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Comment by MrVandemar | Hacker News Reader

My contention is that not only web-designers, but everyone who uses a word processor should get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard.

It's possible to make decent looking documents in Microsoft Word / Libre Office / Abiword / whatever, but people with no idea what they're doing (and no idea that they have no idea what they're doing) easily create monstrous abominations that communicate nothing beyond "unprofessional" and scream "I have the aesthetic taste of a 3 year old".

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Beyond the choices of what to do with them, word processors also don't really try to educate or nudge users into how to do things. "Typewriter"-type usage, where the user makes all their changes directly as they type or on small selections, is still the dominant pattern of actual user behavior when the system is really built on shared styles geared to allowing you to make document-wide changes all at once.

Ignoring that system makes perfect sense in some cases, but the "magic" that Word and friends use to try to coax some of your input into styles is a constant source of frustration and confusion both for people who do and don't want to bother with styles.

That’s not even the biggest advantage of styles - they have a semantic meaning. Eg headings show up in Word’s navigation pane or auto generated table of contents; or if you convert a word document into an epub using calibre and you used styles correctly then eg each top level heading will be a new chapter.

One of the best programming lessons I've learned was actually an attempt I made to learn something about design. Typography (which deals quite a lot with the presentation of information hierarchies) is an essential skill in making code actually readable. It gives you a framework for thinking about how to draw a readers attention to the places you want and how to signal that it is important. Which you can do even with tabs and plain-text.

I don't get it why the Microsoft Word team didn't create a good looking default template that people could just use without any fiddling necessary. They had more than 20 years at this point to create something that looks pleasing out of the box, but when you check the available templates they are all an ugly looking mess.

Yeah, just another niche high school course that everyone should follow, that’s what our schools need

Indeed. Medium has wonderful typography, but it doesn’t make me want to read them.

All school subjects are niche outside of arithmetic, spelling, grammar, reading, writing, civics, typing and recess.

Offering practical subjects that people will actually use in their day to day lives can only be a good thing. Dudes go to college and don't know how to do laundry like good lord.

...get at least baseline training in typography and layout. It should be a short high-school course. The basic rules are not that hard.

Can anyone suggest a concise book/course/video on this?

https://practicaltypography.com/

True. Typographic scales, proportion, and a few other subjects would prove generally valuable for many.

Might as well teach people how to dress properly.

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