The Typography of Legal Opinions | Hacker News Reader

The Typography of Legal Opinions

typographyforlawyers.com

107 pointsgaws78 comments

I can't take seriously a typography webpage that hyphenates the word "typography" between the "g" and the "r". Why split up a morpheme like this? It really undermines the author's credibility to the casual reader, even if it might make the page look prettier to some.

EDIT: lower down, it breaks the same word two chars later, between the "a" and "p". I have never seen such aggressive typography in my life.

Merriam-Webster agrees that these are the places to hyphenate the word typography:

ty· pog· ra· phy. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/typography

That’s marking syllables, not hyphenation opportunities. There are many places where conventional hyphenation doesn’t line up with syllables.

False.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/explanatory-notes/dict-...

I stand corrected; thank you.

Is English commonly syllabified across morpheme boundaries? It just looks so... wrong.

Per the other thread, the interpuncts mark accepted end-of-line hyphenation positions, not syllables. Merriam-Webster does also indicate syllable breaks with hyphens in its pronunciations, which I assume are (some variant of?) Americanist notation:

  \ tī-ˈpä-grə-fē \

In IPA syllable breaks are full stops,

  /taɪˈpɑː.ɡrə.fi/

but interestingly, the syllabification for BrE (from Cambridge Dictionary) matches the break positions:

  /taɪˈpɒɡ.rə.fi/

Possible causation?

A rationale for custom notation from Merriam-Webster's Twitter:[1]

> IPA has some problems if you grew up speaking English: some of the symbols can be deeply confusing.

> For example: the symbol 'i' (lower-case 'i') stands for the sound /ee/.

> In IPA, the symbol 'j' (lower-case 'j') stands for the sound of /y/ as in 'yes.'

I find it amusing how the Great Vowel Shift sets English apart from other Latin-alphabet languages, where long vowels are overall very alike compared together to modern English: The names of the vowels, 'A E I O U', are also their long sounds; typically (IANALinguist) outside of English they're instead close to something like (spelled Ephonetically) 'ah eh ee aw ooh', which is also reflected in the IPA assignment of /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. Funnily, the same even applies to languages in alphabets and even non-alphabetic writing systems, since the transliterations and transcriptions into the Latin alphabet are also based on vowel qualities from the Latin language itself.

Together other English peculiarities such as 'j' and silent 'e', it seems that when "fake-pronouncing" words from an unknown language by naïvely applying the pronunciation of a known language, using English guarantees being far off the actual pronunciation, with a choice of any other language being significantly more likely than not to result in a closer pronunciation.

[1] https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/130415192278247015...

There was an amusing experiment recently where they trained an ML model on different languages to see just how regular their spelling it:

https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1.pdf

English scored the worst on reading by far at 31% (the next lowest was Dutch, at 55%). It also has one of the lowest writing scores at 36%, beating only French (28%) and Chinese (20%).

It also shows what a well-designed phonemic orthography can do: Serbian scored 99% for both reading & writing, indistinguishable from Esperanto.

I think that's the browser doing the hyphenation.

I see the same thing in Firefox, but varying the page scale makes that hyphenation come and go, and setting `hyphens: none` on the CSS via the inspector disables it.

Every word in the article has soft hyphens inserted between each syllable.

I stand corrected. Firefox hid those when I viewed the source.

The document includes quite aggressive soft hyphenation insertion.

The trouble is that the web doesn’t provide you with the tools for good hyphenation. You can disable hyphenation, enable it and leave it to the browser (I think Firefox is still the only one that’ll do anything with that), or insert soft hyphens all over the place and watch the browser hyphenate gratuitously. Anything like Knuth-Plass where hyphenation and too much space are both acknowledged to to be bad and weighed against each other is still not possible out of the box (and I advise against trying it in JavaScript).

Personally, I think automatic extensive soft hyphen insertion in web documents is misguided, but that’s what MB has chosen here.

The Utah document also is far too aggressive in hyphenation for my liking. The California one is much better, having hyphenated only one line.

It's sad that browser hyphenation is still not there yet, and may never be. I'd like to use it for my own personal work but with such variable results between browsers it's better to keep everything 'typewriter-style,' as article calls it.

> I advise against trying it in JavaScript

A bunch of news sites use their own line wrapping tools, though they cause a “jump” (reflow) late in the page load as the JS kicks in. You’ll see this on the Times for instance: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/text-wrap-balance.html

We are getting to the point where so much content is delivered and consumed unhyphenated, that hyphenation should be considered harmful.

I find it harder to read any kind of hyphenated text now, it sticks out and spoils the reading flow as my brain stumbles through each hyphenation like a drunk hurdler.

British and American hyphenation rules differ. American hyphenation is at syllable boundaries while British hyphenation keeps etymological divisions together. And while typo-graphy might seem better than ty-pog-ra-phy, helico-pter comes across as a bit odd to most readers’ eyes.

Well, the exact locations of syllable boundaries are not always universally agreed upon. Here is one dictionary's entry for "typography" [1] which claims that US speakers break it up as ty-po-gra-phy while British speakers break it up as ty-pog-ra-phy.

In light of that, both the American rule (syllable boundary + American pronunciation) and British rule (morpheme boundary) should put a break in the same place: typo-graphy and not typog-raphy.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/typog...

Oxford New American dictionary (on my Mac): ty·pog·ra·phy

Random House College dictionary (print): ty·pog·ra·phy

Merriam-Webster (online, the print edition is what the TUG hyphenation exception list uses as its definitive authority): ty· pog· ra· phy

I published a typography magazine in the late 1990s, and never once heard a single person, American or otherwise, pronounce it the way Cambridge claims Americans do.

I love this comment. Are you a lawyer?

Haha what gave me away? Seven years in biglaw, then escaped by founding a software startup.

I too have strong opinions on hyphenation.

> Generously large page margins.

You know how awful large margins are if you have a PDF and a screen that isn’t large enough to display the full page at a readable size? You want to display one page at a time so j and k or Left and Right or whatever work to go to the next page rather than messing around with scrolling, but this actually means that you want to crop every page to throw away the ridiculously large margins, and most PDF viewers don’t support doing that. (To make it worse, add unbalanced left/right margins.)

I wish for a world where document formats don’t support page margins at all, in favour of choosing margins at display or print time. (Yes, I know that at the extremes this starts to conflict with static pagination which is sometimes even more valuable, but humour me anyway in contemplating what you’d change in such a world.)

I _think_ you want a feature where the reader removes any margins in the document for display. Basically, a "crop the paper format" function. And... yeah, I'd want my reader to have that! (And my Kindle! When sometimes reading a PDF, this would be great!) Does any PDF reader support something like that?

I think I’ve seen it on some desktop PDF software before, though I can’t think what, and the reMarkable can do it.

GoodReader on iPad has this (though you set it for the document manually). It even lets you choose a different view-time crop for odd and even page numbers.

For Android, Librera is able to do that.

On Android, KOReader is able to do this (and free and open source). It can even reflow the text quite well so that it fits on a smaller display like a phone, if needed.

Skim pdf is a good option if you're on macOS: https://skim-app.sourceforge.io/

In emacs with pdf-tools it seems you can enable a minor mode:

pdf-view-auto-slice-minor-mode

which does the trick. Just learned it.

EDIT: could try it. Exactly as intended. Will be of great help (I can now have a complete latex page in view with decent font size).

Okular (Linux/Windows) can do this

The ReMarkable tablet supports this natively. And, IIUC, the purpose of the margins is for notes; the ReMarkable also supports inserting blank pages into a pdf for note taking.

I've been using https://pypi.org/project/pdfCropMargins/ (and reporting bugs which have been fixed) to pre-crop my PDF files, so they work on all readers. I haven't tried PDF reflowing yet though.

Okular trims margins like that. It's not perfect with scans, and page numbers can bring them back though.

Besides the automatic trim margins option in Okular, you can also set custom margins to trim unwanted stuff.

> most PDF viewers don’t support doing that

Acrobat Reader does, while also supporting continuous vertical scrolling and cropping out the space between pages (you’ll still have the page margins). You can then just PgUp/PgDn through the entire document. I believe there are other readers supporting similar modes.

The only problem is documents that use significantly different margins for even and odd pages.

What is much worse is PDFs with multiple columns per page.

> To make it worse, add unbalanced left/right margins.

Along with headers/footers and any number of other features which can make automatic cropping difficult. I tend to read PDFs on KOReader, which is quite good at allowing the reader to zoom in on the page and follow the flow of the text, even on multicolumn documents. Yet there are undeniably limits to what it can do.

More often than not I want a “increase margin” rather than crop margin. iOS Safari and Preview even on 12.9” iPad do not support shrink the page less than device width. Large margin makes my life comfortable.

In the post "Why does typography matter?" referenced from that page, there's a great passage:

"“But I don’t have visual skills. I don’t know anything about graphic design.” That’s like saying you can’t dress properly for court because you don’t know anything about fashion design."

It's worth bearing this in mind. A kind of cookbook approach to style works well enough for many things, especially if you don't care about being perfect. As Molly says in Neuromancer, "You look like you care enough to fake it."

Upon reading the supreme court's Dobbs v. Jackson Decision, I was quite intrigued by its meticulous, book-like typesetting. Intrigued as I am, I inspected the file properties in Acrobat Reader, it only tells it was created using Acrobat Distiller. Interesting, I was expecting LaTeX or InDesign. Nevertheless, the beautiful typesetting make me want to read the whole thing.

The linked article answers many questions of mine. It provide a wonderful context on typesetting in other courts. It is good, and also not surprised to know that "best-designed court opinions" is produced by the supreme court. It is also good to know that "Times New Roman is forbidden" in supreme court.

The supreme court's opinion looks better than Congress documents as well.

I found an article that claims the “Century-only” rule isn’t about aesthetics- the court just wants to be have a meaningful word count limit. That requires limits on typeface.

https://www.cocklelegalbriefs.com/blog/preparing-your-brief/...

I don't understand, isn't the number of words in a text the same regardless of what font it's set in?

It’s easier to estimate word counts in printed documents when the font is consistent. You can’t assume all parties have access to a digital copy.

It’s about verifying the word count by looking at the number of pages. Making X pages roughly equal to Y words (or at least characters).

By itself, typeface/font doesn’t matter. But typeface/font, combined with character size and white space rules (indents, line spacing, spaces after commas, etc.) are necessary for word counts to have meaning.

Otherwise, a lawyer could use a very small font, low size, or very little white space to cram more words in the same space.

So really it’s about being able to verify the word count by looking at the paper and not counting the words.

> Upon reading the supreme court's Dobbs v. Jackson Decision, I was quite intrigued by its meticulous, book-like typesetting.

Apparently you can polish a turd.

Can you please explain for us non-Americans why that's a turd?

I refer to the fact that, however beautifully typeset the document is, the substance of the document is abhorrent and objectionable. So: a beautifully presented piece of horrific fucking shit.

I'm not American either (thank goodness).

That doesn't explain anything. Why is it so abhorrent and objectionable?

It's the ruling that rolls back roe vs Wade, the old ruling that forced all states to allow abortion. Unless you're living under a rock, I'm sure you've heard of this, perhaps not by the name of the ruling though. (I'm not American btw)

That still doesn't explain it.

I read the text, not all of it, but at least the most important bits. Then I went to https://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution... and did a Ctrl-F for "abortion" and found nothing, so the reasoning checks out. It seems perfectly justified to roll back Roe v. Wade, regardless of what your position on abortion as a nationwide right is. This is what I struggle to understand about the outrage over Dobbs v. Jackson.

The outrage is two-fold. First, this is removing a right that used to be guaranteed for 50 years and had been reaffirmed, by the Supreme Court. With the stroke of a pen, 6 judges removed a protection that more than 2/3 of citizens support.

Second, the justification is inconsistent with other decisions. E.g., the majority argues that it's up to the States to decide their own laws on the matter of abortion, but just the day before, the same majority found that New York could not decide its own laws on concealed carry. You mention that searching for "abortion" in the text of the U.S. Constitution find nothing: you'll also find nothing about concealed carry.

Interesting take. the 2nd Amendment explicitly protects the right to “bear” (i.e. carry) arms…

Bear, but not concealed. If you ask me I think I have the right to know when someone is armed. I think the problem here is that New York allows neither, and the SCOTUS is asking them to pick one or the other.

>The outrage is two-fold. First, this is removing a right that used to be guaranteed for 50 years and had been reaffirmed, by the Supreme Court. With the stroke of a pen, 6 judges removed a protection that more than 2/3 of citizens support.

I can certainly empathize, but but isn't it dangerous to leave it to whatever the opinions of the sitting judges may be instead of codifying it in law? You never know if the next thing they pull out of thin air is going to be in your favor, and there's nothing you can do about it as a voter, SCOTUS judges being appointed and not elected.

Of course in the US a popular majority isn't enough to pass federal law, as seen with Women's Health Protection Act, which failed to pass in the senate. Maybe the only way to get a federal law guaranteeing access to abortion would be to send an angry mob to burn down the senate and declare congress unicameral. But then a lot of states would probably just secede, make their own abortion laws anyway, and you'd be right back where you started. Maybe the least bad solution for the United States is to just accept that different states have different views on a lot of issues.

>Second, the justification is inconsistent with other decisions. E.g., the majority argues that it's up to the States to decide their own laws on the matter of abortion, but just the day before, the same majority found that New York could not decide its own laws on concealed carry.

Yes, inconsistency is precisely why you shouldn't have any of these non-Ctrl-F-able supreme court decisions in the first place, including Roe v. Wade. Although with the concealed carry decision there might be another explanation. I agree that concealed carry is by no means necessary for people to defend themselves, and should therefore not in itself protected by the constitution. But can you get away with open carry everywhere in the state of New York? Say you were to walk around Times Square with your six shooter in your cowboy holster, what would happen? It's possible that states that restrict open carry would have to as a concession allow concealed carry in order to not violate the 2nd amendment. That is you can only ban one or the other, but never both at the same time.

I can't fathom the idea that you don't know what the person you're replying to is trying to say. I think the more likely scenario is that you disagree and are trying to invite debate. If you want to do, feel free, it's no worse a derail than the entire thread is, but let's dispense with the coy tedium.

Acrobat Distiller is a conversion tool and can be used as a printer driver. The typesetting may still come from a software like InDesign.

One thing I’d argue against is justified text, especially with narrower columns (wider margins), because that has zero benefits for readability — it’s merely an aesthetic device — or rather, the word spacing variations it introduces even with hyphenation can still be detrimental to the reading experience. Microsoft Press uses left-aligned text in their books for that reason. It can also be easier to remember where in a long paragraph you were when the right edge has some structure.

Legislation has similar layout & typography.

Picking a bill at random... CA State Senate 2021-22 SB-54

Here's the human readable version, with changes inlined (a nice touch). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

Here's the same in the official format. Note the line numbers in the left margin. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billPdf.xhtml?bill_...

As a noob, I'm not crazy about monospace, huge margins, and single column.

But it's a terrific UX for paper-bound parliamentary processes predating digital media. Similar to law books, the page and line numbers allow unambiguous content addressing.

Do we even have a digital standard? Purple numbers? https://communitywiki.org/wiki/PurpleNumbers XPath expressions or CSS selectors?

> “Wait—it looks like the Supreme Court is using two spaces between sentences.” It appears so.

Yeah, they're not animals.

> And who knows? The Supreme Court might still switch to one space. Greater precedents have been overturned. My amicus brief is ready.

Please no.

When parsing text, I find that ". " is an unambiguous sentence ending, while "<stuff here>. <more stuff>" can be ambiguous -- maybe the '.' is part of an acronym, say, or the author might be ending DNS TLDs with '.', say. Text is much clearer with two spaces, or one wider space, after sentence-ending periods.

Dinosaurs are animals.

I'm not a fan of justified text.. It's harder to read and follow than left-aligned. Maybe less lo when using hyphens, as it optimizes the horizontal use.

Big fan of 2 spaces at the beginning of each sentence.

Oh please don't center align text. That's just hard to read. Also the constant change of standard/bold/italic font styles with changing fontsize. why?

Make it an ASCII text file.

Without touching on the rest of the article, can we please stop bashing on the use of two spaces after a full stop? It makes new sentences much more distinct. I've yet to see any convincing argument for single-spacing.

Edit: I note that HN automatically compresses my double spaces to single ones. Sigh.

HTML ignores multiple spaces and since HN is built on HTML, I’d guess that’s why it’s happening.

It makes sentence boundaries more distinct, but a period and a single space already makes them sufficiently distinct, provided you aren’t using a monospaced font. The argument against double-spacing is not that fails to achieve its goal, but that it is unnecessary.

Double spacing after a period works best in a fixed font or typewriter. With a variable width font and justification it’s not as noticeable or useful.

Of course, justification may have no justification itself.

> Edit: I note that HN automatically compresses my double spaces to single ones. Sigh.

That's what HTML does with ordinary consecutive spaces, not an HN choice. It's been this way for the entire history of HTML I believe.

If you see anything else on the web (which I think you rarely will), the text set in HTML has unusual whitespace characters in it, either entered manually or algorithmically. Or maybe using some unusual application of CSS `white-space`, I'm not sure if there's a way to use that to preserve your inter-sentance whitespace without other probably undesirable side effects.

If you are using a typesetting engine, you will likely get the best results by following whatever practice it recommends.

The Supreme Court literally typeset its opinions, including drafts for circulation and editing within the court, for many decades before digital composition was an option. I believe tthat their published opinions have been professionally typeset from the inception of the court, although I have been unable to find a reference documenting this. So, they never really had a tradition of typewritten documents to abandon.

The idea that hyphenation is “better” is pure opinion. I hate hyphenation and much prefer ragged text or justified with big whitespaces.

> which one would you rather read? No one fails to pick this one.

I actually liked the first one better. Sure, it had to "contend" with a not-so-easy-on-the-eyes monotype, but I liked its organization and I very much liked the ASCII art divider line at the top.

The second one felt like someone was too much in love with the "Center" alignment.

Is there a LaTeX package for court rulings document class?

* https://ctan.org/topic/class

I am probably in the minority but I like the old format more.

More content in less space and much less distracting (for me). But then, I guess I am not a fan of good typography.

I like the compression of the former but the contrast of that weak mono space font is terrible.

I think there certainly are improvements possible to the old format, but like you I don't like the direction the new format takes.

Why so much empty space? To me it looks like the text could easily use a larger font. Or maybe use two columns per page.

This might be weird, but when I'm bored I like to make documents style like lawsuits etc.

Obsessed with the fonts and layouts!

I prefer the monospaced. It’s easier for me to read, easier to find my place if lost. It’s a downgrade.

> Greater precedents have been overturned.

Indeed.

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