Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
I still disagree with the position, that "the advantages to making the information more semantic far outweigh the advantages to making it better laid out."
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This is an old, old problem. Anyone who is knowledgeable or a professional in graphic design and typography please chime in. I claim to be no expert but I do claim to have worked in it in the past and have also take a course or two on graphic design and typography as part of my undergraduate major (quite a long time back now).
When digital type emerged (as opposed to metal typefaces), there were many problems that computers could not at that time solve. Ligatures was one problem. An example of a ligature is below. Notice how when you type
"
fi"
in certain font typefaces, if you don't have advanced ligature capabilities, the dot of the "i" runs into the hook of the "f". This is demonstrated in the top right of the image below.
With advanced ligature capabilities, the "fi" becomes a glyph (see image, top left)which I obviously cannot show you textually because this feature is not available in this forum nor is it available generally on the web. So, I demonstrate again with the graphic below. Notice how in proper ligature format, the "dot" of the "i" has disappeared. In fact, it no longer exists! The hook of the "f" takes over the space that originally would have been inhabited by the "dot" of the "i".
The other example given is
"
fl".
Notice that without advanced ligatures, the top serif of the l runs into the top serif of the f making it a total jumbled mess.
With advanced ligature capabilities "fl" is blended as a glyph (i.e., one character). Now, before advanced ligatures (which only came around early 2000s, I believe, if my memory serves me correctly) the computer has no concept of ligatures.) You had to manually find all incidences where there were ligature problems and replace the problem with a glyph if your font actually had that glyph. Most fonts don't actually have those glyphs built in. Now, with advanced ligatures (a feature that actually is part of the font and part of the text program you use and most still actually DON'T have them) this problem is solved because when I type "fi" or "fl" or "ffl" etc. in say Adobe InDesign using an advanced font typeface the "fi" is automatically replaced by the proper looking "fi" and the computer can still understand this as "fi" and not a glyph (because a glyph is one character so "fi" in the past when properly ligatured would become a single entity and thus if you search for "fi" as "f" and "i" you won't find the word!!!
Now, this only touches the surface of typographical problems. There are many problems of which mentioned previously by someone else was kerning. Automatic kerning still isn't good enough to be used totally professionally. If you want a properly kerned text, you really still need to do it by eyesight.
And the problem goes on and on and on. If a piece of text was properly ligature, kerned and so forth and you printed it in PDF, the PDF will be able to properly reproduce (faithfully reproduce) the text in any display for any computer or digital device.
Sure, PDF can be improved upon. Right now, it's what I stick to though because I find the other formats unsatisfying. And to my eye (even if not a professional typographer's or typesetter's eye) the other formats really is glaringly ugly in producing text.
My eyes bleed when I see that ;-)
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Edit: by the way, I should say that I still find kerning very difficult to know how to do well. When I try to produce something aesthetically pleasing, I like most people rely on automatic kerning because I find it very difficult to make it nice looking. When I can see some areas where automatic kerning is not working properly I do try to adjust it manually but a lot of the times I can't get the spacing correctly. Knowing how to kern aesthetically is really difficult. It takes a lot of training and experience.