Put Up Your Hands, And Step Away From The Keyboard!

The Design Police are watching you...




http://design-police.org/

I really like this site, it's so much fun. There's a set of five template pages you can download and send to the offender whenever you see a typographic crime being committed.

Just pick the relevant judgement from the templates, then cut and paste it into a mail.

Ah, Flaming By Numbers...

Not that I agree with everything the Design Police say, of course - especially the "Comic Sans Is Illegal" viewpoint.

You may not know this, but there's a battle being fought on the Web between those who love Comic Sans and those who absolutely hate it. There are even "Comic Sans Must Die!" T-shirts for sale.



I don't use Comic Sans myself - and I never inhaled - but I have something of a soft spot for it, since it was designed by Vincent (Vinnie) Connare, who worked for me in the Typography group at Microsoft. Indeed, its full name is Comic Sans MS, which might give you a clue.

OK, we made it. But don't blame Microsoft if people abuse it. Fonts don't kill people, people kill people. (Apologies to the NRA. Or not.)

Comic Sans is what its name says: a light-hearted font which works great in cartoons and animation, can add a tinge of humor to an email, etc. But it's over-used, and you certainly wouldn't want to use it to send a message of sympathy to a bereaved friend (unless her husband the cartoonist just died in some Marx-Brothers-like farcical accident. Even then you'd want to be careful).

If the Design Police graphic (sticker? paster?) had said "Inappropiate Comic Sans" I could buy into that.

Doctor Iveslow Must Die!

We forget how much we take the process of reading for granted, and how type and typography has developed over the past 550 years to make it as easy as possible for us to recognize the shapes of letters and words.

Typographic techniques like equal word-spacing in a line of text, or avoiding the use of only capital letters, give our visual system the cue it needs to make sense of dirty marks on a piece of shredded tree, or dots turned different colors on a screen.

Remember, the human "reading system" is a high-speed scanning, analysis and parsing machine. When it's moving rapidly across a line of text, it's scanning about four consecutive targets per second.

It's a 600ppi scanning machine, which normally deals with type between one-eighth and one-sixth of an inch high. And it doesn't take much to throw it off. The difference between automatic scanning you don't have to think about, and conscious parsing, is fractions of an inch (obviously proportionally more when you're reading larger text at a distance).

I pass by this road sign most days at the moment. It's on a tree just before a narrow bridge which is an obvious accident hazard. You don't have much time to read the sign, which is hand-painted in red. You just glance to the side, your brain takes a snapshot. You're past it before you realize your brain is trying to decode a puzzle as a result of data collected subconsciously by your peripheral vision.

Who is Dr. Iveslow, and can't he afford a better sign than that? Doctors are quite well paid, after all. And he seems pretty paranoid...

Then the penny drops.

DRIVE SLOW, not DR IVESLOW

Spacing matters....

Typographic disasters

One problem about having such an abiding interest in type and editing is that even when you take the man out of proof-reading, you can never take the proof-reader out of the man.

You end up spotting typos and/or bad typography everywhere. Here's one I spotted in Redmond, WA.



I'm going to leave kerning criticism out of this - it's not pretty but it is readable. I'll even give Frederick's Appliance World a pass on the horrible "W"s and "M"s - they're always a problem for any condensed typeface, which you want to use to get as much information on signage like this.

But surely Frederick could have sprung for just one more "F"? Then we'd have 30% OFF! If cash was short, it's the work of a moment just to trim the bottom cross-bar off the "E". Hey, Presto! An "F"!

Using a "$" in place of an "S" is tacky but expected.

The real typographic crime is the word "CALL", with two inverted "T"s instead of "L"s.

Call me a type snob if you like, but I pass this sign a lot - and it's like someone scratching their nails down a blackboard.

Guess where I won't be shopping for an appliance?

Signing OFE for now,

bill

P.S. The offending letters are two "T"s and an ""F". TTF is of course the file extension for TrueType font files... Spooky, eh?

CSSZengarden: A Claim Too Far?

It takes a lot to make me speechless, but a website I have known and respected for some time almost managed it...

The site was CSS ZenGarden, which aims to educate website designers in the use of Cascading Style Sheetsto create more interesting layouts .

http://www.csszengarden.com/

I have no problem with that. It's a good and laudable aim. They have some very interesting samples. I really like the way in which the layout of the pages changes dramatically when you switch style sheets on the same content.

What I did have a problem with was their sweeping claim:

CSS allows complete and total control over the style of a hypertext document.

You'll all be aware of the recent announcement that Internet Explorer 8 (on which I work) will fully support the CSS 2.1 spec when the final version ships. Hence my interest.

I've been interested in CSS since, oh, around 1996, and have especially been following the developments around CSS 2.1 and some proposals for CSS 3 functionality.

The capabilities of Cascading Style Sheets fall far short of "complete and total control". Today, they offer some level of control. As the standard evolves, we'll see more and more control possible.

But any designer who reads ZenGarden is well aware that CSS as it stands today falls a long way short of the kind of control over style and look that they can achieve in print. And until we get that kind of control we're not done. And to claim that we already have it is to destroy your own credibility.

The Web can be as beautiful and readable as the finest printed magazine. And it can be a lot more powerful medium, too. But not yet. Not today.

Problem with the ZenGarden site, with its pseudo-zen message, is that they seem to think we have already arrived at Enlightenment (they even say so).

Haven't they read their sutras? "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

CSS and the evolution of Web standards is a journey. We've made some steps along the way. But we're a long way yet from Nirvana...

Never "Just Fonts" - Don't Pirate Them!

I'll never forget the first time type on a computer screen made me sit up and take notice. It was 1991, and I was working in Edinburgh, Scotland, where we had set up the European subsidiary of Aldus Corporation, whose PageMaker desktop publishing package had established a whole new market and turned the traditional printing industry on its head.

For us at Aldus, fonts were about printing, since that was the final output of our software. Screen fonts were pretty crude, and really only meant to give an impression of the final output so you could do layout work on the screen before proofing pages on a laser printer and then perhaps sending them to a high-resolution imagesetter for final quality output.

Then one day I installed a new piece of software on my PC. The fonts on screen were stunningly readable by comparison with what I was used to - so much so, that I called over the boss of the company and pointed out how much better these PC fonts looked on screen than anything I'd ever seen before on a Macintosh.

The new software I'd installed was Windows 3.1 - the first version of Windows to ship with TrueType. The fonts were Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New - the new operating system's core fonts.

TrueType was Apple's creation, of course. But Microsoft had licenced it and put a lot of resource and some of its best engineers on integrating it into Windows and creating a new set of core fonts, working in collaboration with Monotype, one of the oldest and most-respected font houses in the world.

Central to the creation of great onscreen versions of those fonts was the fact that TrueType had its own programming language, very powerful but not much friendlier than assembler.

I get mad when anyone says computer type is "just fonts", or when they think that fonts are basically just graphical characters mapped to the keyboard.

In the past, fonts all originated in the print world. That was what they were designed for - a world of high resolution. To make a font for a computer, you design the shapes (there's a huge amount of skill required and rules to be followed). These are then turned into outlines, which are simply mathematical equations which describe the bounding lines of the shapes. PostScript's bezier curves or TrueType quadratic b-splines are both systems for doing this. The lines begin and end at "control points".

To create a printed font, you have to rasterize it, or fill the outline with dots. That's an easy task when you're rasterizing for print, where you have at minimum 300 dots per inch and perhaps up to 2500 in high-resolution imagesetters.

The real problem arises when you try to rasterize it for the screen, because the screen pixels (the dots) are in many cases larger than the features you're trying to fill. It's especially complicated because humans need (not want, need) to read type which is between 9 and 13 points high. This dimension is dictated by the size of the foveal area in the retina of the human eye, which is only 0.2mm in diameter, with about 1.5 degrees of visual arc.

Down at those sizes, at screen resolutions which in the 1990s were around 72 dots per inch and are still today in most cases less than 120, the problems of rasterizing characters are immense. How do you decide, when a pixel falls partly inside and partly outside the outline, whether that pixel should be filled with a dot or left blank? If the wrong pixel is turned on, it may create a weird "bump" in a character and make it hard to read. If the wrong one's turned off, then you get a gap (technically called a dropout)

Then there are rounding errors. A good example is the letter "m". When you place the virtual "rasterizer grid" over it, you have to decide programmatically which pixels to turn on to make the stems or uprights. But since you can't use fractions of a pixel (or couldn't, before ClearType), you have to mathematically round up or down to the nearest integer. In most cases, at reading sizes, that means stems which are either one or two pixels wide. But some stems might round down to one pixel, some round up to two, and the result is an "m" which looks horrible.




Droputs and rounding errors

For a fuller description of The Raster Tragedy, with illustrations, see the article of the same name at:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tools/trtalr.aspx

The process used to correct all of the rasterization problems is called "font hinting", which means providing "hints" to the rasterizer as to what to do in specific problem situations. There are hints which are global in a font, such as always keeping all stems the same width and allowing them to go from one pixel to two only once the type is being scaled to a size where they can all change. There are hints which are specific, for example, a set of rasterizer instructions which amount to"at 10point on a 100ppi screen, turn on this specific pixel in the lower-case letter 'a"".

It's an incredibly detailed and time-consuming process getting all this right across the hundreds of characters in a typical font. Even in those early days of the Windows 3.1 core fonts (when font hinting was a very new science, and rather "brute force" compared to today's more subtle - but more complex - methods) each of those core fonts shipped with around 25,000 lines of programming code inside it.

The people who do it require both the skilled eye of the artist and typographer, and the programming ability of the software engineer. And the process requires lots of other layers of complexity; for instance, making sure all the table data in the font is accurate, that Unicode is properly supported, etc etc etc.

This article has only skimmed the surface. Books have been written about this subject, including a five-volume set by mathematician and programmer Donald Knuth.

A great place to find lots of resource, tutorials, tools, SDKs etc to let you understand this arcane world - and who knows, maybe even enter it yourself - is the Microsoft Typography website at:

www.microsoft.com/typography

There's a handful of people in this world who can do this work really well.

In 1994, one of those strange - and for me, really fortunate - coincidences happened in my life. I was still working for Aldus in Edinburgh, Scotland right at the time Aldus was being taken over by Adobe.

I went into my office one morning and found three voicemails, all the same. "This is Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington. We have a job we think you should be doing. Can you give us a call?"

The job was running the group which had been responsible for that great work in Windows 3.1.

After the strenuous interview procedure, I was offered the job.

Of course I took it.

The Business of Type

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I'm a great supporter of the people who make fonts getting properly paid for their work, and the protection of the Intellectual Property they and others create.

I know how much time, effort, skill - and yes, money - it takes to produce decent fonts for computers, especially if you add in the time and effort (and more money) it takes to put in the extra work to make them great onscreen. I've watched the whole process in awe - and I've often paid the bills on Microsoft's behalf. We've invested millions of dollars over the years.

When we introduced font embedding technology for Microsoft Word back in the early 1990s - so that you could send a document to someone else and have it look the same because the fonts used traveled with it - we held talks with the font industry to come up with an agreed system to protect their IP. We even modified the TrueType (later OpenType) format to create a new set of bits in one of the tables to allow font designers to set the level of embedding they'd allow for their font.

The whole issue is about to get hot again, as the Embedded OpenType format becomes a lot more popular on the Web. Internet Explorer has supported it since 1996. But in those days, it was a proprietary Microsoft format; other browsers didn't support it and took other routes.

Since there was no "standard" format, few people used font embedding. That's about to change. Last year, I kicked off an effort inside Microsoft to turn EOT into an open format. We've opened up the format, documented it, created sample code and a simple tool for embedding fonts, and submitted the whole package to the W3C.

Your website or blog should look the way you want it, regardless of what browser someone is using, or what fonts they have on their system. Last year I wrote an internal paper calling for Internet Explorer to improve support for Web standards. We just announced that Internet Explorer 8 would use Web standards as its default rendering method. I can't claim all the credit for that; but I wasn't the only member of the Internet Explorer team making that call last year...

Back on the fonts issue. When we commissioned Verdana and Georgia and seeded the Web with them, back in 1996, our purpose was to make sure there were two highly-readable typefaces out there that all Web designers would know were available on every system.

Verdana changed the Web, pretty much all by itself. Back then, the idea that people would read onscreen for extended periods was ridiculed. People - even inside a geeky company like Microsoft - told me I was crazy to try making it possible.

How many hours a day do you now read on screen?

Verdana was as screen-readable as we could make a font back in 1996. The font in which you're reading this - Trebuchet, designed by Vincent Connare when he worked at Microsoft - is another font of similar onscreen quality. But when we invented ClearType, we raised the bar for what was possible.

My favorite font for reading onscreen is now Calibri, one of the set of ClearType-optimized fonts we built and shipped with Microsoft Office 2007.

Unfortunately, I can't use it because not everyone has it on their system yet. But if Embedded OpenType becomes a standard, I'll be able to use it, and you will be able to read it.

The Font Embedding issue needs to be revisited as it moves to the Web. And we'd like to talk to the font industry again.

Simon Daniels of the Microsoft Typography group tells me they're hosting the first Font Business Summit organized by the Font Designers Rights Coalition www.fdrc.org. The event takes place on the 3rd and 4th of April at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, WA.

The event is open to type designers and foundries (by invitation). If you have not been contacted about the event and would like to attend please contact Janet@fdrc.org as soon as possible as there are only a handful of open slots available.

The program includes in-depth analysis of font related law from noted attorney Paul Stack who has represented Monotype for many years.

In addition there will be panel discussion regarding font IP protection, analysis of the state of font embedding, font EULAs and an exploration of new font related technologies, with participation from Adobe, Bitstream, Monotype Imaging, Microsoft and others.

Details… http://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/news.aspx?NID=6121

I'd love to see you there.

Owl Vision, Fox Walking

I've learned so much, not only about how we read, but about why computers feel so unnatural to people, from spending time out in the woods.

I'd like to share two very simple techniques with you. I guarantee if you practice them for a few minutes a day, they'll dramatically increase your level of awareness of what's going on around you.

I was taught these techniques by animal tracker Jon Young, who established the Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall, Washington.

The first technique is called Owl Vision. It's very simple. Just use your peripheral vision to gaze at your surroundings without focusing on anything. You can blink, of course, but don't let your eyes focus on anything. It's best to begin in the woods, or in a park - but once you've got this technique down, you'll find it just as valuable on the streets of a city, and even when you're driving...

One of the first things you'll find is that you notice much more. By not focusing on anything, you become extremely sensitive to movement anywhere in the 207degrees or so of your visual field. You'll see birds you never noticed before, for example. Your brain will filter out things like leaves blowing in the wind - but you'll notice if they're moved by a bird or animal.

The second technique's called Fox Walking, to be used in conjunction with Owl Vision when you want to move.

The problem with normal walking while doing Owl Vision is that most of us bounce up and down while walking - even if only a little. This adds "noise" to the visual signal which is hard to filter out. So Fox Walking's a way of walking in which you keep your eyes on the same plane all the time.

Pretend you're carrying a tray of very full glasses, and you don't want to spill a drop. Once you've got this working, you can lose the tray...

A word of warning. It looks very weird to begin with, until it becomes more natural. Best practised without other people around so you don't freak them out.

Ten minutes a day will change your life.

If you want to learn more, both the Wilderness Awareness School and the Reikes Center in California (where Jon's now based), give classes. Find them at:

http://www.wildernessawareness.org/

and

http://www.riekes.org

Living With The Kindle...

Now I've had my Amazon Kindle eBook for a few weeks, I've changed my opinion of it a little.

No, it's still not a great reading experience. The flashing page turns drive me bananas. And the contrast is still poor. My favorite places to read are in bed and in the bath. When reading in bed, you need a really good strong light. And if you happen to turn to the other side, the slight drop in light level makes the Kindle almost unreadable. Gray on gray, not black on white.

I've found I can get it set up quite well in the bath. There's a little fingernail brush in our bathroom that has a groove on the side that the Kindle just fits. That takes the screen above the level of the faucet I lean it against, so I can read "hands-free". No danger of dropping it in the water (which I assume would be fatal). I just reach up and hit one of the Page Turn paddles when I need to.

Speaking of dunking it in water and other dangers, I've dropped the Kindle off the bed a couple of times. The flimsy battery cover came off, but otherwise it seemed no worse for the experience.

Where the Kindle really has advantages are in portability and lightness, battery life, and book purchasing. I've never run out of battery while reading - although once it wouldn't let me download a book because it said the battery charge was too low to run wireless connectivity.

Portability. The lightness makes it convenient to carry.

Book purchasing is, as I said in my first impression, outstanding (at least when you're within wireless range). The other day I wanted something new to read on the plane. So at the airport, I fired up the Kindle, switched on wireless and bought two books on my Amazon account. They were downloaded in about a minute and I was good to go.

No, I still don't like the reading experience much. But the convenience of the device means I'll put up with it as an acceptable compromise until a better screen comes along. I'll buy more Kindle books - especially since the prices are so fair. Impulse book buying really works on this device.

Worth its weight in Gold?

One of the books I recommend that everyone who cares about text should read is Geoffrey Dowding's "Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type". Dowding was a lecturer at the London School of Printing, and this little 85-page book is an "ocean in a teapot".

You could always find it in a good bookstore. But if you want to read it, I suggest you hurry. It's obviously gone out of print. Amazon has only second-hand copies available and the sellers want $81.23 a copy!

Its cover price was, I think, less than $15 when new. So I suggest you pop along to your local dead tree bookstore and see if you find a copy still lurking on a shelf somewhere...

I can understand paying $92 for a second-hand copy of Tinker and Paterson's book, Legibility of Print. That's been out of print for many decades. But I bought a second copy of "Finer points" new, just two or three years ago.

..and featuring Bert Keely on guitar!

One of my best friends at Microsoft is Bert Keely. I remember the first time I met Bert. He'd come up to Redmond to talk about a job working as a consultant on the eBooks project in 1998.

We spent an hour or two chatting together, and it was one of those meetings where you can feel the sparks of inspiration flying. After our talk, the execs in charge of the eBooks project asked me about Bert. Should they hire him fulltime? "Do whatever it takes to get him," I said. "This guy is solid gold".

I've never changed that first impression of Bert in the almost ten years I've known him. In that first month, we came up with ClearType. Bert had the clue as to how we could utilize unused resolution in LCD displays, I knew how to make it work using the Windows TrueType rasterizer - well, more accurately, I knew who the right people were to implement it. We recruited Greg Hitchcock and Mike Duggan into a "Skunkworks" project, the rest is history. Within a few days, we knew we had something special.

Up until then, the eBook project hadn't had much credibility within the company, since it had no technology of its own. ClearType gave us "street cred"...Bert's been a major driver in the TabletPC project since the beginning. He believes passionately that computers should be as portable and easy to use as paper.

That's where our minds meet. I'm trying to make computer screens as good as paper for reading. Bert would like to make them great for both reading AND writing...

Bert is a GREAT guitar player. He plays in a Silicon Valley "three-car garage band" called the Flying Other Brothers. See them on YouTube, backing one of the legends of Woodstock, Country Joe McDonald (of Country Joe and the Fish), whose bitter-but-humorous anti-Vietnam war song, "Fixin' to Die Rag" set the crowd on fire with lines like "Be the first one on your block to have your son come home in a box".

See Bert and the band on:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=flying+other+brothers&search_type=

I found out a secret Bert's been hiding all these years, all the many times we've played music together - he also plays trumpet!

Guitar hero, multi-instrumentalist, technical genius, nice guy - don't you just hate that?

Bill Hill as Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars meets South Park?

Maybe it's the accent. Maybe it's the beard and long hair. I have no idea. But I'm now in my second starring role in a South-Park style Web movie - this time as Qui-Gon Jinn, teacher of Obi-wan Kenobi (played by Bill Gates), and also starring Ray Ozzie as Senator Palpatine, Steve Sinofsky as Anakin Skywalker, and Steve Ballmer as Darth Maul.

Now showing on MSNvideos at:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=f5540a19-a5ba-410d-9ae7-802c4cd1f3f4

I know no more than you. Presumably I get killed off by Darth Maul early in the action - do they know something I don't?

Last time this happened was when a cartoonist "outed" me as MiniMicrosoft, the somewhat vituperative "mole" inside the company. Of course I'm not MiniMicrosoft - as I said at the time, I'll never hide behind an alias. If I see something at Microsoft that I think needs fixed, I'll tell the right person in email, with my name on it.

For the Force is with me...

ClearType: A technology with a limited shelf life - but still longer than David Berlow's...

I've known type designer and font hinter David Berlow for many years. We first met in Boston in 1995 at the Spring Seybold publishing conference. I was the obligatory Microsoft sacrifice in a roomful of Macintosh users at the auto-da-fe known as the "Font Free-For-All"; David was the "moderator" - something of a misnomer, since anyone who knows David also knows "moderation" is not really his forte - he could start an argument in an empty room...

But I guess that was the point of the Font Free-For-All anyway; the attendees came to see blood - preferably Microsoft blood (it was the time of the Font Wars).

At this point, most of you will be scratching your heads and saying, "Fonts? People went to war about Fonts?"

A newspaperman once asked Scottish football manager Tommy Docherty,"Surely you don't think football's a life-and-death affair?" To which Docherty replied,"It's more important than that!"

Many font people feel that way about fonts...

Q: What do you call two font experts in a room?
A: An argument...

Q: What do you call 12 font experts in a room?
A: You call 911...

(One day, perhaps, I'll tell the behind-the-scenes story of the "Font Wars Truce" that led to OpenType, which began with about 12 Adobe and Microsoft font experts in a room...)

Anyway, David's become a good friend over the years. His company, Font Bureau, does great work, and David's one of the handful of really great "font hinters" in the world.

Writing on Roger Black's blog (see link on this page) about fonts on the screen, rendering technologies etc., , David says:

"144 dpi is the first uncontested resolution at which all users will be satisifed exclusively by subpixel rendering to the smallest sizes, and that happens regardless of underlying "technology" i.e. at 144 dpi "greyscale" will be the thing users choose, because it adds no color at any size when defining what should be by definition, a monochrome definition."

He's talking about different anti-aliaising technologies, including ClearType.

Despite being one of its inventors, I can see a time when ClearType becomes obsolete. It solved a real problem of too-low display resolutions when we invented it about nine years ago, and I estimate it still has a long useful life in front of it. But it definitely has a limited lifespan. How long that will be depends on how quickly displays move towards higher resolution. That might take longer than anyone realizes. In fact, maybe a combination of ClearType and hardware resolution will get us where we need to be - in which case it could be around forever.

The human visual system has a vernier acuity of about 1/600th of an inch. We can't see anything smaller than that. So printing on paper or viewing a screen with a resolution of 600 dots per inch is the most we need. The only reason high-end imagesetters for the print industry need higher resolutions (all the way up to 2500 dpi or thereabouts) is because of the "lossy" nature of the printing process itself - ink that spreads, paper that stretches, and so on.

One day we may have 600ppi screens, but we may never need to go that high. Display manufacturers have shown small screens with a resolution of 300ppi, and resolutions of ~200ppi are becoming common in the small screens used in cell phones, digital cameras and PDAs.

It's not that these displays can't be manufactured in large sizes. I have an IBM display in my office that's 22 inches and change, and has a resolution of 204ppi, and I've had it for at least eight years. It still works perfectly, BTW - a tribute to its engineering - and I'm currently driving it with a Dell PC running Windows Vista.

The problem isn't the manufacture - it's the math that'll kill you. Let me explain...

Most screens today are around 100ppi. To go from there to 200ppi isn't a x2 jump in processing power required - it's n-squared, or 4x (twice the number of pixels in each dimension). To go to 600ppi is 36x graphics processing. You can handle the graphics processing required for a small 200ppi screen, but a larger one is quite another story.

For instance, my 204ppi display - with a fast graphics card - will still only refresh at 13Hz (13 cycles per second). On an LCD display, that's actually acceptable and usable. On a CRT it would be instant epilepsy... And don't try watching video on it!

Why so slow? Well the screen has 3840 pixels x 2400 - about 9.2 megapixels. With 24-bit color, that takes 3 bytes per pixel. So we're close to 28 Megabytes per screenful of pixel data. Now imagine you're trying to refresh that even as slow as 60Hz (which you need for full-screen, full-motion video), and you're up to a whopping 1.6Gb per second of graphics processing! You need a monster graphics card, and a graphics bus that won't bottleneck data throughput.

ClearType helps a lot here. Since it uses the RGB sub-pixels, it effectively triples the resolution of the display you can address in one dimension. Of course, it does nothing in the other dimension (although later versions of the technology actually do some work on that), so it's not a 3x resolution multiplier. What the true resolution multiplier is, I've no idea. People have made guesses and suppositions, but no-one really knows for sure because there's no agreed way to work it out. However, it IS a significant benefit for most people.

Fact is, we need a major leap forward in graphics processing and driver technology to be able to support high-resolution displays at normal sizes. And it's not just about the speed of the chips - it's also about the power required, and the heat they generate. It's no accident that all the high-power graphics cards on the market today have their own inbuilt fan.

Dell has made more strides in the area of high-resolution support than any other PC company. Dell shipped the first 133ppi display more than a decade ago, and then went on to ship 147ppi displays in their Inspiron series of laptops. I've been running one for many years. Dell did seem to have figured out how to drive that many pixels (1920 x 1200, or one-quarter the number in my IBM display) at an acceptable rate, although those laptops were pretty power-hungry. I always used to take a spare (huge) battery on a plane ride. And yes, the laptop ran pretty hot, too.

But therein lies my dispute with David. I've tried grayscale on that laptop, and it's nowhere near as good as ClearType. The pixel's still too big. Or is he suggesting that we all switch to monochrome displays but with the 3x (RGB) sub-pixel pattern in place? I can't see that flying - we all like our color far too much.

I use ClearType even on my 204ppi display. You can still see the difference. And at that resolution, color fringing is completely gone.

As you increase in resolution from today's ~100ppi towards 600ppi, you of course see a difference in clarity and sharpness. But in my view it's not a linear change, it's a flattening curve. The big improvement comes between 100 and 200ppi. After that, you're in The Law of Diminishing Returns, where the rate of perceived improvement flattens out pretty dramatically, no matter how much more resolution you throw at the problem.

So here's my contention: somewhere between 150 and 200ppi with ClearType is enough. We really don't need to go farther; there's little point. We could wait until there's some new major breakthrough in graphics processing technology. That could happen, for example, by using a parallel graphics processor, with each core of the chip handling one segment of the display, if we can figure out a low-power technology and a way to run without a huge heat problem.

But 144ppi is still not quite good enough. Especially when you think beyond Latin-based languages to Japanese, Korean and Chinese, where even 144ppi still does not give you enough pixels at normal reading sizes of 9-13points to portray all the strokes of some of the more complex characters.

I suspect, given where most of our hardware is manufactured, that it will be the requirements of these languages which will drive high resolution on larger displays.

As an illustration of the heat problem, the Toshiba TabletPC on which I'm typing this is a convertible model; it doubles as a laptop. But that's a real misnomer. During operation, it gets so hot you'd never put it near any area as sensitive as your lap. We've hit a limit in the technology that the hardware and driver guys have yet to solve.

How did it ever happen?

Reading, I mean...

When you think of what it used to take to put type on paper, it's a wonder reading ever got to be such a mainstream activity.

It's so easy for us. We type words on a keyboard, they magically appear on screen, we choose the typeface we'd like (within limits - which needs to change) and we're done.

Back in the Gutenberg days, you had to hand-cut a steel punch in the shape and style of the letter you wanted. That hard-metal punch was used to punch an impression of the letter in a softer metal, brass, which was then used as a mold to cast a final impression of the letter in an even softer metal, an alloy of lead, antimony and tin called "Printer's Metal". The punch was cut in the reverse shape of the letter, so the mold would be in the shape of the letter, so the casting would be reversed, so the impression you got when you put ink on it and pressed paper onto it would be the right way round... Whew!

Don't even get me started on the technology of the printing press, ink, paper and bookbinding.

Those early punchcutters were both artists and craftsmen. One of the last survivors of that "Old School" is world-renowned type designer Matthew Carter, with whom I've had the pleasure of working on a few occasions on major projects (he designed Verdana and Georgia for us at Microsoft, and was also involved in the design of the new Japanese typeface, Meiryo, which shipped in Windows Vista and Office 2007).

Although it might seem an arcane skill with little use in the modern world, those old punchcutters knew a thing or two about how to make letters both beautiful and readable, and how letters would work together.

There's a fascinating book: Counterpunch: Making Type in the 16th Century, Designing Typefaces Now, by the type designer Fred Smeijers, which is a great read if you want to learn some lessons which still apply today.

For a short bio of Fred Smeijers, visit:

http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/designer/fred_smeijers/

You'll find a link to the book in the Amazon widget on the right.

Great Books To Share!

There have been many great books I've used in my research over the years. Some of them are classics which can only be obtained second-hand, but most are available in paperback.

I never loan my books to anyone, because they usually have notations in the margins which are irreplacable. Even if I re-read the book, my head would not be in the same place it was when I read it the first time. That's the strange and magical thing about books - no two people ever read the same book, because they both interpret the content differently, bringing their own life experiences, personal preferences and subconscious thought into the process.

Anyway, many of the books I've read are real gems. If I had to pick two books about text, though, I'd pick "Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type" by Geoffrey Dowding - an 85-page "ocean in a teapot", and of course Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style", which everyone whose judgement I respect treats on a par with the Bible...

I love to get a list of recommended books, or someone's reading list, or to find a new author whose work I like - a new seam to be mined.

So I've included a list of books I recommend on this blog, with links to take you straight to Amazon, where you can buy them. The star ratings are Amazon's, by the way. If I can find the time, I'll add some comments of my own.

How did we ever manage before Amazon?

I read a lot of books. This is just a first selection. I plan to add a lot more...

The Magic of Reading

Back in 1999, when I was working on eBooks, I researched and wrote a detailed paper on reading - especially on the screen.

It's called The Magic of Reading, and is still available out there on the Web as a free eBook download from Slate magazine, in Microsoft Reader format. You can download both the book and the Reader software from here:

http://www.slate.com/id/90237/

It's also archived at the Poynter Institute in Microsoft Word format:

http://www.poynterextra.org/msfonts/osprey.doc

I'm told Bill Gates said it was "a good read"...

Pagination: It's about Readability, NOT boosting Page Views...

I've seen a lot of comment on the Web recently about people using paginated content to boost the number of page views on their sites.

Sure, pagination can be used (abused) for that purpose. And that's probably what it's about right now - but that's really missing the point.

At the risk of repeating myself, it's all about creating content which will be read by humans...

All humans are the same. We all have the same visual system. Geneticists have found we all share the same gene from a man who left Africa about 50,000 years ago (see The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells)

We all have two eyes. Those eyes all work the same way. A set of complex muscles brings successive scanning targets into the focus of the foveal area of our retina (see my earlier post: Scrolling: A horrible thing to do to humans who're trying to read)

That's why we need - not want, need - to read text that's between 9 and 13 points high at normal reading distances. And the muscles which control our eye movement prefer to read columns of text which are between 55 and 65 characters wide at that size.

On the Web, the way that's achieved is to limit column width. But that leaves you scrolling down an endless column of text.

The best way to do this would be to break text into multiple columns, the number of columns to be dictated by the size of the text window to stay as close as possible to that 55-65 character column width.

You can't have multi-column layout that scrolls. Just imagine scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the first column, then all the way back up again to the top of the second column. Crazy!

All of this can be done automatically. If you've looked at the New York Times Reader, built on Windows Presentation Foundation technology, that's exactly what it does. And the reading experience is great - the best I've ever found on the Web.

By comparison with this, the Web reading experience is still horrible. But it will get better. CSS 2.1, for instance, has pagination features (although they're very dumb, they could be improved with some judicious programming).

What I want to see is the same approach as the Times Reader taken on the Web:

1. Get rid of all navigation clutter while I'm reading. Give me nothing on my screen but content. If you have to put advertising on it, make it tasteful and beautiful - and don't ever make it flash at me while I'm trying to read.
2. Give me multicolumn layout which creates text suited to the way my and all other humans' eyes work.
3. Paginate that content based on the size of my window. Personally, if I'm reading on my laptop, I'll maximize my window to the size of my screen. Then I'll hit the F11 key on Internet Explorer to get rid of all menus, address bars, etc. I have the Start bar on Windows already set to Auto-hide. So there's nothing on my screen but the content.

Aaaaaaaaaaah! I can just feel my body, and especially my eyes, relax...

A "Basic Library" for the world?

If we can provide books in digital format, what about the idea of a "Basic Library Pack", created under the auspices of some body like UNESCO, which would provide the basics for education free, and be translated into as many languages as possible?

It would provide anyone with access to a computer with access to basic knowledge.

I know it's an idea that is fraught with issues. For instance: Whose version of history would you provide - colonial Britain's, or Karl Marx's? But aren't there at least some subjects - math, physics, chemistry, native language, basic English and so on that would be non-controversial?

Could we take advantage of technology to disseminate basic knowledge? As the cost of systems comes down through initiatives like One Laptop Per Child etc, should we not be thinking how we can leverage the growing installed base?

Maybe someone's already doing this - I don't know. But I'd be interested to find out, and to read your comments and ideas...

My Mission

I've been involved in many projects in my 13 years at Microsoft, pretty much all of them to do with improving reading on the screen. I’m a “man with a mission”, and not ashamed to admit it. Oh, I know idealism might be regarded as old-fashioned and sneered at; but I’ve never been able to regard work as just a way to make a living. If I can’t feel I’m making a difference, it’s not worth doing.

Here’s my mission. I believe that reading has to transition from paper to the screen. It’s not just about getting rid of paper. It’s about improving access to information to billions more people in the world.

It was access to information, in books and libraries, that changed my own life. I could easily be doing some menial job and still living in a depressed housing project in the East End of Glasgow. Instead, more than a billion people are using technology I helped to invent, and Bill Gates uses me as an advisor to answer his detailed questions about reading and what Microsoft needs to do to improve reading on the screen.

I'm not trying to impress you with those statements. They’re really just to illustrate the difference reading made in my life. And that’s why I believe every child (and adult) in the world should have the right of access to the same wealth of information, so they can use it to improve their lives. See my Digital Declaration of Independence.

Anyway, if you wanted to produce a printed science textbook in, say, Swahili, you’d have to convince some publisher that you’d sell about 10,000 copies - because that’s the point at which sales break even with costs of printing, production, distribution etc.

However, if you wanted to produce the same book in an electronic version, all you’d have to do is find someone to translate the text, and replace the original language strings with the new ones.

That means the cost of books should come down dramatically, and access should go up just as dramatically.

Of course devices have to get cheaper too, and that is happening - maybe not as fast as we would like, but it is happening.

To make this really work, text on a screen has to become just as readable as paper. There’s no doubt in my mind it can be. There are screens which produce better text than print (I have a couple). It’s really just a matter of developing the right technology, and getting it out there. And that’s why I’m at Microsoft. With more than 600 million users of Windows and about 400 million users of Office, you can deploy that technology on an incredible scale. There’s nowhere else you can make such a dramatic impact.

If you want to change the world, change Windows and Office. That’s my mantra.

Word as a blogging tool

This is an experiment. Rather than mess about with the rudimentary text features in Blogger's editor, I'm posting this by using Word's blogging functionality. "This is a set of quotation marks," he said, just to make sure that these traveled across. Be nice if Word could somehow carry font embedding across into Blogger – then I wouldn't be stuck with the limited choices Blogger offers. This is
Arial Black. And this is Magneto.

So the fonts do travel – this is cool. But what happened to the quotation marks? I'm back to those dumb "Feet and Inches". More investigation needed here.

Of course, Arial Black and Magneto fonts are on my system. I'd be interested to know if this still works for someone who doesn't have them installed. That WOULD be cool!

But it doesn't. My son just hit my blog from his laptop. He sees only the Arial Black (I guess he has that on his system) but not Magneto. On my cellphone I see neither.

And I just noticed that the Arial Black I used turned up as Arial Black Italics. Since Arial Black has no true italic, this means the system's creating one of those horrible artificially-skewed versions of the regular font. Ugh!

Now Word has supported font embedding using Embedded OpenType (EOT) for a very long time (it was embedded TrueType back when it was first implemented). Internet Explorer has supported EOT since 1995 by using the code developed for Word. I used Word's "Save as" options to make sure the fonts were embedded.

Earlier this year I drove a move to make EOT a Web standard by opening up what was until then a proprietary Microsoft embedding format into an open standard. It's been submitted to the W3C.

Somewhere along the line, the embedding information is being stripped out. Either Word is stripping the embedded EOT font object out when it publishes a document as a Blog post, or it's being lost somewhere along the line. But there's no pointer to an embedded font object in HTML.

Be nice to get this fixed... Have to investigate to find our who's doing (or not doing) what...