Slashdot Mirror
Far From Being a Utilitarian Afterthought, an Astonishing Number of Design Choices Go Into Pagination (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In his landmark 1931 book An Essay on Typography, the British typographer Eric Gill discusses everything from the proper place for the tail of an 'R' to terminate to which type of word press might best serve the amateur typographer. He casts the printed word as sacred. But there's one thing -- a silent, steady workhorse found in nearly every book -- that Gill fails to address: the lowly page number. The functional role of the page number is simple: it provides order and sequence to a text. And while it is a supremely utilitarian design element, more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
Holy shit -- do we have a slow news day?
* If you have single sided printing, you can put the page number centered at the bottom.
* If you have double-sided printing, you can put the page number near the outside edges.
But let's keep over analyzing something that takes less then 10 second to think about.
I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently. Sadly, this article discusses a book written in 1931 about where to put the page number in a book. How is this news for nerds again and who cares?
We'll make great pets
This sounds like it could be a typography holy war, similar in scale to Emacs vs. vi or tabs vs. spaces. Actually, what do typography nerds think of tabs vs. spaces?
Anyone confirm?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Has anyone found an "The Outline" post on Slashdot that hasn't fallen under
1) Uninformed Gibberish
2) Trolling clickbait
3) Completely boring filler of interest to no one even the topic's core audience
When I'm reading a book, and I want to find a past sentence, but I cannot remember in exactly which chapter or page, I wish I can use something similar to `Ctrl+F` :D
Coupled with an index pagination lets you skip the usual introduction drivel where the author barfs his thoughts and intentions nobody gives a shit about.
Good authors at least. Bad ones sprinkle that useless garbage all over their text.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not news at all if you're discussing a book from 1931.
A surprising number of beef logs go in your vazhin!
Just pedantry taken to a ridiculous extreme, like with beginning a sentence with but or and. There *is no* correct way to paginate, it's all preference.
Let's concentrate on something crucial instead, like whether chapters should have numbers or titles. Yeesh.
*Yawn*
Is the convention of putting in page numbers as -. It completely breaks the ability to quickly find a page number if it's in dead-tree, or by grabbing the scroll bar and scrubbing if electronic.
If you tell me the page of interest is on page 8-2, that really doesn't tell me how far it is into the document, but if you tell me it's on page 253, I can quickly scan through until I find it.
And yes, I know that hyperlinks and search functions are a thing, but I don't care... Get off my lawn!
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Machines are currently crappy at auto-formatting without either a high-end auto-formatter (=$), or hand-tuning by humans. "Responsive" web pages is tricky to get right. Bootstrap etc. is either not smart enough to do it right, or else encoding everything "properly" to get it to fully work is poorly documented and/or rocket-science that only Shelden can figure out. It's arguably "good enough", but sometimes makes me cringe.
I think I'd rather have WYSIWYG (coordinate-based) and design 2 or 3 layouts based on pixel size. For example, have one layout for less than 500 wide, another for 501 to 900, and another for 901 and up. That way I and the customer know exactly what we are getting, and don't have to rely on auto-formatter bots and screwy browser implementations to control things. (Rather than have the OS manage font size, have it tell the browser to emulate smaller screens on larger screens but scales to fill, which effectively gives you bigger fonts if you want them.)
Fock Bootstrap and its cousins. The Web as it stands is a wasteful UI time-sink.
Table-ized A.I.
Nowadays, the layouters and designers have long been sacked.
Widows and orphans on every (other) page, nobody knows anymore that title size and the extra space below should be a multiple of the normal text, so the alignment of the articles in the previous and next columns are completely ignored. If it is too obvious, some poor soul inserts a vertical line between the columns.
Look closely at your local newspaper and check one online from 30-40 years ago and you'll immediately see the difference.
Since the day Pagemaker was invented, it has gone downhill.
>> 1) Uninformed Gibberish 2) Trolling clickbait 3) Completely boring filler of interest to no one even the topic's core audience
It's a mix of #2 and #3. When I worked in marketing, we used to hire low-cost people to write SEO-heavy articles to attract the clicks of the few people interested in "long tail" topics. It seems like this is a typical example. Here's the full text below so you don't have to actually visit the site.
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In his landmark 1931 book An Essay on Typography, the British typographer Eric Gill discusses everything from the proper place for the tail of an ‘R’ to terminate to which type of word press might best serve the amateur typographer. He casts the printed word as sacred. But there’s one thing — a silent, steady workhorse found in nearly every book — that Gill fails to address: the lowly page number.
The functional role of the page number is simple: it provides order and sequence to a text. And while it is a supremely utilitarian design element, more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
The designer who is perhaps most responsible for modern page-number placement is Jan Tschichold. Born in Switzerland and educated at the Leipzig Academy of the Arts, Tschichold fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and eventually settled in London. From 1947 to 1949, he worked at Penguin Books, where he masterminded the uniformly elegant and simplistic design of the imprint’s paperbacks that persists today.
But Tschichold’s mark went deeper than just book covers; he created an entire set of house instructions for the company’s books. And for Tschichold, folios (the word used by designers for page numbers) were governed by the same principles he emphatically stressed in all aspects of book design. Chief among these principles was clarity. “This,” he wrote in his 1928 book The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers, “puts [the new typography] into deliberate opposition to the old typography whose aim was ‘beauty’ and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today.”
Tschichold was adamant that folios should exist to facilitate that logical sequence and provide a guide for the eye when skimming to quickly access needed information (“Reading presupposes eye movement,” he observed). To that end, his instructions for Penguin specified that folios should be the same typeface and size as the rest of the text, and in Arabic numerals.
One significant point of design that Tschichold abandoned was the practice of subordinating the organization of all text elements around an invisible central axis (stay with me here.) What that means is that a designer builds out all the design elements of a book from that nonexistent axis “as if there were some focal point in the center of a line which would justify such an arrangement,” Tschichold wrote. But this, he determined, imposed an artificial central order on the layout of a text. It was an illogical practice, because readers don’t start reading from the center of a book, but from the sides.
Good numbering begins on the first page of text, which is not usually the first leaf (a piece of paper on which there are two pages front and back) of the book, which is why the first numbered page of a book will often not be “1” but something seemingly incongruous like “7.”
For books that read left to right with folios on the verso, or back of the leaf, should always be even numbers, and those on the recto, or the right side of the leaf, should be be odd. A text always begins in earnest on a recto page.
In designing number placement, a good designer also has to take into account the needs of a book binde
Keep it to the outside margin so some idiot doesn't screw up the printer files. Source: idiot who has screwed up printer files.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
You people don't have anything better to do that hairsplitting?
The Manual does warn, however, that folios should “should never be distractingly large.”
The same could be said of images, that they "should never be distractingly animated."
Just install APK's hosts file engine into people who might use a vehicle to run other people down. It does more than any other security solution.
Is that how typography is going to be done? I missed it in TFS.
Nobody else gives a flying fuck.
Signed, a recovering designer
What the actual phawk? A whole article, and Slashdotted subject such as page numbers? Guys, you should fire this intern. NOW!
Page numbers are too costly to use. They encourage fights between designers, cost additional money to print, and intrude on the cleanliness of crisp page borders thus confusing readers and breaking the flow of a story. Web designers have figured this out years ago and now use dynamically loading content. We should do the same for books. Image having no waste between pages, not needing to turn a page, not needing to read page numbers. All that time wasted trying to remember where you were and turning pages. Now, image a book without such issues. Think of the productivity improvements of staying in the flow state while reading. The book industry needs to convert to scrolls if it wants to stay innovative and relent to the next generation of readers. They aren't brought up on books. They won't tolerate turning pages, but they already learn how to scroll before they even know how to read. It's a better, more efficient, cheaper, and a natural UI for printed content. The web has known this and they are destroying the printed media. It's time we got off our asses and embrace the future: the scroll
Have gnu, will travel.
The latex style file from my publisher decides where to put the page number.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I work for a software company, and have read hundreds of internal Word docs over the years. It's always easy to identify which docs were written by an engineer or manager: they never have page numbers, ever. If they request feedback, the first thing I do is add page numbers and a comment stating, "added page numbers."
The functional role of the page number is simple: it provides order and sequence to a text.
It can also said to be a part of hermeneutics.
Msmash. Horrible. How many of these postings are real?
There are people whom have the ability to reveal that. But thought WE WOULD GIVE YOU AN OPPORTUNITY TO COME CLEAN. With that sed tha floor is yours.
Troll? Couldn't think of a counter argument, so it was marked as a troll?
It's an oddity but the guy raped his children, carried on a sexual relationship with his sister for decades, had sex with animals and a bunch of other really really screwed up stuff and was devotely Catholic after purporting to invent his religion which he found to be identical to catholicism. Some people tend to think nonchalant references to Gill need to point out the whole raped his children over many many years things.
Page numbering is not the same as pagination (which is breaking the text into pages). Page numbering and pagination are both issues related to layout, not typography: that's why a "An Essay on Typography" doesn't mention them.
more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
Page numbers go at the bottom on the outside of each page.
There is no need for thought, just do that and follow what everyone else does. While other options are possible, there is no need for them. yOU MIGHT AS WELL INVERT CAPITALISATION. iT IS POSSIBLE, BUT STUPID. jUST DO THE RIGHT THING.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
When it is a number by itself, it goes at the bottom-right.
When it is written as "Page # of #", it goes at the bottom-center.
There is no other valid location for page numbers.
I dont know if there are any such books, they might be more uniform.
Infinite scrolling is one of the most abominable inventions ever.