documentary to watch is Helvetica.

Although it's probably not the author's fault the typesetting of the article is dreadful too. Because of this the article seems less authoritative.

How so?

Reading the text is made difficult by the spacing used. The paragraph headings for instance just look like bold text and could be spaced better to allow them to be found in the page. The ragged right edge is too ragged and makes the text difficult to read.

If it wasn't ragged, it would most likely look even worse than that Pooh example in the article. It depends on the size of font, which you can't (on the web) control. And he is right, justified paragraphs without hyphenation are ugly, unless you have a lot of characters on a line. Which he has not (around the images especially), and the example is even worse. I wouldn't even think of displaying justified paragraphs for lines shorter than, say… 80 characters or with hyphenations [1]. But even printed newspapers give up justification in narrow columns and has ragged right.

[1] I think that you could make it in javascript. With too few characters on a line, display paragraphs ragged, with more, justified. Maybe someone already did it.

Too ragged was the criticism, which is different from not ragged. There is enough control in CSS to make it look better, and many people do.

Really? I am not aware of a way to do this (other than just making the line longer relative to the font size, which statistically makes the breaks more even)

Web browsers do text justification horribly. Beyond not hyphenating words, they also don't change the spacing inside the word. (I want to say this is kerning, but I can't determine if that applies to adjustable space, or only to the static space.) Until web browser can handle that, there's no reason to justify text on a webpage.

Reducing the how ragged the right-hand-side is involves better spacing not justification.

An interesting read, imo.

Via MacStories http://www.macstories.net/ipad/the-ipad-from-a-typographer-p...

Just to avoid giving the link-spammer any more free visitors, I confirm that the link in the parent comment is nothing but a ripped excerpt from the original with no extra content.

My apologies. Just wanted to give credit to site where I found the article (which I have nothing to do with, by the way).

Sorry, I didn't notice that you were also the original poster, and mistook your comment for link-spam (as, presumably, did the other down-voters).

No problem :), the comment makes it look like spam, actually.

I don't know about the rest of you, but attempting to open this in Chrome on Linux totally toasts my browser, i.e. nothing will load any more.

Chorded keyboards didn't work because they had keys. Smartphones didn't work because they had not enough board. So, if you come up with something that's larger than a smartphone and can run a chorded keyboard without keys, you use...

...yes, you use qwerty. It's not just the typography. Typing in iPad is stupid, too.

Why would I want to use qwerty?

It still baffles me that people want to read books on the iPad in first place.

Reading on a backlit screen is well known to tire your eyes very quickly, due to the low resolution and (afaik) because the eyes' Rhodopsin depletes faster while staring into a light source.

I have heard people arguing that we spend half our days in front of a computer-screen anyways, but that is a different kind of usage. During computer use the eye is mostly scanning and rarely reading chunks of text longer than a page at once. Book reading is a different story, as anyone who has tried to do that on a backlit screen can confirm.

Consequently this argument about (Book-)typography misses the point for me. If you want a good reading experience then get an e-ink device or stick with paper. Even the best font can only marginally reduce the inherent problems with staring a backlit screen for extended periods of time...

Sir, I heartily recommend that you avoid making biological claims that you clearly understand only dimly.

In any event, I have read numerous books and publications on my led backlit monitor for my laptop and not experienced significant eyestrain. The amount of eyestrain I feel is roughly analogous to reading in similar environments.

Modern display technology has come a long way from the days of CRTs. I think this complaint is weak at best and unfounded at worst.

Relevant: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230333830457515...

The question is how big a hit on reading speed. It's possible to read on anything so that's not a useful criterion.

Personally e-ink is only a small difference off paperback and faster than a hard back. My last LCD was about an hour longer for a book but it had a smaller screen (and the big problem wrt the LCD was a backlight turning off).

Realistically it's things like: how do you turn a page; can you do it with either hand; is it easy to hold. That make more difference.

While I agree with the general statement that it isn't that easy, just providing anecdotal evidence doesn't really help a lot.

The problem with all that is that there are a multitudes of factor in play. Contrast, type size, surrounding light, age of the reader, frequency of breaks... A college student reading his textbook on his iPad or Laptop in a well-lit university is different from an insomniac septuagenarian reading "Eat, Pray, Love" in bed, with the light set low to avoid waking hubby.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/do-e-readers-cause-...

From your article: “First of all: doctors say that reading on a screen won’t cause any harm.”

I feel like the post originating this discussion was somewhat alarmist. It's definitely true that some conditions that ereaders (of varying types) present can cause fatigue faster than reading a printed page in a well-lit room.

And please don't take my statements as proof, because I'm not offering anything besides the null hypothesis: reading is reading and there isn't any special magic to screen reading that makes it an eyeblaster.

I'm certainly not going for the "staring at a light bulb" argument... I think in the end it's probably a rather minor difference, akin to bad paragraph typesetting, bad fonts or even ligatures and hyphenation. Certainly not roasted eyeball territory...

In the end, what people like will be more important. I remember reading some studies where font choice on readability was tested, and the font that tested best wasn't the preferred one. Probably the same for reading devices. Let's say you compare the Kindle and the iPad for high school use. And let's say independent tests made clear that reading comprehension for the Kindle is better. Then you still would have to consider whether the kids aren't much more likely to pick up the iPad in the first place. Reading slightly slower is better than not reading at all. (Well, never mind that choosing more interesting books would probably make a bigger impact. Friggin' Lord of the Flies...)

I read GEB on a LC display. Sure, there are trade offs — I think my reading speed is noticably slower — but my eyes just refuse to strain. I would take the advantage of having all my books in digital form over dead wood books any time. This is just a anecdote but I think there is a lesson here: the digital book reading experience doesn't have to be on par with old books in every way to win out. Being a bit worse in one respect might no matter in the long run.

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