In decades of typesetting, I've had a chapter fall out almost perfectly with nicely pages and appropriately placed figures exactly once (fastest 40 minutes of my life) --- for the rest, it was:
- style the text and place the figures
- check the last page and see if it would be helped by paging tight or loose
- review all the pages and their figure placement to see which was the most problematic/egregious --- fix it
- starting at the beginning, adjust paragraph tightness as necessary, trying to get pages to balance and if need be, figures and references to be placed where the specs call for them --- if need be, adjust figure size/height/placement/style
- if one reaches the end and the selected strategy did not have the desired result, revert back to the initially styled and placed version and try the other strategy
- repeat until everything worked and everything panned out and all pages are balanced and all references/figure placements
I wrote a LaTeX package [0] that does exactly this. The default settings automatically lengthen paragraphs as necessary, but you can configure it to only tell you which paragraphs can be easily lengthened [1] without actually lengthening any of them.
One of my tutors at university claimed that she was able to read 9th century manuscript Cyrillic faster than modern printed books because the orthography was more varied and easier to scan/speed-read.
(That wasn't something I found to be true)
Now that you wrote it down, it does actually makes sense.
English letters with asc/descenders: b d f h k l g j p q
Cyrillic: б д у ф ц щ
Also ё й could be considered having “stuff” above.
Perhaps this is why monospaced fonts are so readable? I like having double-space between sentences.
Monospace fonts aren't considered generally more readable by people who make or work with fonts. Their particular strength is in reducing character ambiguity and preserving vertical alignment. But "readability" is subjective and depends on particulars of the specific font and of course personal expectation and preference. I find them almost always less readable than a good proportional serif font, except for code.
I do agree that monospace doesn’t make for readable prose either way.
From the article:
> There was just one space width available in the typewriter, so words and sentences were separated by the same distance. The double space was used to differentiate sentences and improve the readability of the text.
I would dispute this. Sentences are separated by a period as well as a single space character, and that's not the same distance as just a single space because the period doesn't have the same visual weight as a word character. A ". " still looks 'wider' than a " ", even if it technically isn't!
I wouldn't. Typewriters don't work like computers. The additional space was objectively beneficial. I personally witnessed that.
The extra space produced a visually "extra" pause.
Just as these blank lines produce an even greater separation. It's about emphasis, and it's going away (IMO) because it's a nicety, not an obligatory part of clarity and communication. Also, because early editing software wasn't complex enough to correctly distinguish between a sentence end and "Dr. Edward Jones". [EDIT: the gd HN editor removed my extra space!!!]
What a strange non-fact to include.
doener•2mo ago