Category: typography

LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

I’ve earlier performed a little test, comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change the default settings of Times New Roman/Arial and ragged right margin, and they apply formatting manually for each new element, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies.

Now it’s time for the next round of tests, this time including another application in the comparison: the “typesetting environment” LaTeX. I will also go more in detail with the points of comparison, not just considering the crude parameters such as font size and page margins, but also taking into account the finer typographical details. In the former test, I had deliberately turned off hyphenation. That led to a discussion about various hyphenation algorithms, and this time, I have decided to turn on automatic hyphenation in all three programs, using the default settings.

Continue reading LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

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

Upon general request, here’s my guide to proper use of MS Word:

  1. Never ever use direct formatting.
  2. That means: never ever click on any of the buttons in the formatting toolbar
  3. . . . which means that you might as well disable that toolbar altogether (right-click in the toolbar area and uncheck “Formatting”)
  4. You are allowed to keep it there for two reasons:
    1. To control what is going on in the document, and
    2. to click on the “Styles” button (the one with the two “A”s), which opens the “Styles” sidebar, . . .
  5. . . . which should always be visible, and which is the only acceptable way to format the text.
  6. Create styles for the types of text that you are going to use, and/or modify the existing styles to suit your desires.
  7. These desires should under no circumstance include using Times New Roman or Arial, which are Microsoft’s rip-offs of slightly more acceptable typefaces; but which in themselves are objectively ugly; and which give a discerning reader the impression that you don’t care how your document looks. Good alternatives are Garamond (which, in Microsoft’s version, is not a Garamond at all but a Jannon, but it comes close enough), Gentium, a nice, free unicode font (a combination of three huge advantages which are rarely seen together), or for that matter Book Antiqua, which is also a rip-off, but of a nice typeface: Hermann Zapf’s Palatino
  8. Use templates:
    • In an empty document, set up all the different styles that you think you will be using (plain text, indented text, blockquotes, headings, etc.), and save the document, not as a Word Document, but a Word Template (choose it in the drop-down list below the field for the file name).
    • Choose New document from template from the Files menu and select your template.
    • Lo and behold! All your styles are there.
    • You can apply your new template to any document through the Functions > Templates menu. Check the box with “update styles automatically”.

The politics of typography

Did you ever consider the political implications of the ascii standard? No? Thought so.
Someone who did is Robert Bringhurst. And these are not the only implications of typography that he has considered. The title of his book The Elements of Typographical Style may not be sexy, not the kind of thing you would read on the bus or in bed, but, holy shit, it is! If one happens to be a typography freak, this is just heaven, but I suspect that even people who use Times New Roman and Arial (or who don’t know which fonts they’re using, which probably means that they use Times New Roman and Arial), might find something to enjoy here, and even get their horizons widened, so that the next time they open a book, they may not go straight to the mental images behind the curved lines on the paper, but stop for a split second and think “hey, that’s a nice ‘g’!”
Where was I? Oh, the politics. Consider this, about the ascii character set, the standard upon which most computer type setup is based:

The fact that such a character set was long considered adequate tells us something about the cultural narrowness of American civilization, or American technocracy, in the midst of the twentieth century.

The basic ascii set has room for 94 characters. Since c. 1980 we have had the extended ascii set, with 216 free slots — a considerable improvement. But —

This ignores the needs of mathematicians, linguists and other specialists, and of millions of normal human beings who use the Latin alphabet for Czech, Hausa, Hungarian, Latvian, Navajo, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yoruba, and so on. The extended ascii character set is the alphabet not of the real world nor of the un General Assembly but of nato: a technological memento of the them-and-us mentality that thrived in the Cold War.

Bringhurst is a Canadian, of course… They ain’t so bad, them maple-lovers!
And if you thought that things have improved — well, yes, perhaps. But Bringhurst has some cold water for that burning enthusiasm too:

The rate of change in typesetting methods has been steep — perhaps it has approximated the Fibonacci series — for more than a century. Yet, like poetry and painting, storytelling and weaving, typography itself has not improved. There is no greater proof that typography is more art than engineering. Like all the arts, it is basically immune to progress, though it is not immune to change.

The ascii set has 94 characters, Gutenberg used 290 for his bible. ‘Nuff said.