On Thursday 22 June 2006 07:54, Martin A. Hansen wrote: > Hello All, > > > I found this document on the BBC news website, which I have reposted here: > > http://130.226.106.174/~paste/cgi-bin/20_06_06_iap_evolution.pdf > > And after reading it I thought it would be an interesting exercise to > present it to the LyX-users list for thorough criticism with respect to > typographical and graphical layout. I think we could learn some interesting > things here (at least I could). > > I shall not go into the content of the document, but only say that in my > opinion, this document is of major importance and therefore ought to have > perfect layout. However, looking closely at the document it is clear that > it was not prepared using LyX! I have this feeling that, apart from several > errors, a lot of typographical rules have been broken or ignored - and also > some graphical ones when considering the letterhead. > > In my opinion the letterhead is poorly designed. The little black bar in > the top left corner annoys me, why is it there? The line reading "(The > Academy for Sciences for the Developing World)" seem badly placed shifting > the entire block right of the vertical bar. > > The document contains several errors as far as I can tell: there is a white > space missing after (ii) and the vertical white space between 67. and 68. > institutions should not be there. Furthermore, I am not sure I like the > choice of fonts (and the high number of fonts used). Finally, I have this > feeling that all blocks of text are aligned in an unpleasing way, but I > cannot say what exactly triggers this feeling. Perhaps somebody can? > I agree on all the points you have made.
One aspect which I find particularly offensive is the use of upper case where lower case would traditionally be used and lower case where upper case would traditionally be used. The general feeling of unpleasing alignment is, in my opinion, due to three features: justification is by varying word spacing only; kerning is not used (look at the spacing of "V" in the last word of the title); and a sans serif font (Officina Sans-Book I'd guess, from the fonts listed by Adobe Reader) is used for the bulk of the document, made worse by putting the first page in bold. There's a reason why most printed blocks of text have used a serif font for the last three centuries or more: it's easier to read. Les -- L. R. Denham Gentoo Linux 2005.1 Kernel 2.6.10-gentoo-r6 KDE 3.3.2 Athlon XP 3200+ 1 GB Dual Channel PC2700 RAM Maxtor 120 GB (Partitions EXT3) Sony CRX300E CD-RW/DVD-ROM OPTORITE DVD RW DD1205 Gainward GeForce4 64MB MX440 EPox 8RDA3+ Motherboard
