March 15, 2008 at 10:56Easy typography
First, introduce myself. My name is Eugene (Eugene Spearance) - the author of the well-known site and technology Typographer .
After spending evenings in sweet idleness, I decided to write several articles on the topic of computer typesetting, reveal the secrets of my own Printing House, and also share some thoughts about the future development of printing.
Perhaps I’ll break the biggest myth now, but for me, typography began long before reading the immortal § 62 of Covodomy , and even more so, long before I became acquainted with the Internet. Until I was firmly settled on the net, for about 5 years I worked as a typesetter in several editions of local newspapers and magazines. Spending a lot of time behind the layout, I developed for myself a certain set of rules, which, it seemed to me, made the text more readable. Then I accidentally stumbled upon the directories of Rosenthal, Milchin and Ruder, and finally fell ill with a competent layout. Be that as it may, I believe that it was the newspaper and magazine layout that gave me the basic knowledge, which I then transferred to typography.
I omit my acquaintance with the Internet and the beginning of the development of the Parser language, I will try to immediately briefly describe the idea of creating my own Printing House. The first thing that comes to mind is laziness. Perhaps it was because of her that I thought about automatic layout. Of course, like many authors of such services, I also used the TypographerLebedev ... and, like many, was burned at his imperfection. I wanted to reduce the work of the layout designer (that is, myself) to a minimum, but I did not come up with a way to write my own Typographer. Although not, a lazy creature cannot write anything. First things first, I bombarded Samiznaeteko’s studio with letters proposing to supplement the existing Printing House, and my requests (about the gods) were heard. Of the dozens of additions that I sent, one or two were implemented, as well as a couple of minor bugs were fixed, which the studio certainly reported in the logs of the next version. Frustrated by this phenomenon, I began to collect bit by bit the knowledge for writing my own Printing House , and meticulously put it into the Piggy Bank of regular expressions .
And so, somewhere in late 2002 and early 2003, I finally matured and created the first version of the Printing House with a set of 32 rules.
Today this product is the most complete automatic printing machine of all those presented in the Russian-speaking network. Indeed, over the past four years I have rewritten the engine at least twice, added a huge number of rules (there are about 170 of them now), made a spelling check, introduced the concept of “floating space” in the screen layout, and was one of the first to implement typography of “hanging punctuation”. There are 3 implementations of the Printing House: an online service, a web service for remote printing, and a light version of the code for implementation in your projects.
Typify any text typed from the keyboard, copied from Word, text with hypertext markup ( html , xml , xsl ...). At the same time, comments, cascading style sheets, javascript and pre-formatted pre-text are not affected.
Edit texts made up by other handlers.
Tag tags in text. Remove tags from text before typography and after (the last function is useful if you want to leave only mnemonics). From the tags are placed: paragraphs, line feeds, links, numbered unordered lists, acronyms.
Associate words with both an inextricable space and inextricable structures (floating spaces).
Handle hanging punctuation (for sophisticated users).
And much more…
Observations of the printing process yielded interesting conclusions, the first thing that struck me was that the Printing House is absolutely adapted to the processing of Ukrainian texts. I did not know this, but the percentage of texts sent from neighboring countries indicates this. Also, at the request of colleagues from teletype.ru , some umlauts were easily added to the printer, which confirmed its suitability for other languages.
People have become more careful with the letter Yo, and in principle, I consider this a greater achievement than the Typographer himself.
The word X * Y is typed at least 1 time per day, while it is completely unclear what people want to do: check spelling :) or get the result of the layout.
Huge work has been done, and the product has already proven its worth. However, it is sad that the phenomenon of “typography” did not receive the desired wide distribution. Perhaps the matter is the lack of advertising, but I'm sorry, what kind of advertising can be for a non-commercial project, especially such a specific one. Without a doubt, the stone has been moved from a dead point, and this leaves a certain positive mark.
A month ago, I made a decision to stop the development and subsequently stop the site www.typograf.ru.
By popular demand, we continue to live! The fighter didn’t give up :)
PS Next time I will reveal the secrets of the typography algorithm.
PPS In the process of preparing the article, I used my Typographer, and at the same time I noticed that the pre tags on the Habr site are incorrectly processed :) Good luck!
After spending evenings in sweet idleness, I decided to write several articles on the topic of computer typesetting, reveal the secrets of my own Printing House, and also share some thoughts about the future development of printing.
How did it start ...
Perhaps I’ll break the biggest myth now, but for me, typography began long before reading the immortal § 62 of Covodomy , and even more so, long before I became acquainted with the Internet. Until I was firmly settled on the net, for about 5 years I worked as a typesetter in several editions of local newspapers and magazines. Spending a lot of time behind the layout, I developed for myself a certain set of rules, which, it seemed to me, made the text more readable. Then I accidentally stumbled upon the directories of Rosenthal, Milchin and Ruder, and finally fell ill with a competent layout. Be that as it may, I believe that it was the newspaper and magazine layout that gave me the basic knowledge, which I then transferred to typography.
I omit my acquaintance with the Internet and the beginning of the development of the Parser language, I will try to immediately briefly describe the idea of creating my own Printing House. The first thing that comes to mind is laziness. Perhaps it was because of her that I thought about automatic layout. Of course, like many authors of such services, I also used the TypographerLebedev ... and, like many, was burned at his imperfection. I wanted to reduce the work of the layout designer (that is, myself) to a minimum, but I did not come up with a way to write my own Typographer. Although not, a lazy creature cannot write anything. First things first, I bombarded Samiznaeteko’s studio with letters proposing to supplement the existing Printing House, and my requests (about the gods) were heard. Of the dozens of additions that I sent, one or two were implemented, as well as a couple of minor bugs were fixed, which the studio certainly reported in the logs of the next version. Frustrated by this phenomenon, I began to collect bit by bit the knowledge for writing my own Printing House , and meticulously put it into the Piggy Bank of regular expressions .
And so, somewhere in late 2002 and early 2003, I finally matured and created the first version of the Printing House with a set of 32 rules.
Year 2008
Today this product is the most complete automatic printing machine of all those presented in the Russian-speaking network. Indeed, over the past four years I have rewritten the engine at least twice, added a huge number of rules (there are about 170 of them now), made a spelling check, introduced the concept of “floating space” in the screen layout, and was one of the first to implement typography of “hanging punctuation”. There are 3 implementations of the Printing House: an online service, a web service for remote printing, and a light version of the code for implementation in your projects.
What we can do
Typify any text typed from the keyboard, copied from Word, text with hypertext markup ( html , xml , xsl ...). At the same time, comments, cascading style sheets, javascript and pre-formatted pre-text are not affected.
Edit texts made up by other handlers.
Tag tags in text. Remove tags from text before typography and after (the last function is useful if you want to leave only mnemonics). From the tags are placed: paragraphs, line feeds, links, numbered unordered lists, acronyms.
Associate words with both an inextricable space and inextricable structures (floating spaces).
Handle hanging punctuation (for sophisticated users).
And much more…
From experience
Observations of the printing process yielded interesting conclusions, the first thing that struck me was that the Printing House is absolutely adapted to the processing of Ukrainian texts. I did not know this, but the percentage of texts sent from neighboring countries indicates this. Also, at the request of colleagues from teletype.ru , some umlauts were easily added to the printer, which confirmed its suitability for other languages.
People have become more careful with the letter Yo, and in principle, I consider this a greater achievement than the Typographer himself.
Entertaining statistics
The word X * Y is typed at least 1 time per day, while it is completely unclear what people want to do: check spelling :) or get the result of the layout.
Total
Huge work has been done, and the product has already proven its worth. However, it is sad that the phenomenon of “typography” did not receive the desired wide distribution. Perhaps the matter is the lack of advertising, but I'm sorry, what kind of advertising can be for a non-commercial project, especially such a specific one. Without a doubt, the stone has been moved from a dead point, and this leaves a certain positive mark.
By popular demand, we continue to live! The fighter didn’t give up :)
PS Next time I will reveal the secrets of the typography algorithm.
PPS In the process of preparing the article, I used my Typographer, and at the same time I noticed that the pre tags on the Habr site are incorrectly processed :) Good luck!