Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
I was reading a novel last night where a newspaper extract appears in the story - quite a common device & was thinking this looks "wrong" - a newspaper would not format its text like this.
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I think many authors just put all these types of extects into a standard blockquote construction & do not think it though.. e.g.
paper & on line news should be fully justified, handwritten letters should be left justified. paper & on line news use different indents /paragraph spacing rules.
so I wonder what an "authentic" set of CSS rules would look like, for these various sources ?
a button labelled " format this paragraph like a newspaper" is not going to happen as sigil development has ended, but if it did happen - what should it do ?
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LOLOL, Cyb!
You should see what our House CSS sheet looks like. Believe it or not, we have guideline CSS for poems, letters, articles, newspaper clippings, notes...all that crap, for just that reason. Drives me bats to have it, and drives the guys bats, because I try to get them to remove any unused CSS from any book...but yeah, that's how ours looks.
I don't think you can do a "1 size fits all," because you have to take too many things into account. The base font, font size (is it 1em? Larger, smaller?), the kerning of the particular font, in the fontfile...does it lend itself to justification, or just get crammed? If you do an 80% font-size with justification, same question? And for letters; do they look off-balance if they are unjustified? What about if the entire book is not justified, (as we tend not to do, to allow readers to make the choice themselves)? Does that keep the letter from being set off enough?
Typography, digital or otherwise, is an exacting and time-consuming science/art. Trying to set up standardized rules for what X should be, or Y, can't really be done, not efficiently, without also analyzing the type of book (text), the nature of it (romance or action-adventure?), the flow (how many letters per inch, generally, at a base font size?)....too many variables. Just my $.02. Doesn't mean that we don't have internal guidelines, we do...but it's not as simple as it might seem.
Hitch