And yet.

There are two typographic decisions I’m complaining about:²

Supra-chapter divisions (call them “parts”) are introduced by double-page illustrated spreads with a “part title” and an apposite quotation. The spreads are uniformly striking, in a positive sense (here’s where the illustrations come in). The typography of the quote is equally striking, but less positively: a narrow column, fully justified, in a particularly wide typeface, leaving just six words or so to each line. A particularly egregious example occurs on pg 12: “Chroniclers are privileged to enter” (34 characters) and “soarings up and down, all” (24 characters) occupy the same line width, and the latter must of course be unpleasantly spaced out (inter- but also intra-word) to make the distance. Obvious solutions: (1) hyphenate; (2) ragged right; (3) both; (4) and maybe (if absolutely necessary) consider a smaller point size or italics.

My other irritation is with the decision not to indent paragraphs, but also not to indicate them with extra linespacing. This means the only signal that a new paragraph is beginning is the early termination of the line before.

I planned not to complain about this. (Let me be very clear: I much prefer a book such as this, with an ideosyncratic design that I disagree with and can complain about, to one with a perfectly readable but utterly unimaginative design that I have no complaints about whatsoever.) It’s a minor point, and it doesn’t interfere with readability, right?

But then it did.

On page 71 we have a dialogue between Brother Filippo and Diamante. A line of dialogue by the latter (“I was remembering…”) happens to almost completely fill two lines. The following line must be understood to be spoken by Brother Filippo, if the dialogue is to make any sense, but only the reader alert to the significance of an en-space will realise this on first reading. (The misreading caused by a wrong interpretation is so obvious that one goes looking for its source.) If paragraphs were only indented, there would be no possibility of confusion: new paragraph, new speaker, clear and obvious.

Lest my typographic complaints give the wrong impression, let me say that I am enjoyed the book very much (so far: page 71 of 311). It’s not cheerful, and its protagonist is not particularly likeable, but there’s plenty else to like besides himself. (Does it sound Scottish to you? Not a clue, me…) And if I’ve put you off, Small Beer has plenty with less adventurous (of course less individual) typography.³

Notes:

1. Somewhat visible, although not in the glory that it attains in other chapters, at the end of the excerpt on scribd.
2. How wonderful to have one’s own soapbox, without even having to witness the effects of one’s spittle-flecked ravings on the public-at-large.
3. Of their catalogue, I particularly recommend Kalpa Imperial, and any and all of Kelly Link’s writing. I haven’t read their more recent stuff, but I’m working on it…

The Rambling Urchin, a letterpress production by Alan Brignull of the Hedgehog Press

The Rambling Urchin is his periodical, printed on an Adana letterpress machine (presumably something like this). There are issues of pure whimsy (“Numbo-jumbo / Mind Dribble”), type showcases (“BRAVE BADDIES GIVE ROTTEN STINGO [...] relates to the illegal brewers of Adanaland [...] It also uses every letter of 72-pt Albertus owned by Henry Morris of the Bird & Bull Press.”), poems, quotations apposite or otherwise, and little texts on (mainly) print-related issues.¹ He’s a clever man with an ornament (see his virtuoso display for the August 2009 Letterpress Exchange Group, but also his cunning volcano). And his selections and writings have a gentle wit to them that complements his artistry wonderfully.

The package arrived announcing that it was “Real mail: certified not junk”, on a perforated strip bearing a six-digit serial number.² As well as the Rambling Urchin issues, he sent me stamps from the Perfect State of Flatby (as seen here) and from Adanaland (including something like this one, although not overprinted and thus presumably less rare).

As you might guess from my linking all over the web, he doesn’t have a website. But googling will very likely turn up a few more gems; the Rambling Urchin has been running (in various formats) for more than 20 years and lots of other people have appreciated it along the way. Of course it’s not the same as the print version³ but it will have to do until you visit Adanaland.

And to Alan: thank you again for the tourist visa. I hope I’ll come back someday.

Notes:

1. But not only printing. November 2007, the “Tuvan Edition”, gives the national anthem of the Republic of Tuva, along with a banner which “is supposed to say ‘Rambling Urchin’ but it could be ‘Nomad Spit-cunning’ as Tuvan dictionaries are hard to find”.
2. The post office had rather disrespectfully gummed something machine-readable over it, but thankfully it came off without causing any damage. Probably it read “Real Mail: certified not junk”, in some encoding or other.
3. Also included in the package: some wet ink, for the full sensory experience: the smell of letterpress!

Summary:

• XeTeX gives LaTeX access to non-TeX-installed fonts, and fontspec makes it easy.
• XeTeX also lets you write in unicode; biblatex will play nicely if you use biber instead of bibtex as the backend.
• fc-list lists installed fonts (giving the names that XeTeX needs).
• fontforge will display every glyph in the font, nice and big (and you can print the result).
• fontmatrix has a very slick interface for font-browsing, from “tag-this-font” to “inspect-this-glyph”.
• All of these except biblatex and biber (which are still in beta) are packaged for various Linux flavours; biblatex installation is easy, for biber I vaguely recall that I installed via CPAN, which is rather a pain. There may be easier alternatives by now though.

XeTeX lets you use all your fonts in LaTeX

XeTeX is a TeX replacement; you compile your document with xelatex if you’ve been using pdflatex, and nothing much changes apart from that. But behind the scenes quite a lot happens; among other things, you get to use the fontspec package, which works with the font names that the rest of your Linux system knows about. (Another, less positive, feature of the move is that you XeTeX is incompatible with microtype. Can’t have everything…)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Verdana}

If you pick a font with italic and bold alternatives, \textit{} and \textbf{} and so on will just work. Just like that. Which is nice.

If your font has Greek and Russian characters (Greek text characters, not a math alphabet), you can just type ‘em:

Lorem ipsem and so forth; ο ξυπόλητος πρίγκιπας; 
зону большого над, языке а; 
italic: \textit{in Latin και στα Ελληνικά},

Which is nice.

(I don’t know what the Russian says, nor do I remember where I got it. The Greek says “The barefoot prince” and “and in Greek”.)

That Mapping=tex-text says that XeTeX should recognise the old LaTeX style for quotes, long dashes, and so on. But you don’t have to use it: you can type them directly as unicode characters (which is nice).

When he goes---``Hello World!''\\
She replies—“Hello dear!”

And if the font you’re using has fun OpenType features (and that’s the whole point, right?), you can access them easily too:

\fontspec[Ligatures={Common, Rare}]{Impact}
\fontsize{12pt}{18pt}\selectfont Questo è strano assai!
\fontspec[Numbers={OldStyle}]{Impact}Old style: 1234567\\
\fontspec[Numbers={Lining}]{Impact}Lining: 1234567

See the fontspec documentation for much, much more. (If your pdf seems to have half its text missing, there’s something wrong with your pdf rendering library. I don’t remember what I did to fix this though; possibly just updated, or possibly changed to a different pdf viewer.)

biblatex with biber can handle unicode bibliographies

So part of the reason I was originally playing around with all this was to help Olga write documents mixing Greek and Latin characters, with both Greek and Latin in the bibliography, with a minimum of hassle. It turns out that bibtex doesn’t like unicode, in particular it doesn’t know what to do with Greek. But biber, which is being developed as a backend for the biblatex package, is designed for unicode from the ground up. Both biber and biblatex are beta release software and there are still a few kinks to iron out, but they can already do a lot.

List installed fonts with fc-list

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you’re going to want to do once you see how XeTeX and fontspec work is try out lots of fonts to see what you’ve got installed that you could use.

If you just want to know names, fc-list is your friend. Be prepared for a lot of output though…

Here’s a handy trick: use the pgffor package (part of the fantastic graphics package pgf) and you don’t have to constantly retype Lorem ipsem:

\usepackage{pgffor}
...
\foreach \f in {
  Droid Serif,
  Alfios,
  Alexander,
  Dustismo
  ...
  URW Bookman L%
}{
  \noindent\setmainfont{\f}\f:
  Lorem ipsem and so forth.
  \par\medskip
}

Viewing fonts (and individual glyphs) with fontforge and fontmatrix

Somewhere along the line I picked up a free font with heaps of fleurons, and a font of 300 ampersands each by a different designer (yeah, a gimmick, but the proceeds went to charity). For both of these, I wanted a way to see all the glyphs the font contains, large enough to appreciate them as individual characters, and also with the codepoint information so I know how to get access to whichever one I might want to use.

The internet was silent on how to achieve this (or my google-fu was weak), until JanekZ helped me out on typophile. It seems fontforge is the only way to get a conveniently-formatted listing of every glyph the font contains (“Encoding >> Compact”); it can generate a pdf for printing but the pdf doesn’t contain codepoint information. But for simply browsing, fontmatrix is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately it seems to be buggy: “print” doesn’t produce any output, and “view all mapped glyphs” refuses to scroll. But the stuff that works works beautifully.

So you might expect that I might know some other typography geeks. And in fact I do: two folk who actually make fonts, as part of their professional activities.

The funny thing is, typography has nothing to do with how I know these guys. George Triantafyllakos is an old friend of Olga’s, we hang out and discuss comics when we’re in Thessaloniki. And Donald Roos has joined forces with some Amsterdam friends of mine for a cookery club — yours truly has volunteered for the demanding task of “Quality Evaluation”, a.k.a. “the eating bit”.

If you read Dutch, check out the Koninklijke Nederlandse Bitter Bal Bond (“Bij het officiele bitterbalwerpen dienen de volgende regels in acht te worden genomen:”…). My favourite piece of George’s work doesn’t have a link, but on his design page open the “Selected posters” tab and click the head wearing sunglasses against a yellow background. Powerful.

Dit is op aarde van
al ‘t kwaad de grootste straf:
Wie eenmal lezen kan,
die leert het nooit meer af.

Of all the evil on the earth
this is the greatest pain:
Who once has learned to read,
can never give up again.

Koos J. Versteeg

Pretty funny if the association is familiar. Otherwise, probably pretty incomprehensible. [via]

CSS IS AWESOME (design by Steven Frank)

Laughing Squid has a follow-up with a bunch of other typophile tees.

[I'm no longer sure how I got there. Certainly I started here, thanks to Robin I believe, and passed through here on the way.]

I was patting myself on the back for having spent some time studying the beautiful inscriptions on the triumphal arches near the Colloseum — until I realised (just now) that Trajan’s Column is in Rome. Even worse, I have a nasty feeling that I walked past it, and admired it from afar, but didn’t check out the inscription. Which would be the point, really.

From now on, I do my research before I travel. Can’t wait for my next chance to get to London.