Comments on: Good type feels good

Good type feels good

Robot Johnny — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:42:27 -0800

Thinking with Type The online companion to the book of the same name offers a nice little online primer on the finer points of typography, including my favourite new online game: Dumb Quotes. Remember kids: only you can prevent poor kerning.

By: Robot Johnny

Robot Johnny — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:47:56 -0800

And before anyone cries, "shill!" I'll assert that the site is unquestionably a nice, fun little resource despite it being a marketing tie-in.

By: miss lynnster

miss lynnster — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:59:47 -0800

I'm a typography geek, so I can dig it. I particularly enjoyed the demonstration of how letter stretching only occurs when "evil" hits it. (Didn't see the "Dumb Quotes" game, though. Where was it?)

By: Robot Johnny

Robot Johnny — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:03:15 -0800

Unfortunately because the site is flash, I couldn't link directly to any particular page. In the same "Crimes Against Typography" section as the evil stretching you mentioned -- look for the navigation up top.

By: Karmakaze

Karmakaze — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:21:42 -0800

By: Hands of Manos

Hands of Manos — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:23:57 -0800

Robot Johnny, very nice site!

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:43:21 -0800

As someone who has learned to hate "Smart Quotes" because of the way they break so many things, I automatically started to play the "Dumb Quotes" game backwards. I couldn't figure out why I was losing so badly, at first. What do they break besides URLs? Surely you're not writing code in Word. Outside of technical areas where characters are redefined, in regular written English you shouldn't be using hatch marks to replace quotes in the first place.

By: Karmakaze

Karmakaze — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:56:32 -0800

Bligh: One example off the top of my head: copying from Word into email also frequently causes ugly random characters to pop up. I know how to avoid that, but many of my correspondants sure don't. In fact, copying from Word into any program that's not made by Microsoft tends to cause the ugly. If all you're going to do is print, then curly quotes are fine. If you're going to be working with text online where it will be passed through different types of readers, than there's one " key on the keyboard for a reason, and I'd just as soon have that appear when I press it rather than what some word processor thinks I meant to type.

By: KirkJobSluder

KirkJobSluder — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:06:29 -0800

Downconverting text with smart quotes to html can be a bit tricky as well. But that's a major problem with different text encodings.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:18:40 -0800

Everything I have handles them correctly. The ANSI/ASCII text editor I use, Notetab Pro, automatically converts them to hatches when the text is pasted. Adobe apps understand the extended charater set and keep them. Firefox, too, understands them when pasted into this textbox: "Testing". But we know that somewhere in this pipeline they're likely to get mangled and, anyway, even if not they won't render properly on many people's browsers. But everything should be using unicode. Failing that, the curly quotes should be converted into their html entities or character codes. Tidy is a good tool to use to convert everything to character codes.

By: ThePrawn

ThePrawn — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:28:16 -0800

Textile is also handy for converting characters to their code equivalents. It also converts text-based markup to html (e.g. (*bold*,_emphasis_, ??citation??, etc.). It's web based, so there's nothing to download/install.

By: cmyr

cmyr — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 12:41:41 -0800

This is a neat enough, despite the font examples being anti-aliased for white and then displayed on brown, which is pretty criminal in its own right. What's the idea, there?

By: KS

KS — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:42:23 -0800

Yeah, RobotJohnny, it is a nice focused little site. It is worthwhile form/content. I shared this site with a number of colleagues when I first came across it. It did its job as a marketing site, too, because I ordered the book, even though I hardly need another type book. Ellen Lupton rocks, and she should be encouraged to continue making this sort of thing.

By: gimonca

gimonca — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:55:31 -0800

Ah, sweet nostalgia for the demoroniser. Good times, good times.

By: hypnorich

hypnorich — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:35:09 -0800

Robot - It's frames not flash that's the problem. http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/resources/crimes_scale.htm and... INTERSTATE is kerned terribly on this page: Good Fonts Baskerville's kerning is a dog too. Couldn't resist.

By: HTuttle

HTuttle — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:25:52 -0800

No one is as anal as a typography freak.