New Draft for the "Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination" Published
Author(s) and publish date
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Ivan Herman
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The Digital Publishing Interest Group has published a new Working Draft of “Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination”. This document describes requirements for pagination and layout of books in latin languages, based on the tradition of print book design and composition. It is hoped that these principles can inform the pagination of digital content as well, and serve as a reference for the CSS Working Group and other interested parties.
I found this while looking for ideas on improving the typography in the ebooks I am responsible for, and while I gather I am not alone in my frustrations in the lack of good typographic control in the current ereader systems, I think the author here leans too far in the direction of equating good typography with replicating the traditional form of the printed book. It's true that much of the practice of traditional book design is predicated on the notion of the codex--folded and bound paper signatures that open into a two-page spread. But a digital book is not a codex, and behaves very differently from one. So why do we need the design strictures of the codex? In a codex, you would have the gutter be small relative to the outer margins so that the two text blocks would be visually joined. But in a digital book, there may be no spread and no gutter. Margins may be arbitrary. Why worry about the placement of footnotes on the 'page', when footnotes can be dynamically linked from anywhere in the file? The author notes that traditionally, a design was planned for signatures of a certain number of pages, a concern that is completely irrelevant in a digital book. It's possible to read an ebook file in a continuous scroll with no page breaks at all. I mean, it's always been the case the a new medium starts out imitating the old, but eventually gives that up. I'm not saying we should throw away 500 years of tradition, or that we shouldn't strive for better, but we also have to adapt (I should say that I am old enough to remember doing layouts with waxer and knife). This means that digital designers need to focus on what's actually going to be of value to the reader and work in the new medium. And, as a practical matter, it may be a long time before reading systems can manage tasks like balancing spreads without orphans when even in dedicated typesetting systems, those corrections are still often made by hand by the operator. Can you imagine a browser doing on the fly as the reader adjusts the viewport? It may be better to just give up the notion of the spread. A digital book doesn't really need it. Many design decisions are driven by the economics of production, to keep a book from being too long or too short. Why carry those decisions over to the digital realm? It's not as if many books today are shining examples of the typographer's art. (And don't even get me started on the cheapness of the paper and bindings!)
There are several reasons for wanting more typographic control, as well as for wanting more from the world of print.
A simple one is that people are making printed books using CSS (and yes, printed books are outselling ebooks).
Another is that people want (or need) to print Web pages and get sensible output using Web browsers.
But another is that many of the conventions of printed layout are of course based not only on history but also often on deeper principles that were learned and experimented with.
There are, by the way, dedicated typesetting systems that can balance columns pretty well; I've written code for that sort of thing myself in the past. If you're designing for print, of course, such as New York Times bestseller (not a fake example) a certain amount of tweaking is likely to be acceptable anyway; if you're producing driving licences (currently done with XML and XSL-FO in at least some states) yes, it's another matter, there's little or no tweaking to be allowed for obvious security reasons. So yes, it varies, and for an ebook you're right, I agree, we may for the forseeable future accept some minor problems in exchange for greater power and flexibility. I've often wanted balanced columns on my own Web site. And an A3/tabloid sized digital book reader might well benefit from the concept of "facing pages".
Om the placement of footnotes, sure, it's early stages for ebooks. The medium has yet to find a real voice. I can imagine a draggable footnote area that expands automatically to show when there are footnotes, or opens to show the first line or two so that you get an idea whether you want to expand a note with just a glance of the eye rather than having to interrupt the flow of thought; that's why we have footnotes in print and not just endnotes. That has to be balanced against making accessible readers, and against unobtrusiveness.
The mechanism to place something on the same page as a reference to it, though, is fundamental, and is used for figures, for marginalia, for footnotes, for floated tables, and using the same mechanism for many things is a win all round. So that's here, and having the ability to replicate footnotes at the foot of the page doesn't preclude other treatments as we learn, collectively, and experiment.
So we're all learning, but your comments, and especially any specific comments you or others make, are all very welcome. Thanks!
Latinreq wasn’t really intended to be a guide to digital typography. We wanted to document the print tradition, both because many people now create print books using HTML and CSS, and because it’s a wonderful resource for digital books. I’m certainly not advocating that digital books have half-title pages and blanks, but I think much can be learned from that thousand years of experience with books. Most ebooks won’t have spreads, but I think many will still be paged—I don’t want to scroll through all of Moby Dick. Print has come up with effective methods of helping orient readers in long texts, like page numbers and running heads. Even footnotes are a very interesting way of making annotations discretely available to the reader without requiring clicks or links.
Latinreq won’t tell people what digital books should be, but I hope parts of it may help inform the ongoing conversation about such books.