On 30/01/2009, at 4:16 AM, Fred Ballard wrote:
I've read that the Gutenberg bible is formatted without spaces. It's
interesting that they aren't essential to reading.
I believe this is due to the inherent markings of the tops and bottoms
of the glyphs, particularly the lowercase glyphs. B42s were all set
with a very Germanic textura blackletter which feature strong diamond-
shaped markings that allowed the eye to follow the line of these
markings. Further, back then with the cost of paper and vellum it was
entirely uneconomical and even more expensive to print (or write) with
what we today consider an ample leading (line-height). In addition
Gutenberg let his hyphens lie in the margins (what we know as hanging
punctuation) further adding to the blocky, well-defined lines.
In fact, the reason why serif typefaces are easier to read (at least
when printed—it is true that at small sizes on screen and with poor
hinting serif typefaces quickly become more difficult to read); it is
the serifs or ‘little feet’ on glyphs that allow our eye to dance in
saccades along a line by telling us where that glyph starts and ends
in the vertical space. Add all the characters up, particularly the
lowercase ones, and the eye will follow all the serifs forming a
concise line.
I've also read that it's all uniformly blocked out with so many
characters to a line, so many lines to a column, two columns to a
page, and ending with a full page. In a sense, one of first books
(it isn't actually the first) ever printed was the most perfectly
formatted ever.
Indeed. Gutenberg’s first bible (actually a Gutenberg Bible consists
of two volumes, each 1280-odd pages: Old Testament, and part of the
New Testament with the second continuing where the first let off—they
were divided again because of economical reasons), and the rest of the
series that followed (180 in total I believe), were divided into two
columns, spanning mostly 42 lines.
Kind regards.
—Pascal
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Simon Pascal Klein <kle...@klepas.org
> wrote:
On 30/01/2009, at 2:15 AM, <kie...@humdingerdesigns.co.uk> <kie...@humdingerdesigns.co.uk
> wrote:
Join the club, I've been commissioned to do a local website and the
guy was hoping he'd be able to get a quick bug-fix on his current
with a bit of updating.
Unfortuanetly the css was akin to the Guttenberg Bible; completely
unreadable and would have been a pig to translate. Not to mention, a
strange and chaotic mishmash of tables, frames and weird proprietary
software markup. Some clients (and this one did, thank god) need to
realize that when the original is written by a back street bedroom
"I can do that" wannabe, they're paying for someone who can stick a
few words and pics up and not much else.
Wel, I for one, relish at the idea of getting my hands on a
Gutenburg Bible and reading it… well analysing the lettering and
type rather, but hey. :-)
From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org
[mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On Behalf Of James Jeffery
Sent: 29 January 2009 14:13
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
Subject: Re: [WSG] Failed A Job :(
[...]
---
Simon Pascal Klein
Graphic & Web Designer
Web: http://klepas.org
E-mai: kle...@klepas.org
Twitter: @klepas; http://twitter.com/klepas
Kaffee und Kuchen.
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Simon Pascal Klein
Graphic & Web Designer
Web: http://klepas.org
E-mai: kle...@klepas.org
Twitter: @klepas; http://twitter.com/klepas
Kaffee und Kuchen.
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