Typography + editing = preEdició

Prospects of Pages

Pere Farrando — 2013-06-14T16:07:50+02:00

The recently announced possibility to edit Pages documents on a browser, included in the forthcoming operating system Mavericks for Mac, clearly shows enormous potential. One cannot help but seeing that feature as the first step toward a collaborative writing service on the web. However, to those who do not care about one company gaining ground in a field which is already occupied by another one, such prospect is likely to switch the attention away from two matters in which Pages has room for improvement: • A better treatment of typography (availability of the thin space, decimal fractions in point measurements, the discretionary hyphen, and em and en spaces, for instance). • A better handling of spell and grammar checking and end-of-line word division, specially in non-major languages.

QuarkXPress and InDesign as tools for copyeditors

Pere Farrando — 2013-04-09T12:57:10+02:00

Is that precise aim – having a thorough control over the text – reserved to typesetters? Think about end-of-line word divisions, the use of hard spaces here and there and the whole matter of having a scheme of paragraph and character styles and applying them to the entire manuscript. How can this be tackled without the collaboration of copyeditors and hence their knowledge of the two more important page-layout applications?

Are URLs regular text?

Pere Farrando — 2013-04-03T19:22:49+02:00

I can think of a few questions to see this through: • Do URLs need to go after a carriage return when they are part of an enumeration of data? • Is the full stop to be avoided after a URL? ... • Do their internal dots, slashes and dashes work as end-of-line breaking points (without any need of an additional dash that would mislead the reader)? My answer is an expected yes.

Why the mouse beats the trackpad

Pere Farrando — 2013-03-27T19:33:14+01:00

See the actions to move the cursor using the Apple’s Magic Trackpad (or the Magic Mouse, it doesn’t matter): ...Move the finger on the surface of the trackpad towards the destination (one or more tries). ...Move the mouse towards the destination (usually one try). ...Using the trackpad the user brings the cursor to another place on the screen, whereas with the mouse the cursor itself is moved by the hand, which gives the user much more precision. To move the cursor or to be the cursor, that's the key.

Pushing the subscription model

Pere Farrando — 2013-03-23T13:15:45+01:00

Guess I make a list of services that any average or advanced computer user, and specifically someone in the publishing sector, has or might want to have: ... - Adobe’s Creative Cloud (have-not) - Podcasting: file hosting and RSS feed provider (have) ... - One or two subscriptions to newspapers (have-not) ...Now, tell me you really expect I will subscribe to your service before all the have-nots mentioned above.

4. From XHTML to InDesign (and a glance at iBooks Author)

Pere Farrando — 2012-04-20T15:55:32+02:00

Every article or post intended for a webpage (namely, a valid XHTML file) can be made into an epub using Sigil, which is a fast way of creating an article in two formats perfectly suitable for all kinds of authors. ...As you can see in Figure 2, we have got all the HTML tags in the structure of our InDesign document, but this is not enough for us, because paragraphs with classes won’t be identified as singular paragraphs. ...Because HTML classes haven’t become independent tags, and neither have tags, we have to go back to our fake XML file and turn all types of paragraphs with a class (and tags as well) into new dedicated tags. ...Things would be different under two circumstances: first, by having an iBooks books reader that is available for Mac, Linux and Windows users, so that a universal target could be reached; second, by having a version of Pages that is enhanced enough to become the PDF-maker partner of iBA. ...People who want to provide short contents for free in a casual environment can’t rely on tools that are to be announced sooner or later, like an iBooks reader for desktop devices, or on distribution channels that are as closed as the iTunes system.

3. A claim for ebooks with less and better formatting

Pere Farrando — 2011-11-09T23:12:39+01:00

I assume that running headers and page numbers are not contained in the code written by the designer, but that they are created by the app’s rendering system, which determines how the EPUB specification is executed. In Apple’s iBooks app, these elements are small in size, the title and the name of the author are set at the top of the page, and the page numbers are at the bottom, set in the expression x of y (see Figure 4). ... I am convinced that the main objective should be to ensure minimum typographic weight, which implies not devoting any space on the page to information or marks that are not useful to the reader (remember we are dealing with continuous text). ...The author’s name, the title of the novel and the current page number appear when we touch the tablet screen (see Figure 5), which means that the navigation interface is the best ally for good typography in ebooks. ...To sum up, this post is addressed not to designers, but rather to publishing companies that dare to bring out unfinished or badly-designed works, and to ebook-reading app programmers who force the EPUB specification to behave the way they want it to, rather than ensuring a neutral, truly comfortable page.

2. Five editing features that Pages 09 lacks

Pere Farrando — 2011-06-15T10:00:00+02:00

I say editing because it is a more widespread and recognisable word, but it would be more accurate to say authoring, as typefaces and their use in texts for print are in the hands of authors. ...We want Pages to take care of, if not all, at least most of the details we need when editing and setting our texts, even if these details don’t actually turn up on a page—think of the discretionary hyphen, for instance. ...In Pages we can give the order “Never hyphenate”, but what if we want to force the division at a certain point in the word, or even to broaden the points of division given by the application? Pages doesn’t have to be comparable with InDesign or QuarkXPress, but it would be a great step forward to allow the discretionary hyphen to block the division of any word by putting one of these invisible hyphens before it, as InDesign and Quark do. ...My aim with this post wasn’’t to start a race between programs, but to point out a few holes in typographic and editing features of Pages and relate them to the needs of authors and editors.

1. Catching on Markdown (for non-coders)

Pere Farrando — 2011-04-27T10:00:00+02:00

We need to write code, but only a small amount of it, and we will never get used to surfing into coarse specifications (CSS, XML, ePub, LaTeX, and the like). Besides, starting a website by using Joomla, WordPress or MovableType is not an option for us, because it means having to deal with an Apache server, a MySQL database, and PHP code — unbearable. Those who don’t get deeply into these content management systems end up using a template which will never give them the sense of a personal space in the cloud. ...It is true that Markdown doesn’t manage with <div> blocks, so we have to write thinking only of <p> and <span> levels. ...To me, there is nothing to worry about — non-coders spend a lot of time off the cloud and aren’t in a hurry to learn more code.