At 11:11 AM 7/5/2005, Dean Matsueda wrote:
I concur, but keep in mind that the art and craft of typesetting goes
back for __centuries__ so a couple of decades is not much of a sample.
If you read through Mark's series of articles, he notes that before
computers came along, this was "correct" typesetting practice. But, we
don't see this anymore because one application completely changed this
practice: QuarkXPress. Quark never got this "right" and so after twenty
years of desktop publishing, the norm is to not hang quotation marks of
bullets.
Dean,
Yikes! I own plenty of books that were typeset before the advent of
QuarkExpress (or desktop computers, for that matter) that don't have
hanging quotation marks or list bullets.
Initial caps and other elements may have hung outside text blocks in the
days of hand-lettered manuscripts, but I thought the invention of movable
type created the need to enclose everything within margins and changed the
conventions. I imagine Gutenberg was cursed as a shameless,
tradition-busting, non-standards-compliant heretic by the monks and others
who had been hand-lettering manuscripts for centuries and really knew how
it was supposed to be done.
Mark Boulton seems to feel that anything that interrupts the continuous
left margin of text is "incorrect" and unsightly. He says, "The eye looks
for straight lines everywhere, when type is indented in this way, it
destroys the flow of text." Sloppy grammar aside, his proposition that
"the eye looks for straight lines everywhere" is no more true than "the eye
looks for discontinuities everywhere" -- both have certainly been crucial
to our evolutionary survival, perhaps the latter moreso than the former in
a world where so few straight lines naturally occur.
Besides, unvarying straight lines put us to sleep -- just ask anyone who's
had to drive across the prairie. Changes in line can help keep us awake
and engaged.
Personally, I welcome breaks from the monotony of continuous margins and I
make use of the shapes of text on the page to keep my place while I'm
reading, particularly with non-fiction. I find indented lists easier to
scan & comprehend; the list as a whole stands out from the enclosing
narrative. It's a wonder that Boulton favors line-spacing between
paragraphs, the way it breaks up the continuous flow of text!
Further, leaving room for hanging quotes & bullets between the page frame
and the text boundary is an expensive use of space. It's basically
indenting all of the text one or more ems, expending a lot of the page for
(in my view) dubious benefit, mandating wide left margins, constraining
page design, etc. I say, to heck with it. Do it for design's sake
occasionally to keep things popping, but it strikes me as a bad idea to
implement (or return to, if Boulton's history is correct) as a universal
convention.
Cheers,
Paul
ref:
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_steps_to_better_typography_part_2/
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