Description

In some more complicated cases such as embedded quotations, French typographic tradition proposes to start each typeset lines with a so-called ‘chevron’. In all current typesetting software (as far as we know), the only way to achieve this is is to break the text flow into separate lines and manually place a textmarker per line.

Obviously, this creates problems in case of corrections, but also it underuses the intelligence of the typesetting engine. The breaking of the lines disables the engine instead of helping to decide the length of a line minus room for the selected text-marker.

How about?

We are wondering about the possibility of some sort of ‘half-declutch’, a state between chained text and detaiched chains. Ultimately it might allow different, more rich relations between the behaviour of running text and it’s encompassing textframe.

Related to

• This behaviour is related to the way ‘smart hyphens’ work. See also, for example, the hyphenation software http://www.talo.nl/talo/index.html
• Poetic linewrapping
• The Text Box Model

Description

A ‘lezarde’ is the phenonemon that in a typeset page, by accident, subsequent whitespaces seem to align vertically and form a visual white crack.

How about?

How would a manual mode for text engines work? Instead of clumsily inserting spaces or linebreaks to make the river dissappear, would there be ways to solve the problem without completely disengaging the text-engine?

Related to

When we started imagining tools from the perspective of whitespace, we came up with many ideas for new types of lay-out.

• Dactylo space: Specific spaces at specific places, after a full stop for example.
• Magnetiz0r: Activating white space reveals the story http://dillydallyfoundry.com/whitespace/6.php
• Mouse trapper: Touching is erasing http://dillydallyfoundry.com/whitespace/8.php
• Warp & blackhole space: 3D on text-lay out, really
• Rock salt: Random spacing, random angles http://www.yagraph.org/images/rocksaltwhitespace
• Rivers of salt: By flowing through the text, space shapes a never ending tale. an experiment by Ale Rimoldi in Scribus http://ideeale.free.fr/tmp/necessity_of_salt.pdf
• Align-and-distribute elements in Inkscape http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Inkscape_glossary
• Visual games with whitespace in the typesetting of Tot Later: http://git.constantvzw.org/?p=osp.work.totlater.git;a=tree

Exercise

How could you make rivers? How would you actually produce such an effect, instead of trying to avoid it?

Description

This page was laid out with the help of InDesign. Sentences were wrapped using tabmarks at the end of each line.

Text-lay out tools do not provide users access on the level of a line; it treats the whole paragraph or you need to manually intersect the text-flow.

How about?

We could manipulate lines as if they were units?

Related to

ConTeXt has an option to put floating elements ‘Here’. It means those elements are not taken into account in some automatic processes but still related to others.

Description

This image was drawn in llustrator. The top-image is a screenshot from the ‘wireframe preview’, exposing the actual construction of the vector-image. The image below is a preview of the rendered output. The image is the result of a mix of overlaps, linestyles and other transformations. Some of these steps are ‘baked’, or ‘disengaged’, meaning their transformations are processed into an actual stroke. Others are ‘live effects’ applied to vector-objects. The two images were juxtaposed because we needed to check if the drawing would not produce problems in production. Machines such as lasercutters and plotters, produce output based on the actual stroke of the image.

How about?

There could be an in-between view where wireframe and final rendering would be overlayed. It would be useful to expose more of the intermediate steps between the construction of the wireframe and how they are processed.

Related to

See also under: Process Awareness

From the understanding that design files are always collections of elements (each with their own properties and timelines), we tried to think how to version selectively. A design file contains both fixed and fluid areas (some elements stabilize early on, and others might keep changing), could we think of a way to mark areas as ‘unbaked’ and only track changes for these areas?

Exercise

• Study: What is transferred from a svg into a pdf, and which effects are being ‘baked’ in the process?
• Manually produce a series of images where wireframes are overlayed with their final rendering
• Rebuild the image used in this entry in Inkscape to study the effect more closely
• Compile a list of metaphors for the transition from ‘live’ to ‘fixed’: Baking, Clutch - declutch, Destructive operations, …