🚀 go-pugleaf

Uh oh, here we go again!

In article <4058@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
           lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) states that:
> I am not schooled in book design, but I really don't see what special
> expertise is involved.  I designed and printed one book and helped with
> another, using TeX in both cases.  I just looked at some examples as
> models for the first version, then screwed around with the formatting
> parameters until it looked nice.  Being impressed with the advice
> in the TeXbook that one should have the design done by a professional,
> I took my drafts to the publisher and got comments and advice, which,
> however, turned out to be quite trivial.  I doubt that book design
> is even much of a craft, much less a science (as some seem to be
> contending).



Greg, just because in your one case you didn't find formatting a book very
difficult doesn't mean that anybody can do it, and that book design
is a simple task. There are a number of reasons why your argument
isn't convincing to me.

1) Just because your publisher didn't make any non-trivial recommendations
   doesn't mean that your book couldn't have used some changes. As other
   people have stated, there are many books being published now that have
   terrible designs; not all publishers (and designers) know what they
   are doing.

2) You had the advantage of using TeX, which takes care of many of the
   tasks a book designer normally has to worry about, like watching
   out for widows and orphans; making sure lines are being hyphenated
   properly (not too many hyphens in a row, etc.); making sure large
   chapter headings are properly kerned; using hyphens, en-dashes,
   em-dashes properly, substituting ligatures in the text where needed,
   etc., etc.

   Now it is great the TeX does all this stuff for you, but unless you
   fully understand what TeX is doing, you probably won't be able to
   apply these concepts outside of the TeX environment. For example, do
   you know how to properly space large words in all caps? This is
   actually a very difficult thing to do properly. Do you know what widows
   and orphans are?

3) Copying somebody else's formatting and ideas is a good way to learn
   about general design principles. But, unless you understand why the
   original designer made all those design decisions, you will never be
   anything more than an imitator, unable to solve design problems
   creatively and originally.

4) "...screwed around with the formatting...until it looked nice." That
   is a very interesting statement. Though I get the impression that
   you are good at picking out "nicely" designed documents from "poorly"
   designed documents, that doesn't mean that everybody can. I know people
   who think that a simple flyer to look "nice" should have 4 different
   typefaces in 2 or 3 styles each for a total of around 10 fonts. Now I
   know you wouldn't think so, but making the implicit generalization that
   everybody knows what a "nice" document should look like is, I feel is
   incorrect.

5) Book design is only one small area in the field of typography and
   graphic design. Just because book design seems simple to you doesn't
   mean that other areas are simple too. In one simple example, creating
   pages that contain multiple columns, I feel, is much more difficult than
   creating single column pages. I know you didn't imply this in your
   message, but since the dicussion has moved toward document design in 
   general, I thought I would mention this point.


Finally as a disclaimer, let me say that I'm not a typographer or a graphic
designer. I am, like many other people, somebody who got interested in DTP
and have grown to enjoy producing "nice" looking pages from my computer.
However, unlike many other people, I have spent a lot of time learning about
typography and graphic design by reading, talking with experts in the field,
and taking classes. I feel that, though the basic knowledge about typography
campared to other fields (such as programming), may be easier to learn, to
be really good at it takes just as much time, effort, and skill.

-Michael Wang

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