3 . 2 The Design Point of View
Design is another point of view that must be considered as we examine ways of approaching the document-creation process. The way a document is visually presentedhow it grabs the audience visuallyis a critical factor in the overall perception of a document. After all, the end product is an object to be viewed. The aesthetic components that make up the pages, fonts, layout, and color all contribute to the overall goal of producing a document that communicates ideas clearly. (A thorough treatment of document and Web design(8) is beyond the scope of this book, but for a list of good books see section Publications in the appendix Resources.) The remainder of this section will introduce some of the basics of document design and other topics that have strong relationships to document processing.(9)
3 . 2 . 1 Fonts and Typography
"Typography is to writing what a soundtrack is to a motion picture." -Jonathan Hoefler
Open any computer magazine about desktop publishing and you will see many ads for fonts and font-manipulation software. It may seem that the world has gone a little font crazy. Fonts, specifically, and typography, in general, are extremely important.
In some sense, typography is something that is so obvious, so visible, and so all-encompassing that most people simply don't notice it. However, it is precisely because typography is so pervasive that it is so important.(10) Fonts are not simply the shape of letters for creating words; they are letterforms with carefully designed shapes and subtle differences that relate to each other and that combine to make a pure visual statement.
Some software tools pay more attention than others to the role of fonts and typography. Depending on your specific needs, these tools may or may not be important. However an awareness of the crucial factors can only help when judging the capabilities of a particular tool. In general, page makeup and page layout programs have much more flexible typographic features than their batchoriented counterparts. The WYSIWYG nature of page makeup systems is more suitable to adhoc design and experimentation.
If you are faced with selecting a font, it is important to consider the number of variations available in a font family. Some font families have more than a dozen variations. This within-family flexibility can only make the designer's job easier. Using several variations within a single font family is almost always aesthetically safer than mixing arbitrary fonts.
Many tools are available for font manipulation. These tools allow precise adjustments of kerning tables (the spacing between letters), the creation of new letterforms, the extraction of outlines, distortions, and so on. One important reason that such a variety of detailed tools exists is that font design has such an important impact on the document as a whole. Letterforms are a key ingredient in a document, and designers use them as the raw material to be
Of course, it's important not to get too carried away with these tools.
Individual characters may also be used as graphic components. The line between font manipulation and graphic illustration can blur quite easily.
The many software tools available for font manipulation allow such a wide variety of choices that the traditional letterform is no longer sacred. Characters used as illustrative elements bring us back to the age of illustrated manuscripts filled with carefully crafted characters. There is of course the added danger of "font junk," the use and abuse of font manipulation tools by the amateur.
Fonts are also one of the more problematic aspects of document interchange. A font used in one document may or may not exist as a "system" resource on another computer system. Sometimes, if a document depends on the system to provide the font, and it's not there, an available font is substituted and the look of the document changes. Adobe's Multiple Master font technology addresses some of these problems and is a key component of their Acrobat line of products. Multiple Master fonts are able to parameterize more of the font that other font technologies. (For more information on Acrobat, see Section 7 . 4 . 2 Electronic Page Delivery in Chapter 7 Applying Standards.)
Another somewhat obtuse but powerful character manipulation system is the METAFONT language.(11) METAFONT is a precise mathematical description of fonts; in many ways, it models the way ink is placed on paper by a pen. METAFONT is the creation of Donald Knuththe same man who brought you TeX see( Section 4 . 1 Types of Document Processors ). METAFONT is a language for describing characters in excruciatingly precise terms. After creating or modifying a description, the system chews away on the "code" and spits out a new font. These fonts can then be used by TeX, turning this interesting academic exercise into a practical and useful tool.
3 . 2 . 2 Layout and Composition
The placement of the various components of a document on a page is the layout. Document layout and composition are critical pieces of the design puzzle. Unfortunately, the only help electronic publishing tools have to offer is assistance through the use of templates. Some tools, like Microsoft's Wizards in MS Word, lend you a helping hand to fill in templates. Tools that aid in the overall layout and structural composition of documents exist only in research laboratories. Automated aids for global design features such as overall balance, proper use of white space, and so on, do not exist as product features.
Typical document processing systems have style sheets or master pages, that define a particular visual layout. The visual layout of document elements on the style sheets can be applied to the entire document. The number of master pages and the flexibility in working with them are important capabilities of a document processing system. Often, global changes to a document are accomplished using these types of pages or styles. Careful use of master pages and style sheets is a significant help in the management of overall document consistency. (For a more through discussion of document management issues, please see Chapter 8 Document Management.)
In the future, it may be possible to have design "helpers" in much the same way that grammar checkers now help. Such suggestions are not pure fantasy. We are already starting to see the application of image-recognition systems in the pen-based portable computer field. Users can create rough sketches, and the system cleans up the drawing on PDAs (Portable Digital Assistant) like Apple's Newton. Image recognition is being taken a step farther with the concepts of shape grammars.(12) In the architecture and computer graphics domains, shape grammars have been used to create simulated buildings in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright(13) and paintings by Kandinsky.(14) The concept is to create a grammar, a language, from a set of shapes as well as the allowable operations upon those shapes. Many interesting grammars have been created to describe the styles of architects and artists.
