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Seventh Circuit issues excruciatingly detailed typographic guide for lawyers

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has published a detailed “Requirements and suggestions for typography in briefs and other papers” as part of its Practitioner’s Handbook for Appeals.

Mind you, the Seventh Circuit is pretty hip: they have RSS feeds, a wiki, videos on their website, and electronic case filing. Still, their typographic guidelines are pretty awful. Click the link below to read more.

Seventh Circuit Thinks Its Lawyers Are Really Stupid « Above the Law: A Legal Web Site – News, Commentary, and Opinions on Law Firms, Lawyers, Law Schools, Law Suits, Judges and Courts + Career Resources.

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The Internet cranks weigh in on spaces after a full stop

Larry Yudelson has sent us a link to a a blog post by “

Heraclitus’ arguments are basically

  1. Old books used more space after the period than modern books do. Anyone who has looked at a pre-20th century book already knew this.
  2. Old style-manuals direct the use of more space after periods. Heraclitus cites several old manuals, though they are mostly British, and he ignores Theodore Low DeVinne’s 19th century Practice of Typography.
  3. People who claim that the extra space after a period was introduced with the typewriter are wrong. Is there a widespread belief that the typewriter is the source of the extra space after a period? Heraclitus cites only modern blog posts in support, then he conveniently knocks it down. Classic straw man argument.
  4. Therefore you can space as you wish after the period.

“Martrix,” our favorite typography maven, commented on Heraclitus’ article as follows:

Who the heck is writing this diatribe? Isn’t almost everything we do in typography convention or custom? Sometime in June I decided to research the ellipsis. Uh oh! Another sacred cow has been ground up into hamburger. All’s fair on the printed page these days, if you believe everything you read on the web.

I decided that non-typographers can and will do as they please, e.g. what is easiest. They don’t know squat about character encodings in UTF-8 and they could care less. Legibility? Why would anyone who relies on a screen the size of a cigarette pack and texting care about legibility?

My standards are still legibility and my eye. If it violates convention and it looks bad, it is bad. If I were to pick up a hardback and discover that they’d double-spaced after the periods, used three periods in succession as an ellipsis and let it drop down to start a new line, used two hyphens instead of an em-dash and let orphans run wild at the top of pages it would disturb me as much as seeing ‘columny’ [sic] as the first word of Kristof’s editorial in the NY Times Sunday Review section last week. It all detracts from whatever pleasure I anticipated receiving for my $28.

eBooks (I received a Nook for Mother’s Day 2012) are the worst; never mind the typographical horrors, it’s as if publishers have decided that readers aren’t entitled to legibility, proofreading or basic literacy because they only paid $9.99.

Well, you certainly got my dander up!

Two final thoughts:

  • If you think Heraclitus is right, you should get used to some other archaic typographic conventions like “Capitals being generally ſet with Spaces between each letter. . . .” That beaut comes from The History and Art of Printing (London, 1771), which Heraclitus cites approvingly.
  • If you think books and periodicals should be typeset in a consistent, familiar, and pleasing manner, you’ll have to put up with the conventions of the obsessive-compulsives who care about such things. Après eux, le déluge!
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Study Type in Rome — only $6300

“The program, now in its fifth season, is a unique way to learn about type and typography, book and lettering design, as well as architecture, art, archeology, epigraphy, and even Italian cuisine. Study with the best typographers and designers in Italy. Visit the Trajan Column and partake in exclusive guided visits to the Roman and Imperial Forums, the harbor town of Ostia Antica an ancient site that best reflects the grandeur of Rome and “behind-the-stacks” tour of Biblioteca Angelica, the oldest library in Europe that houses original Bodoni type books. Examine the inscriptions on Roman structures that have long been accepted as a typographic ideal.”

SVA Summer Program in Italy.

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Keys to the Kingdom

I thought The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web might be the Holy Grail of web typography but this adaptation of Bringhurst’s principles to a typographically-hobbled web ground to an unexplained halt in 2006. Most of Richard Rutter’s Web Typography and Clagnut site files were lost to a “catastrophic database failure,” aka no database back-up, but he’s gradually restoring as much as he can from archives.

Do any of my fellow TypeManiacs believe The Elements is still a feasible project? If they do, and If Mr. Rutter is too busy to finish it, would they be interested in collaborating?

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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.