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Book designer meets programmer — Hebrew book composition

Our bud Larry Yudelson sent us a link to this neat article by Raphael Freeman, showing how he uses a variety of custom scripts to compose complex book pages in Hebrew.

I’ve sent a note to Raphael asking what page layout program he’s using. I’ll reveal all when he gets back to me.

via Book designer meets programmer | Raphael Freeman | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel.

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20 Fantastic jQuery Web Type Plugins

Larry Yudelson strikes again! This time sending us a link to a whole page of jQuery typography plugins.

First, a few words of explanation:

  1. Today’s typical web page consists of some HTML code (for structure and content) plus some CSS code for styling.
  2. For animation or for user interaction, you might employ Flash, HTML5, Javascript, or some other technique.
  3. Javascript programs can read and respond to a user’s mouse movement, mouse clicks, and keyboard input. Javascript can completely change the appearance and content of a web page by swapping CSS files or completely rewriting a page’s HTML.
  4.  Due to Javascript’s popularity, several collections of Javascript programs have been made available –for free!– to help web designers do cool things with their websites. These collections include MooTools and jQuery.

So the point of the article that Larry has pointed us to is that a whole bunch of typemaniac programmers have been cooking up extensions to the jQuery library, specificially to help you manipulate type on your web pages.

For example . . . Remember using a proportion wheel and vertical camera to resize display type to the same length?

Well, throw away that rubber cement and get with the 21st century! Charlie Park’s “Hatchshow” plugin will equalize all the measures for you — even when you edit the copy.

And that’s only one example of what programmers are doing with web type. For some others, read the article.