TYPOGRAPHY AND ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

TYPOGRAPHY

The art of typography is much more older than computer. At the same time computers and associated technology are having impact on the field of typography, thus it is important to understand the trade-offs between resources and typographic excellence.

• What is typography?
  • [Typography is] the art of rightly disposing printing materials in accordance with specific purpose; of so arranging the letters, distributing the space and controlling the type as to aid to the maximum the reader's comprehension of the text. - Stanley Morris (1951)
  • It is the art of arranging letters, space and type to effectively communicate information.
• Issues that involve typography are:
  • Typography can strengthen or weaken a message.
    
  • The use and design of fonts.
    
  • The arrangement of the page or page markup.
    
  • Technical Issues.
    

FONTS

There are many type of fonts availble. On top of that, computers have lead to the introduction and use of more fonts. For example, those who are from the fixed width family were introduced due to the advent of computer technology.

• What are fonts?
  • They are letterforms that we use to print, write and read.
• A single character can be broken down to several parts.
  
• Fonts are dealt with digitally inside computer, thus called "soft-font". There are 4 basic ways of storing fonts:
  • Bitmap font is a simple, direct and accurate method, however it is costly to the use of memory, it is inflexible and it is difficult to rotate.
  • Bitmap Font With Run-Length Encoding is essentially the same as bitmap font except for the fact that it compresses data thus require less storage but more computation.
  • Vector Font stores font using the end-points of lines. It is very economical in terms of memory use and it is easy to rotate and scale. On the down side, this method is not suitable for displaying large characters on high resolution device. It also has problem with drawing serif and bold fonts due to its linear nature.
  • Outine font is a method that uses vectors to outline a character and then fill it in to form a letter. This method is as simple and as flexible as the vector method. At the same time, it is as accurate as the bitmap method interms of reconstruction of the letter but it requires much less storage space as compared to the bitmap method. The downside is that it requires more computation than any of the methods mentioned above.
• Fonts come in a variety of formats:
  • Character Styles.
  • Font sizes.
  • Serif or Sans-serif.
  • Proportional or Fixed-width.