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Comment by v1ne | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see we're getting there again and that people care about typography.

Yet, the optical margin correction looks mechanistic and only concerned with symbols, not with characters: The "Y" at the start of the first line doesn't move a bit, even though it's clearly optically too light on the left. The next three lines all start optically pretty heavy with a bar. So I'd nudge to "Y" to the left.

I think it's just a pity that LaTeX with microtype is still the pinnacle of automatic typesetting, after all these years. I really enjoy good typography, but the Web, App and even Desktop world seems not to care about such details, apart from a few programs like Ableton.

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> Desktop world seems not to care about such details

My free, open-source, desktop text editor, KeenWrite, integrates my quote curling typographic library, KeenQuotes. KeenQuotes curls straight single quotes, double quotes, swaps in the multiplication symbol, corrects low opening double quotes (,,), and handles numeric primes, all while respecting code blocks. KeenWrite replaces some ligatures, but proper ligatures need to account for etymology, which has no simple solution. (Aside, even curling straight quotation marks properly requires part-of-speech processing.)

KeenWrite[1] exports to text, XHTML, or PDF files. Architecturally, the XHTML format doubles as an XML format that is passed to ConTeXt[2] for typesetting into PDF. ConTeXt developers care deeply about typography.

[1]: https://keenwrite.com/

[2]: https://contextgarden.net/

Thank you for the pointer! ConTeXt looks pretty promising.

I think this package can reduce readability. The content under Before looked better than the After to me. For example, it changes the word "duplex" to "du-plex" split over two lines, which is less readable.

> I think it's just a pity that LaTeX with microtype is still the pinnacle of automatic typesetting, after all these years. I really enjoy good typography, but the Web, App and even Desktop world seems not to care about such details, apart from a few programs like Ableton.

I have only a tyro's appreciation for typography, so please forgive my uninformed question. Is it a pity that LaTeX+microtype is the pinnacle of automatic typesetting because it's not good enough, or because it's non-web-focused and there is no web analogue of equivalent quality?

It's a pity I feel because microtype is from 2004. That's 20 years ago. Yet, typesetting on the web is still ... not there? I think there's a lot of potential untapped.

Also, the full feature set of microtype is only supported with (Pdf)LaTeX, but not with the newer XeLaTex, meaning that in order to get your favourite fonts to work with PdfLaTex, you have to do a hilarious amount of work to translate an OTF font into specific cuts in MetaFont, the LaTeX font format, and so on.

I mean, I understand that things get pretty tricky once you try to integrate such schemes into a font renderer. There's other scripts than just Latin, with probably very different rules, there are different font sizes, text sizes, etc. A lot of variables to take into account. A lot of variables that were constants when typesetting on a page. So the problem is now more complicated than in the past.

What does "Ableton" (which is a company that makes a piece of software called "Live" among other things) do with typography on the desktop?

They genuinely care about their software's UI.

I'm a typography nerd, and the author of another DAW. I think that Live looks pretty good, but it doesn't have much to do with typography in my eyes.

Now, their education website(s) ... that stuff is gorgeous, and I think does represent somebody's typographic imagination, to the extent that HTML/CSS makes it possible (which is .. a lot).

Also the " in the second paragraph feels a bit too far out to me, microtype does these things more subtly a bit.

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