Comments on: The dylanchords.com guide: “How to use Word without hurting Heiner’s eyes”

By: Eyolf Østrem

Eyolf Østrem — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:27:44 +0000

You’re right: there is one — and one only — exception to the “never” and that is italics. No, that’s not true: there are other cases as well: small-caps, occasionally boldface, and even a change of typeface is permissible if one know what one is doing.
My point is that not the one should not use formatting, but that (1) it should be used meaningfully and (2) consistently, which means that it should be applied through styles and not as direct formatting. With styles, one can define a certain set or formatting commands for a particular kind of content; with direct formatting, one can certainly achieve the same effect, but only through a much more inefficient path (by applying the same set of manual formatting to every instance, instead of defining all the relevant text pieces as instances of the same kind once and for all), and with a much greater risk of error/inconsistency.
The one exception, as I mentioned, is italics. I could write another post on this subject, but to make it short, this is one of the points where I disagree with the dogma “separate style from contents”. Because of the 500+ years’ tradition of mixing the regular font with a corresponding italic font (originally not even necessarily belonging to the same typeface), I would argue that I’m not simply asking for “emphasis” — which in principle can be defined as any alteration of the text presentation — but specifically and emphatically for “italics”. Italics is not just any kind of emphasis, but a particular kind of emphasis which carries a lot of associations and expectations which apply to specific situations: titles of books/works, emphasised words, phrases in foreign languages, epigraphs, certain paragraphs that should stand out from the text flow, etc. To call all these cases “emphasis” would be wrong. Ideally one might define different styles for each of these cases, and then set all of them to “italics”, but in any less ideal world (e.g. a practical world), I prefer to use plain italics.
That is half the reason why I use \textit and not \emph. The other half is that, for some reason which I don’t fully remember,
\emph{if})
will not prevent the “f” from crossing the parenthesis, while
\textit{if})
will.

By: Lex

Lex — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:22:07 +0000

in “LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer” article i noticed you used \textit LaTeX command—which is, i suppose, an analogue of “italic” button on direct formatting toolbar in Word.

i propose that “1. Never ever use direct formatting” should be replaced by softer “don’t apply more than one direct formatting to single piece of text”, like: you can make text bold or italic, but not bold and italic at the same time.

Or should one make “emphasize” style and use it?

By: Twitter Trackbacks for things twice » Blog Archive » The dylanchords.com guide: “How to use Word without hurting Heiner’s eyes” [oestrem.com] on Topsy.com

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:10:50 +0000

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Iain Cheyne (icheyne) 's status on Tuesday, 06-Oct-09 21:19:39 UTC - Identi.ca — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:19:50 +0000

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By: Irfan Johanda

Irfan Johanda — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:54:10 +0000

Great Site!
BTW, I usually use Frutiger Linotype (getting it free and licensed from Microsoft Reader) for sans-serif type font.

By: Riley

Riley — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:14:40 +0000

Exactly right — the idea is to use named paragraph and character styles. Stated in its convers form, avoid at all costs the ad hoc formatting of Word’s *normal” or *default* styles.

First, named styles allow one to ala CSS, update or revise all instances of that named style by simply changing the style name.

Second, it becomes much easier to convert a document from Word to some other format if specific types of content — headings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, etc. — are properly tagged. Again, the converse is that everything is identified as “normal”, making it literally impossible to automate a conversion based on a style name / tag…

By: Heiner

Heiner — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:46:58 +0000

Hi. I'm a student of mathematics and care a bit about fonts and layouts. My advice is: (1) Use (La)TeX if you want your document to look good. Nothing beats it when it comes to typesetting formulae, and for the rest it is as good as any "desktop publishing" program, if you put enough effort into it. (2) If you want it easy and "need" WYSIWYG, TeX is not the right think for you. Even with LyX it is nowhere as easy as Word, nor as stupid. For more infomation, search the web, there's plenty around. Wikipedia is a good start. [BTW: As you noticed, Wikipedia creates screenshots of TeX's output to display a formula-image.]

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:00:01 +0000

These typography entries (and the links contained therein) are great. I need to write quite a few formal-style documents (scientific reports – I’m a physics student), and I’ve been getting sick of Times New Roman and Arial, but never knew what to use instead. I like to think I have enough of an eye for design that my page layout is straightforward and easy to read, but typefaces have always been a bit mystifying to me.

In fact, I hadn’t even looked closely at my documents until I read these articles, always assuming that the words are most important, then the layout, and finally the font. After printing out all my old lab reports again and looking over them, I realised that I could definitely make my work look a little neater and prettier just by changing typefaces.

Thanks to these pages I’ve settled on Gentium for my general-purpose font, since it’s close enough to Times to still look professional to a type-blind academic, but sufficiently different to help individuate my report from the dozens that the tutors will be reading. Plus there’s the obvious advantage in that it doesn’t look quite as sterile after having been seen in millions of characters before reaching mine.

My standard sans-serif font is now Tahoma, but I’m not sure about it. Trebuchet MS is quite nice, but a bit too wide, and Verdana’s default spacing makes it appear a bit too wide when bold (great for screen, but on paper it’s not so good). Arial definitely looks worse, but it’s harder for me to decide what should replace it because there simply isn’t much sans-serif stuff in my documents – a couple of section headers and diagram labels are the only instances.

I guess I also want to say thanks for opening my eyes (if only slightly), and to ask what you and the readers of these pages recommend as a professional-looking sans-serif font. Something with the same production ethos as Gentium would be fantastic (from a less-than-aesthetic point of view), but I really don’t know what to look for.

My last problem is slightly more specific. Thanks to the wonders of physics, I have to include a fair amount of Greek characters and mathematical formatting. So far I’ve been using Microsoft’s Equation Editor to embed the formulae in my Word documents, and without any real troubles. Part of the reason I chose Gentium was the fact that it includes Greek characters, so I’d like to be able to change the Equation Editor’s font to use that as the default. Does anyone have any ideas? I just can’t fathom the minimal interface to the editor, and I’d like to avoid shelling out for MathType (although I suppose I could always ‘acquire’ it).

Is TeX a suitable alternative? I keep seeing references to it, and I think they use something similar to achieve equation formatting on Wikipedia, which looks okay. If anyone can offer a suggestion on how best to use it (if at all) I’d be grateful – should it be for my entire documents, or just the equations? If the former, what do I use to edit/style the document? If the latter, how do I import the formatted equation into Word?

Thanks.

By: Richard J

Richard J — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 07:59:30 +0000

Well…one thing that hurts MY eyes (and brain) more than a shoddy font: right- AND left justification of text…jeez, I hate it when Word tries to do what typographers spent a lifetime learning. /Rick

By: stevietheb

stevietheb — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 13:25:43 +0000

For those on Mac, I strongly suggest using Mellel rather than Word. Mellel handles non-English languages better than Word for Mac (particularly Hebrew which is totally screwed up on Mac because Microsoft won’t take the time to fix it). Mellel + a good unicode font is a dream to use for those who have to use languages with different character sets. Also, Mellel forces your hand and really encourages you to use Styles—which seems to be the main concern of this article. Unfortunately, Mellel is still in its early stages, so some of the more advanced features of Word it can’t match—but I tend to do my own tables of contents and indexing and whatnot anyway.

By: Heiner

Heiner — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:19:23 +0000

There are not too many (TTF) fonts available for Linux, but you can import the Windows ones if you like. Good fonts need good artists, and those are mostly rare in the OpenSource world…

By: g from nfld

g from nfld — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 01:24:51 +0000

i dont have a clue how to post a blog or any of that shit, but to the site owner, dylanchords, man you really got your shit together, how do u get all this info?
cheers

By: eyolf

eyolf — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 01:48:01 +0000

May I turn the question back to you: Are there any common alternatives to these fonts in the linux world? Is there a “core” set of fonts which most distros have, or is it hit and miss? I found URW Gothic L in my system, which is another Futura clone, and URW palladio L as a Palatino clone, sortof. What else is there? If one wants to avoid TNR and Arial, that is, and still stand a reasonable chance of getting the desired display even there?

By: J. David Black, Jr.

J. David Black, Jr. — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 17:55:24 +0000

When I type up guitar chords or tab, or if I’m printing someone else’s out, I typically line up the chord change with the syllable change that it falls on. This is easier with a font that has equal spacing for all characters. Which one would you suggest?
So far, I’ve been using Courier New or Lucida Console. Courier seems a little boxy, and the Lucida is a serif font that wishes it was sans-serif.

I agree with your comment on Trebuchet, I like to use it for most other everyday purposes.

By: a

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 01:22:51 +0000

Wow, so someone doesnt type an email in a peticular manner…I guess the world’s gonna end.