Typography

It’s not hard to use Greek letters and math symbols in (X)HTML, but apparently it’s not common knowledge either. Many pages insert little image files every time they need a special character. Such web pages look a little like ransom notes with letters cut from multiple sources.  Sometimes this is necessary but often it can be avoided.

I’ve posted a couple pages on using Greek letters and math symbols in HTML, XML, XHTML, TeX, and Unicode. I included TeX because it’s the lingua franca for math typography, and I included Unicode because the X(HT)ML representation of symbols is closely related to Unicode.

The notes give charts for encoding Greek letters and some of the most common math symbols. They explain how HTML and XHTML differ in this context and also discuss browser compatibility issues.

Here’s an interesting graph from Marko Pinteric comparing Microsoft Word and Donald Knuth’s LaTeX.

According to the graph, LaTeX becomes easier to use relative to Microsoft Word as the task becomes more complex. That matches my experience, though I’d add a few footnotes.

1. Most people spend most of their time working with documents of complexity to the left of the cross over.
2. Your first LaTeX document will take much longer to write than your first Word document.
3. Word is much easier to use if you need to paste in figures.
4. LaTeX documents look better, especially if they contain mathematics.

See Charles Petzold’s notes about the lengths he went to in order to produce is upcoming book in Word. I imagine someone of less talent and persistence than Petzold could not have pulled it off using Word, though they would have stood a better chance using LaTeX.

Before the 2007 version, Word documents were stored in an opaque binary format. This made it harder to compare two documents. A version control system, for example, could not diff two Word documents the same way it could diff two text files. It also made Word documents difficult to troubleshoot since you had no way to look beneath the WYSIWYG surface.

However, a Word 2007 document is a zip file containing a directory of XML files and embedded resources. You can change the extension of any Office 2007 file to .zip and unzip it, inspect and possibly change the contents, the re-zip it. This opens up many new possibilities.

I’ve written some notes that may be useful for people wanting to try out LaTeX on Windows.

Charles Petzold describes on his blog how he wrote his book The Annotated Turing, a commentary on Alan Turing’s seminal computer science paper. The book is scheduled to be released June 10. Petzold began by literally cutting and pasting pieces of Turing’s paper. He worked on the book away from his computer for the first couple months.

As a programmer and author, Petzold has no aversion to using computers. He says “I gave up handwriting … sometime around 1982 when I first learned WordStar on my Osborne 1.” But he discovered that he thought more deeply about the subject of his book when he wasn’t distracted by typesetting issues. He’s a technical wizard, but he makes selective use of technology.