Typography for digital texts

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Typography for digital texts deals with the visual design of text documents such as websites or e-books primarily using font and the other possibilities of typography .

The main purpose of typography is to make texts easier to read and therefore easier to understand and to present them in a visually appealing way that invites them to read. In the course of its history, an aesthetic has developed that is also understood as typographical rules. Furthermore, typography falls back on orthographic (spelling) and orthotypographic (correct punctuation) rules - or deliberately breaks them (e.g. in advertising).

Typography for digital documents initially takes on all the options of classic "paper typography". At the beginning of digitization, however, the display output devices and technical possibilities were significantly worse than they are today, and so initially many disadvantages and compromises had to be accepted when reproducing digital texts compared to printed matter. In the meantime, however, similarly good results can be achieved with websites as with print.

As a result of general digitization, the group of people who create digital text documents has also been expanded considerably; Today it is no longer just professional typesetters , but virtually everyone who creates such documents.

This article is below the digital document creation using word processing software or markup languages .

Comparison with classic typography

Differences to paper typography

  • Texts are changed frequently during creation and later, or could at least be changed in the future. However, the entire break should not have to be carried out manually every time a change is made to the document.
    Therefore: Provide and support automatic break for lines and pages.
    Furthermore: Definitions for paragraph control , for preventing page breaks within certain areas
  • Hypertexts , interactive functions, dynamics become possible; Multimedia elements can be integrated ( animation , audio, video ).
    Such texts can be transmitted as PDF files, for example; these enable a fixed layout like a paper document, but bookmarks and references using hyperlinks as you are used to from the World Wide Web .
  • To support accessibility , font sizes and types can be adapted to the individual needs of the reader.
  • The technical conditions for the optical representation ( resolution on the screen , on the printer ; color reproduction; use of different end devices with different properties) are not always known in advance and differ from a product that is unique and uniformly manufactured using printing technology .

Common to paper typography

  • At the moment of publication, the designers have full control over the technical conditions and the design ( e.g. make-up ).
  • This state is frozen when printing out on paper or creating a PDF file (in normal representation true to the layout).

Greater diffusion of the medium

In the past, text design required a skilled occupation ( typesetter ), and it was only done professionally by a small number of professionals.

With the PC and its software , the technical possibilities have become accessible to any interested layperson. Typographic knowledge, however, has not experienced the same distribution. The vast majority of users are most likely based on the example of a mechanical typewriter .

Rules and their application

Even in classic typography, the application of the rules (see typography ) is adapted to the medium: novels, posters, daily newspapers, poems, menus, etc. are each subject to their own needs.

In the same way, with digital texts, the technical framework, the type of text, the target group and the possible effort must be brought into an appropriate relationship. Legal documents and scientific works follow their own rules; Principles that apply to a body of text differ from those that apply to a table or poem.

The DIN 5008 calls "... Rules for word processing" and aims to office communication. They are essentially reproduced in the Duden (Volume 1, Spelling).

Everyday business correspondence should be produced with as little effort as possible and still have an appealing appearance. For this reason, typographical rules have been simplified appropriately (example: whole space instead of narrow space ) . However, this does not mean that DIN 5008 now has legal priority over more extensive design rules. Rather, it describes a minimum standard for an appealing design, but cannot prevent refinements.

Character encoding

The typography always had to adapt to the number of characters that were technologically available for storage and display:

  • For a long time the character repositories were based on 7-bit coding .
    Of these, ASCII is still known today, on which some technologies are still based. In addition to control and white space characters to encode 94 different characters , including at letters only the small and large 26 of the Latin alphabet , the 10 Arabic numerals, punctuation marks !"'(),-./:;?, the mathematical symbols +<=>u. a. and other symbols #$%&*. Some characters were used for different purposes, e.g. B. -also as a minus sign and 'also as an acute accent. 12 more characters could be used for mathematics and as diacritical marks , but were replaced by other characters in variants for other languages ​​/ countries according to ISO 646 . The German variant was specified in DIN 66003 in 1968 .
    (In the early days there were only 64 characters available on mainframes and also due to the mechanical line printer , so the alphabet was only in capital letters.)
  • In the 1990s, 8-bit character sets emerged , sometimes incorrectly referred to as "ANSI" character sets , but also specific encodings such as Microsoft code pages ; also non-Latin scripts: ISO 8859 .
    They allow 190 to 220 characters to be differentiated simultaneously in a text. German, French and other texts could be represented adequately, but the mixture of different scripts (e.g. German text with quotation in Greek script ) was not possible or only possible with great effort.
  • In the meantime, Unicode is almost always “understood” in the PC sector, ie a much more extensive character set (98,884 characters in Unicode 5.0).
    This means that tens of thousands of characters can be distinguished. However, this only means that the PC can process a correspondingly large ordinal number for a character - but not that the computer also knows a graphic representation ( glyph ) for each of these character encodings , and this in every font used .
    Another difficulty arises when capturing text: PC keyboards only have a limited number of keys. They are tailored to the use of certain languages ​​such as German, Danish, Turkish, Greek and special characters such as a dash or typographically correct quotation marks are not available with a simple, obvious keystroke (on Windows and macOS , more characters can be entered using the keyboard).

From the times of the reduced stock of signs, auxiliary or substitute representations arose inevitably. If there are no reasons for interoperability , they should be replaced:

so far to improve through HTML without UTF-8
"... "
(keyboard quotation marks)
...
("German" quotation marks )
& ldquo; & ldquo;
'... '
(simple keyboard quotation marks)
...
("German" single quotation marks)
& sbquo; & lsquo;
>... <
(mathematically larger / smaller)
›…‹
("French" single quotation marks)
& rsaquo; & lsaquo;
--
(double keyboard hyphen)
-
( dash )
-
...
(three points)
...
( ellipsis / ellipse)
& hellip;
<-   ->   <=   =>
(Greater / less with hyphen / equal sign)
← → ⇐ ⇒
(arrows)
? →
& lArr; & rArr; (among others)
^
( Circumflex )

(arrow up)
& uarr;
2 *3 2 x3
(asterisk or X)
×
( mark )
x · middot;
<=   >=
(Smaller, equal; larger, equal)
≤ ≥
(less than or equal to, greater than or equal to)
? ?
1/2   1/4   3/4
(Digit, slash, digit)
½ ¼ ¾
(fractions)
& frac12; & frac14; & frac34;
-
(Keyboard hyphen for minus)
-
(minus sign)
+/-
(Plus sign, slash, hyphen for minus)
±
(plus minus sign)
& plusmn;

See also

literature

Web links