Peter Norton is a talented self-merchandiser, but once in a while even Peter misses the mark. The Norton Disk Doctor advertisement, which featured The Peter in one of his pastel shirts with a stethoscope draped rakishly around his neck, skirted some ancient societal taboos, but those of us who actually cross over into the medical world found it amusing rather than obnoxious because it was so ignorant. In the Byzantine world of medicine, there are many subtle signals and class distinctions associated with even so commonplace an article as a stethoscope. Not only is the "scope around the neck" style a hallmark of insecure interns, but the prospect of being seen in public with the $5 plastic stethoscope in Peter's outfit would gag any self-respecting physician, nurse, or medical student.
Anyone can walk into a medical supply store and buy a stethoscope, but an "appropriate" stethoscope can only be selected with the aid of unwritten rules and tradition of the medical subculture, while interpretation of the data you can acquire with a stethoscope requires years of study and experience. Self-evident, you may say, but consider some cases that may hit a little closer to home. Many purchasers of painting or drawing programs have discovered, to their regret, that the acquisition didn't make them any more creative; true artists can work wonders with these programs, but the rest of us only produce computerized scrawls. Similarly, possession of a computer, a WYSIWIG word processor, a laser printer, and a battery of fonts does not magically turn one into a graphics designer or typographer--but while society is protected from ersatz physicians by law and from nonartists by visual common sense, our defenses against brain-damaged desktop publishers are much flimsier.
We've all found ourselves on the receiving end of memos, newsletters, and manuals, produced with personal computers, that would easily qualify as felonious acts in the world of "real" publishing. At one extreme, we've got the Sir Edmund P. Hillarys of word processing who jam each page with as many different typefaces as possible "because they are there." At the other extreme, we've got aberrations like the 1000-bed hospital I work in, Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Cedars-Sinai owns scores of PCs and Hewlett Packard LaserJets, but views them only as typewriter replacements--all documents are printed in 12 point Courier. Somewhere in between, we've got the villains who use fancy fonts and "chartjunk" to disguise lack of content--a practice also known as "garbage in, gospel out."
Typography is a subtle art and is not intuitive (at least for most of us); consciousness-raising is needed. Digital Typography: An Introduction to Type and Composition for Computer System Design summarizes its own premise with these words:
The ability to create typeset-quality documents easily may well change people's attitudes about type and printing. For example, a merchandising executive relates how he can no longer gauge the metaqualities of memos. When memos were typed on conventional typewriters, he could hold the document up to the light to see how much correction fluid had been expended. The more corrections, the less the sender must have cared, or else the memo would have been retyped. With computers, only the uncorrected errors show. For this executive, word processing has meant the loss of some information that used to come with his interoffice mail....
A similar situation arises out of expectations about the quality of printing itself. Through experience, most people associate typesetting with a good-quality document. After all, much care, attention, and revision are required to put a document into typeset form in a book, journal, or magazine. But now, memos, drafts of articles, and business letters enter homes and offices in near-typeset form. Unconsciously, people attribute quality to the content, based on the form.
The reverse also happens. Non-specialists with no flair whatsoever for typographic design are designing and producing documents that have worse form than content. Our high expectations for graphic quality from commercial printing will be brought to bear on everything printed. The same thing has happened with film and television. We are so used to a high level of production quality in movies that even Grade B movies must rise to this level. Amateur productions can scarcely be shown on television today unless they meet minimum professional standards of production quality.
Digital Typography addresses itself to four major topics in turn. It begins with a history of letterforms and the technologies for their production, ranging from the clay tablets of yore to the digital typesetters, laser printers, and CRTs of today--explaining along the way the origins and meanings of many common publishing and typesetting terms, such as leading, fonts, typefaces, points, and joins. With this groundwork laid, we're introduced to the bewildering variety of typeface designs and taught how to categorize them, with many beautiful illustrations as examples. The section on letterforms concludes with a fascinating discussion of what typographers have learned about reading over the centuries, and how intercharacter spacing, the presence or absence of serifs, and other qualities interact with the structure of the eye and the characteristics of the visual system to affect legibility.
The author then turns his attention to computer output devices, again building his discussion from fundamental concepts: pixels, resolution, aspect ratio, and so on. He takes us on a whirlwind tour of all the major types of output devices currently in use, contrasting their capabilities, limitations, underlying technology, and suitability for typography. Digital font designers must be eclectic as well as artistic, because the physics of a device can have a striking influence on the appearance of a font. For example, the "soft edges" of CRT pixels can be exploited to make the joins in letterforms appear smoother, while the effects of drum polarity, charge leaks, and other electrostatic phenomena can be brought to bear in laser printer fonts to produce more subtle curves, more pleasing characters.
The third topic is the creation of graceful digital letterforms, a job that has proved more difficult than anyone ever expected. When Donald Knuth, a wizard of computer science if ever there was one, turned his attention to computer-based publishing, he knocked out his first digital typeface and typesetting program in a few months, only to find that he had just scratched the surface of what he had hoped to accomplish. Knuth ended up spending a full decade on his T[E]X and METAFONT programs before returning to work on volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming. Some early digital typefaces were scanned in directly from existing physical fonts and then "tuned up" with a pixel editor, and this strategy is still used on occasion, but the currently preferred approach is to store typefaces as algorithms or as generalized mathematical descriptions called outlines. The associated software technologies have become the foundation for a lucrative and hotly competitive industry; the recent squabbles between IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe over the relative merits of PostScript and TrueType give us some idea of the stakes.
The final portion of the book, and the largest, is devoted to page layout and document design: the organization of paragraphs and columns; the use of figures and grids; the importance of white space, margins, hyphenation, line lengths, and pagination; the development of document specifications and templates; and the general problem of matching screen, paper, and expectations. As in the rest of the book, many beautiful illustrations and examples are used to great advantage here. Document interchange formats, page description languages, and automatic layout tools are also surveyed briefly. There's some interesting history in this section amid the huge amount of useful advice. For example, we learn of the Bravo editor, developed on the Alto at Xerox PARC circa 1978, which pioneered the treatment of words, sentences, and paragraphs as objects, and controlled the formatting of each object type through interactive windows--normally hidden--called property sheets. When Charles Simonyi migrated from PARC to Redmond, Washington, this concept went with him, and it resurfaced as style sheets, one of the fundamental features of Microsoft Word.
Although I've probably made this book sound rather esoteric, I recommend it without reservation to everyone who uses a word processor. Most of us have tools at our fingertips that would have made publishers of 50 years ago weep for joy; consequently, we owe it to ourselves to become familiar with at least the basic issues and principles of typography, so that--like the layman who takes a course in CPR--we do no harm, and we know when to call for help. Fortunately, Digital Typography turns this task into a pleasure; it's a genuine little gem of technical writing. Reading this book is like sitting by the fireplace with a wise old professor, as he chats about his field over a glass of fine wine. Rubinstein's style is informal, yet exceptionally lucid, and his discussions range over a marvelous variety of disciplines without ever losing focus. At the end, you'll qualify as an informed amateur--you'll be sensitized to the aesthetics of typography, and you'll look at books and magazines (and your own productions) with a new and critical eye. If you should wish to educate yourself further, Rubinstein includes a 14-page annotated bibliography that includes both the classic works on typography and the most important recent papers and research studies.
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal