LOADING

Typography

Typography

What is typography? A short intro, history, and how this relates to the thesis.

<%-@partial('toc.html') %>

History

There are some histories. Actually, there's a whole lot of it.

Digital typography

Digital typography has existed since the introduction of computers in one form or another. It is useful to separate the notion of digial typography into two

An example of this is Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library in the world. Project Gutenberg was started by distributing out-of-copyright texts in plain text formats in 1971 by Micheal S. Hart, and has at the time of writing 40.000 texts.

The PDF document format is an exaple of the latter. In such files, the document is formatted into virtual fixed format "pages" with the ulimate goal of being printed on and consumed from physical paper. Electronic pages are on the other hand documents that are to be consumed digitally on screens. Web pages are an example of an electronic page.

Where the vitual pages are fixed in a defined format (such as A4), electronic pages often has the ability to reflow the text, automatically scale and adapt itself to the the screen it is displayed on (see the discussion on responsive design for more information on this).

There are tools that provide the functionality of converting between the two types of text.

Based on these

Splitting the content into more palatable chunks.

Technologies

There are several technologies that provide the ability to author digital texts. The most relevant technologies for this study ....

This study will focus on the act of paginate the texts to

Consumption

Digital consumption of text doe

Studies show that the texts read digitally are processed differently than texts read from a physical format, that that information gathered online is skimmed rather than read thoroughly. This suggests that there are fundamental differences in how texts are read digitally.

On the other hand, the continued success of the Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks store shows that people are both able and willing to read books digitally. Apple reports that there are 2.500 classrooms in the US with iBooks textbooks and that 80% of the US high school curriculum are avaiable as iBooks textbooks.

While there is an ongoing increase in the use of computers in education, there has been little research on how to best format the content for the new setting and emerging usage patterns for optimal legibility.

There has been little research on how students reads and processes texts from digital screens, and what studies that do exists are slowly showing their age by having been performed in a time without the iPad and Kindle.

Chunking of content
Production

While this thesis mainly focuses on the consumption of digital texts and how such texts are liked, the production of digtal text is also worth mentioning. The creation of the prototype will be documented to provide some insights into how texts can be and will be used for creating a digital book.

Typographic form recommendations

Recommendations on how to structure and typeset text, both physical and digital has been produced. As this is field of research in and of itself, this paper will briefly summarize the fields thaat has been deemed most important for the study at hand.

The literature available are not always ... Some recommend a serif font for body text and a sans-serif font for headlines, some recommends the oposite.

The literature available is often old, giving recommendations on how to stylize content for screens of low resolutions (320x240) ...

Modern displays are orders of magnitude better , and with the tablet form factor,

Higher resolution,

Ebook typography

Web typography

The web, being a relatively new digital medium,

Adhering to the old scroll based metaphors

CSS

To stylize and typeset web pages, the style sheet language CSS is

For a more thorough discussion on CSS see, the chapter on CSS.