Gordon Woolf's Blog

Lessons to learn in Yale web style guide

It is several years since I looked closely at the Yale University Press Web Style Guide, now in its 3rd edition. This is an excellent guide to how to create web pages, especially those for such as newspapers and magazines  where large amounts of text may be needed.

The section on typography is particularly worth reading and the whole is available as a book. However the entire content is on the web at: <http://www.webstyleguide.com>

When I saw it first it concentrated on tables as the means of formatting pages, but since then it has moved on, as has the web, to CSS. The important aspect though is that this guide makes the designer think about the structure of a site, and specifically its usability.  Whether you are planning a first web page or upgrading a major site, this is essential reading.

For example, just read what authors Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton have to say to start their chapter on page templates:

Always start your template work with an internal page, because the internal page template will dominate the site. The home page is important, but the home page is inherently singular and has a unique role to play. Your internal page template will be used hundreds or thousands of times across larger sites, and the navigation, user interface, and graphic design of the internal pages will dominate the user’s experience of your site. Get your internal page design and navigation right, and then derive your home and secondary page designs from the internal page template

That’s food for thought for many of us who work on web pages.

Why is it always Times?

I was asked: “Why do newspapers always use Times Roman typeface?”. My answer was that newspapers seldom do, but it is still one of the most common fonts when it should not be.

Times is a great font for papers printed on very high quality newsprint. But most newspapers have used more suitable fonts even from before Times New Roman was designed. Stanley Morison of Monotype created that in 1932 for a specific use and it got out of hand when it was built in to most of the early laserprinters a half century later. "The Times" has not used it for decades. I made the point in an article usually titled Face it - your body matters" which has been published in a number of publications for newspaper and periodical publishers. Here's an extract:

I asked a number of typographers for their recommendations for a newspaper font, to be printed on standard newsprint. Six came up with nine recommendations. I'll list them all in no particular order: Nimrod, Olympian, Rotation, Times Europa, Calisto, Melior, Stone, Lucida and Lino Letter. While some are categorised as serif fonts, others are classified by the foundries as "slab serif". All have most aspects in common - wideset, with good variation between thick and thin strokes, but with no fine strokes, large bowls to letters such as e and a and relatively large x-height. X-height is the height of lowercase characters such as x which have no descenders or ascenders.

The same principles apply if you are using a low cost book paper, especially those which are intended to bulk-up a book. Different font choices would apply if you are producing text on coated stock. People in general don't know they are seeing bad or good typographic choices -- they just stop reading if the task is made unnecessarily difficult. Those choices are partially conditioned by experience and by fashion but also by more direct influences such as the ease with which the eye can take in the information.

Software for novel writers and others

An Australian novelist and programmer, Simon Haynes, has put together the kind of software he needed for his own writing needs. You can find it at http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html and it is free.

I suspect it will also meet the needs of others who, like novelists, need to move text around and to keep track of facts and descriptions in what they are writing. I use an outliner, but have never been happy with the outliners built in to Word and OpenOffice. They just let you give an item a subheading and then open and close the subheads to add and edit the text under them. If you move a subheading then all the associated text moves with it, and is surprising how often an idea which you thought was best in one section or chapter needs to go somewhere else.

The advantage of Ywriter is that you can make separate notes of where you think your ideas are going. In use by a novelist this will include sections of facts about characters and places etc so that you do not change a character's eye colour or have them change venues impossibly fast.  and installs quickly.

I don't think I'll ever write the great Australian novel. It's been said that inside every journalist is a novel and that with any luck that's where it will stay. But this could be useful in helping keep track for what I do write. I'll certainly be playing round with it a but more, and will also have to check the library for Simon's Hal Spacejock comedy scifi books -- there are four of them, distributed by Penguin.

The software will not replace your word processor, but it may help more than novelists in organising ideas into words before they make their way to the word processor, just as they then eventually make their way to a page layout program.

Problems in a Word file? Maggie it!

I know I don't use Word, but I know a lot of Word users, and therefore it may be worth mentioning that the cure for a lot of Word problems that do not respond to more obvious solutions is to "Maggie" the file. This method has been promoted by a lot of Word and Windows newsletters including Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets and Office Watch and is deceptively simple:

If you are having problems with a Word file, try Maggie-ing it, which is to set up a new file, then copy all the text from the old file, except for the final paragraph return.

The final return is the key to a lot of the formatting, and therefore to a lot of formatting problems.

The Maggie process is named after Maggie Secara, a copyeditor in the USA, and a very good editor that I'm pleased to have among my contacts for those seemingly unanswerable questions which every editor faces at some time. She is also an author of a major work on life in Elizabethan England - see http://compendium.elizabethan.org

Indented paragraphs and period spaces

A recent Tweet about the pilcrow, that backward-P mark to indicate the end of paragraphs, reminded me of a piece I wrote a while ago answering someone who wanted to know why people used indented paragraphs with no space between lines and two spaces after a period, suggesting it was all due to newspapers.

Indented paras with no space between, yes that’s newspaper style, but two spaces after a period? Only in very amateurish newspapers which do not realize that in most fonts the extra space is built in with the actual dot at the left hand end of the glyph.

Spacing between paragraphs is quite common in newspapers when text is set ragged right, either as a style or for special features. And paragraph spacing is a common ploy to make stories fit.

The ad you designed is in another publication

It was a problem well before the digital age: a publication takes time to create an advertisement for a special client, and then that ad starts appearing in the opposition papers.

With the newspaper I used to own we would include a box on most proofs stating that the design of ads where we did the layout was our copyright and could not be used elsewhere without permission. I think it included a statement that a reproduction fee would be charged, though I don't think we actually ever tried that. We also wrote to the publishers involved reminding them of copyright law. Other suggestions: include the name of your publication in the 4pt code on the ad that identifies the file, and maybe include a copyright symbol. No publication likes including another's name even in tiny type. But nothing will work if you cannot persuade the client that they should not submit ads created by you to other publications unless they are prepared to pay you a design fee. Most businesses which do not employ advertising agents or design bureaus directly simply do not understand that there can be any restrictions on something which is based on their words. Finally, get your sales people to start pointing out to potential advertisers that your designs are so good, that others can only copy. I won't suggest that if copying becomes too blatant, that you do what we did once -- include a deliberate error in the proof then correct it immediately so there's no danger of it creeping through. Then wait for the mistake to appear in the opposition. Phone numbers are good for that ;-)

1990s: peak time for newspaper efficiency?

In clearing out some old paperwork I came across my figures for the setting up of a joint production facility for a number of monthly and quarterly tabloid newspapers in 1993. I wonder whether, despite all the improvements in computers and software, we are achieving any extra throughput today. Was this in fact the peak time of newspaper DTP, and while we may be producing better pages are we doing them less efficiently?

The report included a spreadsheet of weekly page production ranging from 30 to 80 tabloid pages a week but the initial expectation was 50 pages a week:

Copy preparation: 12 hours
Ad setting: 40 hours
Page layout: 35 hours
Scanning: 15 hours
Comping: 12 hours

Total: 114 hours per week (approx 3 people) which was considered in the report to be a "considerable" overestimate of "normal" time requirements, allowing for errors, breakdowns, waiting times, etc but not for staff absence.

I found another report in which I stated that my expectation for the page layout function was about 20 minutes a page (less than half the above estimate) from reasonably skilled operators and maybe 40 minutes for page one and any special feature page.

The comping part (with its equipment requirement for layout tables, cutting boards and waxer) showed that it was still an expectation that ads would be output individually, trimmed to size and waxed into place on the pages, though editorially output would be to an A3 laser (most ads would be output to an A4 laser).

Required equipment would be: 3 x 486 PCs and one AT or better plus 1 each A3 and A4 lasers, plus scanner, fax, photocopier, desks, benches etc. Software recommended was PageMaker and CorelDraw.

I also noted that there should be no provision for copy inputting. This would be done at the originating publication or, if required, should be done by outworkers.

Simple backup and transfer of Thunderbird

One of the problems with using Thunderbird for email and Firefox as a browser is that it is difficult to find the files to back up and more so to be sure that you have all the files you need. I came across this when I needed to transfer all settings and stored emails from XP to Windows 7.

Enter MozBackup, from http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

It is freeware developed by Pavel Cvrcek from the Czech Republic and is how programs should be: no entries in the registry, just unzip and put the exe file where you want it. It finds installed copies of the various Mozilla programs (a lot more than just Thunderbird and Firefox) and when you click the one you want to backup it offers to deal with all the suitable settings but gives you the option to deselect, so you could use it to back up just settings, or just emails.

It then offers a backup file name suggestion (usefully incorporating the date) and offers a place to store it but you can change those.

I wondered whether it would work in reinstalling when copied to Windows 7, which puts the files in different places to XP. but it worked perfectly. There in Windows 7 was Thunderbird with all the settings and emails I had in XP. I then repeated the process for Firfox and again it just worked.

When I had a problem with Windows 7 and went back for a while to XP, the process worked in reverse -- not a lost email or bookmark.

New use for old carbon paper

My huge but now ancient stock of carbon paper has been going down fast since I introduced some toddlers to it: "See, you put it between two sheets of paper and what you draw on this sheet is also on that one".

I'm not sure their mums like it that much even though some was the "new kind" several decades ago which did not spread the mess quite so far.

I was able to explain to a couple of the parents that this was what the term “cc” as used in their email program came from. And that “bcc” means “blind carbon copy”, referred to carbon copies when their recipients were not listed on the top copy of a letter or document.

How the paragraph came to be

According to Jan Tschichold, in an essay titled "Why the beginnings of Paragraphs Must be Indented" ...The medieval paragraph symbol ¶ originally could also appear in the middle of running lines and was colored. It signified the beginning of a new group of sentences. During the late Middle Ages such groups of sentences were introduced with a new line, but the habit remained of beginning the new group with the symbol for paragraphs, usually written in red. Some of the early printers even cut it as a type sort and printed it in black. Previously, though, it was inserted by hand in red by the rubricator (whose job description stems from the color: rubrum = red). The space for the symbol had to be left blank by the typesetter. But rubrication often did not take place, and it was found that the em quad indention or indent, as we call this empty space today, was sufficient by itself to define a new group of sentences, even without the red symbol. See his books for advice on using paragraphs, and lots more.