Okay, I actually have to write an entry on this. Quick Updates don’t give me enough room. I'm reading The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst. It’s truly a fantastic book, and includes little insights here and there along with the sea of knowledge on typesetting text and designing beautiful pages.

        The more I read, the more I realize that typesetting is very easy to do poorly. Especially with the pc word processors that are so commonplace today, there is a painfully distinct difference between a document produced in Microsoft Word (to pick on the most common of them) and a properly typeset document. A word processed document looks splotchy, run together, spread apart, unbalanced, and generally ugly. A typeset document requires more care on the part of the typesetter and/or software, as well as a large set of conventions that are often local to a certain part of the world. Perhaps Antipodes would be willing to share something about the various forms of European quotation marks.

        As I was putting together the special text formatting for this entry, (you do notice the difference, right?) I realized that some of the recommended dimensions on printed text do not apply to the web. For instance, this entry was written to be set at 11-pt type. A typical line height for a printed page set in 11-pt is 13-pt. This gives the eye enough space to traverse the line back to the left margin of the page and pick up comfortably with the next word. On the web, text is generally less readable. It’s also heavier (“darker”) than printed type. It has to be. Screen pixels are bulky, so to get any reasonable shape without withering away, the outline must be wide. The consequence of all of this is that I had to increase the line height to 16-pt before it looked balanced and readable.

        When I get this partly figured out, I'm going to write a theme for Mindsay. It won’t be complicated or flashy. It will be subtle – based on some of the tools I’ve used to construct this entry. Of course, html being what it is, I have precious little control over what you actually see, but I will try – I will try to apply and understand the principles I’m reading about in a hostile environment. This is a start.