Balisage Paper: Printing Should ̶B̶e̶ ̶I̶n̶v̶i̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ Not Be Irritating
Tony Graham
Antenna House, Inc.
Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS formatter, cloud-based authoring solution, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.
Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSLT/XSL-FO
since 1998. He was Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C
and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group
(XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well as an acknowledged expert in XSLT.
Tony is the developer of the stf
Schematron testing framework and also Antenna House’s focheck
XSL-FO validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks,
the author of Unicode: A Primer,
and a qualified trainer.
Tony’s career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies, and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked with data in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive, publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and conferences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Copyright © 2024 Antenna House, Inc.
Abstract
In Printing Should Be Invisible,
Beatrice Warde likened good typography to a crystal, rather than gold, wine goblet.
The crystal goblet, she argued, is better because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing that
it was meant to contain.
As the manuals many of us produce tend more to the prosaic than the beautiful, this
talk aims for the lower bar that printing (formatting) should not be irritating.
A whirlwind tour of aspects of formatting from styling tables of contents to formatting
indexes, this talk covers ways that the styling can aid rather than impede the comprehension
of the text.