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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.
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
How is this news for nerds again and who cares?
Typography is a pretty nerdy field.
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.
Every time I type a comment on slashdot I have to go back and count my sentence spaces out of a genuine fear that someone will notice and light into my ass.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Pro tip: Words like "Mr." and many other handles (with or without a ".") should always be followed by a nbsp to stop possible dissociation across a line break, Mr.
bluefoxlucid
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Pet peeve: PDF files with displayed page numbers that don't match up with the actual page index.