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Typography?


There are alot of things that one probably doesn't notice till someone else points it out, like blinking or breathing. Not entirely similar, but somewhat, is typography. I have never paid attention to good typography (typesetting) or anything like that till I began to design stuff (like this website), and even then I just picked what "kinda looked good" to me. Much like how a child might start using Comic Sans the first time it is introduced.

Lately, due to presentation marks taking some weight in reports, and in general, for the sake of professionalism, I've started to pay attention to proper type-setting of documents. Professionalism, even if not in content, but only in presentation, adds weight to the content (surprisingly the reverse isn't true, and is quite the opposite).

So, I've started using LATEX, which does all the typesetting automatically, but then has quite terrible default settings on LYX. Too much customisation is generally discouraged, since it counteracts the efforts of LATEX to properly typeset stuff, but then I start to discover this world of typesetting is quite largely opinionated. Sure, there are some general rules that people agree to, but then everyone then argues over the rest of the minor details.

You might have noticed that the fonts on this blogpage has changed. Although it might not actually show up till the regional caches have been rebuilt. (Reload the CSS manually if you know how. Mozilla has a plugin for it.) This, is of course partly because I'm starting to pay attention to these sort of things (although I haven't decided what fonts to use on the rest of this website).

CSS3 with the @font-face introduction has really revolutionised the presentation of webpages. Before its debut, everyone, if you realised, practically used the same few fonts on all websites, or resorted to using pictures to display things like menu text or logos. Now, it can be done in just plain text (i.e. you can actually select the text with your mouse, unlike if it's used in a picture). Thanks to that, the web has started to look more diverse. I totally didn't know about that (and it didn't exist when I first made this website. This place thing is actually quite old btw!)

I guess I'll have to try learn more about this properly, and do a proper revamp or something.

21:41 15 Mar 2015
Thoughts

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