Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
I'm not claiming that typography and layout do not have an impact, but it is not obvious that they do and saying just what that impact is seems sometimes to be quite difficult.
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The purpose of typography is to disappear so you absorb the contents without noticing the letters. For a very long time, this was combined with the purpose of cramming as many words on a page as possible in order to reduce printing costs; balancing "large enough to read clearly, with enough whitespace not to get lost" with "cheap enough to print and make a profit" was a balancing act, with a tertiary goal of "make our books memorable so they'll buy more from us if they liked them."
Ebooks and other digital content drastically changes the balancing act. There is no more "too few words on a page to print"--there's only "so few words on the page that the reader can't flip them fast enough and loses the story." No reason not to put a blank line between paragraphs; it makes them easier to spot--especially on low-res screens. OTOH, the tech limitations make it harder to provide things like "script font for letters in the middle of the novel."
We've made enough advances in typography that most people think "no typography" is okay, when really what they mean is that "the typography used by default in simple computer programs is okay for me."
That typography was established over many years of testing; thousands of hacker-geeks worked to come up with pixel-based fonts that differentiated between letters well enough to work on black screens with amber text. (Well. I think it's likely only a few dozen geeks actively worked on it; thousands sent feedback and said "
This part sucks; I can't tell the difference between 1 and I; fix that you jerks or I'm buying a [PET/TSR/S-100/Commodore64/Apple/whatever next time..")