Be a pro about styling prose

Following is Issue 40 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter [ archive | subscribe ].

Hey, Web typographers: here's a little tool that'll help you make those seas of text more navigable ... making them interesting is still up to you.

The other day, while showing around some Web page design prototypes, a (somewhat) younger colleague said she just didn't like the styles I had applied to article-length text.

See, I'm not old enough to have set type when the tools of that craft were Linotype machines, mallets and metal saws. But I do have a history of setting, trimming, waxing and pasting up many galleys of so-called "cold type," long since replaced in print production by desktop publishing tools. I first learned to set type in the 1970s.

And one of the things I learned in early days as a designer and typesetter was that people expect paragraphs in typeset prose to have their first lines indented, typically about 10 percent of the column width.

Well, that younger colleague saw that I'd done exactly that in this prototype, and thought it was wrong. "That's not the way people read on the Web," she said. Since the default appearance of paragraphs in a browser is all flush-left, with a full line of space between, that's what she felt people wanted to see.

I disagree. But, despite hundreds of years of experience, research and habit, the human race has failed to remove all subjective, arbitrary judgments from the craft of typography. So she may be right, at least to some people, because the ways people read and process text are as varied as books in the Library of Congress.

Talk about type, or do something about it

I could discuss the nuances of font selection, line spacing, column widths, paragraph indents, margins and padding well past the interest level of all but Gutenberg himself. But why bother? Your type tastes may be different, just like my colleague's. And since we're all busy and there's no one right answer to any typographical question, what we really need are methods to make fast choices.

So rather than write a newsletter full of font rants, I assembled a little tool that might help you decide your preferences from different styles of text in a Web browser. It's called, subtly, a "text style sampler."

With it, you can quickly switch fonts, text sizes, line spacing and paragraph indents, then expand and contract a sample text block to see how it looks at different widths in the browser.

I put the instructions right on the page. You will need to have a browser that supports Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript and cookies to make it go. Generally, any contemporary browser will work, though the Netscape 4 series won't. But heaven help you anyway if you're a Web designer and you're still using N4.

This tool takes advantage of a CSS-switching script technique taught by Paul Sowden and added to by Eric A. Meyer. With good stuff like that to work with, my part was easy.

Let me know what you think, and please send along any suggestions for improvements. Enjoy!