Book design inspired by Edward Tufte | Hacker News Reader

Book design inspired by Edward Tufte

writelatex.com

This is a nice template, but it’s somewhat missing the point IMO.

Tufte’s two-page spreads are designed one by one, based on the content. He painstakingly arranges every figure and every word so that the books will be both clear and beautiful.

Using LaTeX is to some extent antithetical to this idea. Instead of arranging everything by hand, you’re letting the typesetting engine make most of the decisions. There’s nothing inherently wrong with ceding this control, but it’s pretty much the opposite of Tufte’s style.

An expert using this tool is never going to be able to make something as carefully as Tufte would make it, because seizing precise manual control of typesetting and layout in LaTeX is a pain in the ass compared to using a tool like InDesign (or for that matter compared to scissors, paper, and a xerox machine).

The types of documents where (La)TeX excels are heavily structured and usually full of mathematical formulas. The more important the relationship between diagrams/images and the text, the worse off LaTeX is relative to a visual tool. Tufte’s books are at the furthest end of this spectrum, where LaTeX performs absolutely worst.

* * *

For example, this document (among the links from ajtulloch’s sibling comment) looks absolutely nothing like a Tufte book, and is filled with typographic problems that wouldn’t ever make it past a halfway competent publishing house: http://tullo.ch/static/cambridge/AdvancedProbability-Lecture... (I’m not trying to pick on anyone; this is always going to be a problem when you compare the output of an automated tool against hundreds of hours of work by a perfectionist expert.)

Moreover, many of the design choices IMO make no sense in the context of a mathematical paper.

Yuck, yeah, that last item of the contents taking up a full second page is really annoying. It would be much more usable and fitting to reduce the blank space above to fit the whole thing. Seems obviously not hand tuned.

Meh, I think this somewhat misses the point of TeX, to be honest. Yes, the dream is you just give it content and it lays it all out. No, in reality that doesn't necessarily happen. In reality, TeX can cover many of the well defined choices for you, but you still have to iterate on the content and some commands to TeX to get what you really want.

That is, using this template is probably a fine tool to use in the process of creating documents. Just as I doubt that Tufte really arranged the kerning of every character. (Maybe he did... unfortunately my copies haven't traveled with me yet.)

Wow, that book you linked is truly a terrible example! You can get much better results than that from TeX (XeLaTeX, ConTeXt, etc).

Okay, let me ask a dumb question.

Tufte's stuff is very arty and pretty. But is there any scientific evidence that it is BETTER?

For example, do his font choices result in less eye fatigue?

As blowhardy as I find Nielsen Norman Group, they tend to back their web usability stuff up with actual data and analysis.

i suggest you read one of tufte's books - the classic is the visual display of quantitative data. he dissects 'common' charts etc and then strips away the baggage - that's pretty much what it means. what you call 'arty' is (maybe) some icing on the cake but the core is pretty solid.

I've read most of Tufte's books. And I tend to agree with them 90+% of the time.

But anecdote is not the plural of data. Pretty is not automatically effective.

Nielsen Norman Group occasionally hit some unusual exceptions when they actually tested their assumptions about web usability even though they got most of it right. I suspect the same with Tufte.

>the classic is the visual display of quantitative data

...I've never read any of his works (I'm not the OP), is that the best Tufte book to start with?

That or "Envisioning Information." "Visual display..." is slightly more quantitative (as the name would suggest). He has some ebooks for $2 if you just want to get a feel for his writing and design: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ebooks

One of the studies we were shown in a usability class was that pretty interfaces are rated by users as more satisfying and actually are better at letting them accomplish goals as well. If you went to a really ugly web site with lots of clutter, like the myspace era, and got a progress dialog, for example, you might just ditch the web site. Whereas if you went to a beautiful web site and it gave you a progress dialog, you might be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, for example. Sort of like how tall, good looking people earn more money. Sad, but factual.

Right, many software devs have read The Design of Everyday Things [0] and understand the value of usability. But they didn't read Don Norman's follow up book Emotional Design [1] which explains that usability is only 50% of the answer - emotion is the other 50%. And emotion often means pretty, or at the minimum a positive UX.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expande...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Love-Everyday-Things/...

I wouldn't be surprised to find that emotion is actually higher than 50%. Though, I like to gripe about how overblown the study of doors is in that work.

One interesting aspect of that is progress bars. Regardless of the amount of time an operation takes people will have a slightly different subjective opinion of how long it actually took depending on the behavior of the progress bar. Progress bars that slow down near the end seem to take longer than progress bars that accelerate near the end, even if the elapsed time is exactly identical.

If you want science, read Graph Design for the Eye and Mind[0] instead.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Graph-Design-Mind-Stephen-Kosslyn/dp/0...

Not a dumb question at all. I left my Tufte books at the office, so I can't check, but I thought he cited sources throughout.

Either way, between Cleveland, Robins, Few, and Ware there're tons of studies and references:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/wsc/index.html

http://www.researchgate.net/researcher/2028337238_Naomi_B_Ro...

http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php

http://www.amazon.ca/Visual-Thinking-Design-Colin-Ware/dp/01...

Better is subjective though and related to what you're trying to do. A lot of past research was about efficiency of information transfer. There's more recent research looking at memorability. In one report, different graphics could have both goals.

There's a "Useful Junk" paper delving into that topic. There's a link to it in Few's reply: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel...

There's plenty more. Stanford Vis group is a fun place to check from time to time: http://vis.stanford.edu/ Heer specifically has a range of papers and some online slides for a vis course he taught http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/ (uses Tufte for the course text)

I'm drawing a blank on a few others I find informative...

Unfortunately, I don't have any about fonts but I'm sure there are plenty out there.

To focus on an issue that Tufte often addresses, pretend that you are Lawrence Mulloy and it is late on the evening of January 27, 1986. Several engineers from Morton Thiokol have called you and told you that if the Space Shuttle launches tomorrow morning, it will explode, and all of the astronauts will die. But it is expensive to call off a launch, so you ask them what data they have.

Would you say "launch" if you only saw the first 2 charts on this page:

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

Would you say "launch" if you saw the 3rd chart on that page?

The decision to launch tomorrow is yours. What do you decide?

That is the most ridiculous curve fit I've ever seen.

I can't see any of the charts on that page. They're just collections of dark splotches.

I'd like to see a LaTeX template in the style of Jean-luc Doumont's book, Trees, maps, and theorems (http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/).

That must be some book; the list price is $96 but used copies are going for $300.

I think it's a profound book on communication, and I consider my copy to be a piece of art.

I've been a convert to Tufte-LaTeX for a while - it produces beautifully formatted documents.

I wrote a post a while ago on setting it (from a vanilla LaTeX setup) at http://ajtulloch.github.io/2012/getting-started-with-tufte-l..., which has some examples.

For some heavy mathematics typesetting with Tufte-Latex, have a look at http://tullo.ch/articles/cambridge-mathematics-notes/ (e.g. http://tullo.ch/static/cambridge/NonParametricStatistics-Lec...). The LaTeX sources are on GitHub at https://github.com/ajtulloch/CambridgeMathematicsPartIII.

If anyone wants an invite code to writeLatex, the service featured here, here it is https://www.writelatex.com/signup?ref=64cf3f9ff138 If you sign up via that link you get free space (and so do I). Happy LaTeXing.

Tufte talk about his advice and examples of Book Design here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

I was working on something similar but with a markdown like syntax instead of latex. Project is still in initial stages though.

http://vpj.github.io/docscript/

Looks interesting. A few questions/comments: - In what language did you wrote the backend? In particular how do you create the bars/tables? - Wouldn't it be better to just call it something like "Forestpin Flavored Markdown"? From what I get you basically add some extra syntax (like itallics) and extensions (sidenotes) - Regarding the sidenotes, it may be hard to get the syntax. What if you detach it from the location where its mentioned like you do for footnotes?

Anyways, looks pretty cool!

Thanks!. It's written in Coffeescript. I didn't think much about the name when we started this. Didn't want to call it markdown because we didn't want to make it compatible with standard markdown, especially because of indentations. Will probably change the name in the future.

Does that mean docscript is no longer in development? I was kinda hoping it might develop into a low featured, easy to use replacement for latex.

I find that except for math I use a minimal amount of features of latex, but a lot of work and weird code to display simple things.

I just don't get why there isn't something that does a few things well and nothing else.

It is in development. Started working on it last week. Still experimental. Thinking of changing the syntax a bit to be a little more intuitive. It's on github:

https://github.com/vpj/docscript

Will add a command line compiler and stuff soon. We are using it to generate documents at our startup. So it will be in active development for sometime.

Maybe take a look at pandoc (markdown -> latex or html with equations/tables).

I use this template for handouts (with some changes: the default fonts drive me nuts so I use Charter). But that's mostly because I like having room to take notes in the margins, and I like the sidenotes.

For anything I don't print out myself and hand to people, though, I expect it to be read on a computer or, ideally, a tablet, which changes the design a lot.

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