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Far From Being a Utilitarian Afterthought, an Astonishing Number of Design Choices Go Into Pagination (theoutline.com) 149

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In his landmark 1931 book An Essay on Typography, the British typographer Eric Gill discusses everything from the proper place for the tail of an 'R' to terminate to which type of word press might best serve the amateur typographer. He casts the printed word as sacred. But there's one thing -- a silent, steady workhorse found in nearly every book -- that Gill fails to address: the lowly page number. The functional role of the page number is simple: it provides order and sequence to a text. And while it is a supremely utilitarian design element, more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.
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Far From Being a Utilitarian Afterthought, an Astonishing Number of Design Choices Go Into Pagination More

Far From Being a Utilitarian Afterthought, an Astonishing Number of Design Choices Go Into Pagination

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  • Slow news day? (Score:2, Informative)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 )

    Holy shit -- do we have a slow news day?

    * If you have single sided printing, you can put the page number centered at the bottom.

    * If you have double-sided printing, you can put the page number near the outside edges.

    But let's keep over analyzing something that takes less then 10 second to think about.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But let's keep over analyzing something that takes less then 10 second to think about.

      This is News for Nerds. It's exactly what we do.

    • Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @01:03PM (#56495611)

      Pet peeve: PDF files with displayed page numbers that don't match up with the actual page index.

      • This is more a defect of naive PDF reader applications, or perhaps of the PDF spec itself. If it is a PDF of a book, then it makes sense for the printed page number to match the convention of books where page 1 is the first page of the first chapter of the main text not inclusive of the TOC, foreword, preface, etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Potor ( 658520 )
          Actually, I write books - and let me tell you - good PDFs separate the front matter from the main matter, so, for instance, p. ii on the pdf shows up as p. ii in the client, and, p. 10 as p. 10. This is necessary: a book's index can be generated automatically through such software as Index Generator. (Of course, only a poor book would have such an index, but IG is still an incredibly helpful tool for checking the consistency and completion of index entries).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by piojo ( 995934 )

            I take it Index Generator isn't the right tool to correct a PDF whose PDF numbering does not match the text's numbering (where the index is already created and part of the book)? If not, can you recommend a tool that will fix a PDF's page numbers based on user instructions? (I mean by changing the metadata, not by overwriting the glyphs on each page.)

            Edit: I did a search just before posting this question, and found some solutions which may be useful to others with incorrect page labels on their PDFs: https: [superuser.com]

  • I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently. Sadly, this article discusses a book written in 1931 about where to put the page number in a book. How is this news for nerds again and who cares?

    • Re:News for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hipp5 ( 1635263 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:30AM (#56494837)

      How is this news for nerds again and who cares?

      Typography is a pretty nerdy field.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:54AM (#56495041)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • You should have just watched the one on Arial. It was just like the one about Helvetica, but a free copy comes with every TV.

          • Except that fans of the Helvetica documentary will point out every minute difference between it and the knock-off Arial documentary.

        • True story. I once eagerly devoured a documentary on Helvitica.

          And yet I'm sure you'll be bored out of your mind by this article.

        • Well, it was a pretty damned good documentary film, even if you never thought you'd find the field interesting. Fantastic cinematography, really.

      • And is crucially important to establishing believable science fiction movie settings.
        https://typesetinthefuture.com... [typesetinthefuture.com]

      • Just ask Saint Jobs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

        How is this news for nerds again and who cares?

        Typography is a pretty nerdy field.

        We're talking about the page number at the bottom of the document. That's not even remotely in this category. If you want to talk about something nerdy in this field, talk about typesetting and the history of publishing prior to the invention of the word processor and why the word processor was a remarkable invention.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 )

      I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently.

      Sorry, there is no more pagination on the web.

      Now all of the content for each site is concatenated together into a single endless page which stuffs more crap onto the bottom every time you scroll down a bit.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I thought this would be an article about different techniques for web pagination through large data sets efficiently.

        Sorry, there is no more pagination on the web.

        Now all of the content for each site is concatenated together into a single endless page which stuffs more crap onto the bottom every time you scroll down a bit.

        That infinite scroll bullshit annoys me to no end. I'm always happy to find a site where I can specify the page I want to see or the number of lines / elements by tweaking the URL.

      • Naw, each site is split up. After reading each paragraph you have to click the "next" button and be subjected to another barrage of advertisements. This compensates the web site owner's expense of copying someone else's article and rebranding it.

  • This sounds like it could be a typography holy war, similar in scale to Emacs vs. vi or tabs vs. spaces. Actually, what do typography nerds think of tabs vs. spaces?

    Anyone confirm?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 )

      Tabs. Why? Because if you don't like the indentation the way it is, you can easily adjust your tab spacing without altering the code. No matter what the person writing the code thought is the "correct" amount of whitespace between edge and indented code, your setting will provide whatever amount you consider correct.

      Try that if you insist that 4 spaces are indentation and I think that 2 is plenty. And don't you DARE to add spaces to my code because then it will be ALL WRONG when I check it back out. And you

      • Tabs. Why? Because if you don't like the indentation the way it is, you can easily adjust your tab spacing without altering the code. No matter what the person writing the code thought is the "correct" amount of whitespace between edge and indented code, your setting will provide whatever amount you consider correct.

        This is true, but... You have to make sure you use *exactly* one tab per indent level, and only use tabs at the beginnings of lines. You must use spaces within the line if you want to align any

        • You've pretty well defined why forcing layout is a wasted effort - And why whitespace delimiting should fail. Let your tools figure out formatting and layout, make your content the focus. Tabs should define logic, not spacing (This is a new paragraph/block, etc) and your tool should figure out how to present that through styles. When I worked in prepress, one of the most vexing issues was "designers" forcing layout with extraneous tabs/spaces.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tgeek ( 941867 )
        I had a job writing RPG. I didn't bother with tabs or spaces and just lined everything up nice and neatly. I didn't last long at that job. But I got the last laugh . . . because where's RPG now???? muahahahahaha

    • Yeah, the only one that's solved so far is the thing where some people argue--on text medium, no less--that two spaces need not follow a period ending a sentence because the space is automatically bigger anyway. Meanwhile, two spaces after a period ending a sentence is actually larger than a single space after an abbreviation like "Mr."; and the space after a period is, in fact, not proportionally wide compared to spaces in other places on the very screens in which these debates take place.

      Even in the s

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        We need to ignore the 'rules' that arose from newspaper printing. They were crafted to conserve space and ink, not for legibility.

        • I can't tell if this is supposed to be in support of or against the two spaces rule. Are you suggesting that newspapers conserved "space and ink" by putting more space after a sentence?

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:56AM (#56495071)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Any typography warriors out there? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Godwin O'Hitler ( 205945 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @12:12PM (#56495183) Journal

        Pro tip: Words like "Mr." and many other handles (with or without a ".") should always be followed by a nbsp to stop possible dissociation across a line break, Mr.
        bluefoxlucid

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • It's not invisible; the general argument is that modern proportional fonts have a space so wide [-] for a normal space, but magically make it even wider [--] when the space follows a period. In practice, that doesn't really happen.

          If you visually glance over a block of unpunctuated text, it should look like a wall of text. If you have punctuation and one space, that looks the same. If you have punctuation with two spaces after the full-stop, those big chunks of white space stand out like a beacon: it'

    • Re:Any typography warriors out there? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by moehoward ( 668736 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:36AM (#56494883)

      Having authored a number of books (technical/educational) and been deeply involved in page layout and pedagogy, I can tell you that these things are taken VERY seriously. And, yes, our editorial and authoring teams have had holy wars over much less than this.

      These issues come to the forefront when books will be re-used by the same person. Something that is educational or used as a reference requires great thought with regards to layout.

      Typography and related layout issues are quite an art. I wish there was some simple reference guide. Chicago Manual of Style only goes so far.

    • You DO realize this isn't a binary choice, right?

      * Indent with tabs; align with spaces
      * Elastic Tabstops [nickgravgaard.com]
      * Smart Tabs [github.com]

      = Smart Tabs =

      Emacs:
      * https://github.com/jcsalomon/s... [github.com]

      Vim:
      * https://www.vim.org/scripts/sc... [vim.org]
      * http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Inde... [wikia.com]

    • Sorry my friend, there never was a holy war, you simply use vi. And tabs versus spaces is obviously tabs.
      As some guy much smarter than me once said: 'You might disagree, but you would be wrong!'

      Typographicc nerds use tabs, and define in convenient units where each tab stop is (because not all 'tabs' aka columns have an equal width).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Agripa ( 139780 )

      Actually, what do typography nerds think of tabs vs. spaces?

      Anyone confirm?

      I like tabs when they work. But since they never work, I do not like them.

  • Can we ban "TheOutline" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:06AM (#56494681)

    Has anyone found an "The Outline" post on Slashdot that hasn't fallen under
    1) Uninformed Gibberish
    2) Trolling clickbait
    3) Completely boring filler of interest to no one even the topic's core audience
     

    • >> 1) Uninformed Gibberish 2) Trolling clickbait 3) Completely boring filler of interest to no one even the topic's core audience

      It's a mix of #2 and #3. When I worked in marketing, we used to hire low-cost people to write SEO-heavy articles to attract the clicks of the few people interested in "long tail" topics. It seems like this is a typical example. Here's the full text below so you don't have to actually visit the site.

      ---

      In his landmark 1931 book An Essay on Typography, the British typogra
    • I hadn't researched /.'s history of postings from them. I'll agree that the interface is annoyingly shiny. However I'd never seen the site before today, and I'm already reading some interesting material. Example: https://theoutline.com/post/40... [theoutline.com]
    • Seconded. I'm as much of a typography nerd as the next guy - unless the next guy is my friend Peter, who takes font mania to an unhealthy extreme - but this was painfully meager. I kept waiting to be astonished, and it just never happened.

  • When I'm reading a book, I wish... (Score:3)

    by Parker Lewis ( 999165 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:07AM (#56494693)
    When I'm reading a book, and I want to find a past sentence, but I cannot remember in exactly which chapter or page, I wish I can use something similar to `Ctrl+F` :D

  • Coupled with an index pagination lets you skip the usual introduction drivel where the author barfs his thoughts and intentions nobody gives a shit about.

    Good authors at least. Bad ones sprinkle that useless garbage all over their text.

  • *Yawn*

  • The abomination that must die... (Score:3)

    by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:25AM (#56494807)

    Is the convention of putting in page numbers as -. It completely breaks the ability to quickly find a page number if it's in dead-tree, or by grabbing the scroll bar and scrubbing if electronic.

    If you tell me the page of interest is on page 8-2, that really doesn't tell me how far it is into the document, but if you tell me it's on page 253, I can quickly scan through until I find it.

    And yes, I know that hyperlinks and search functions are a thing, but I don't care... Get off my lawn!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcmonkey ( 96054 )

      I find this numbering by chapter equally vexing, but I believe it is done so a single section can be developed apart from the rest of the content or revised without renumbering the whole.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Strider- ( 39683 )

        That's why it's done, of course, but that's due to inadequate tools rather than anything else. Hell, even LaTeX could handle big documents, never mind PageMaker and so forth. It's just people that try to put together complex documents in Word where this fails.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcmonkey ( 96054 )

          The area where I most often see this chapter-page style numbering is in owners' manuals, such as those that come with a car.

          Makes me think, if their engineers haven't figured out automatic page numbering, what else in this vehicle is substandard? ;)

    • I have one that's worse than this. The manual for my car has chapters like "EMP", "JJ", "EM", and so on. They're not in alphabetical order. Within each chapter, pages are just numbered starting at 1. Chapter code at the top of the page, number at the bottom. What sort of mental defective thinks this is a good idea?

      • I have one that's worse than this. The manual for my car has chapters like "EMP", "JJ", "EM", and so on. They're not in alphabetical order. Within each chapter, pages are just numbered starting at 1. Chapter code at the top of the page, number at the bottom. What sort of mental defective thinks this is a good idea?

        EMP? Man, that's a bad ass-car.

  • Machines are currently crappy at auto-formatting without either a high-end auto-formatter (=$), or hand-tuning by humans. "Responsive" web pages is tricky to get right. Bootstrap etc. is either not smart enough to do it right, or else encoding everything "properly" to get it to fully work is poorly documented and/or rocket-science that only Shelden can figure out. It's arguably "good enough", but sometimes makes me cringe.

    I think I'd rather have WYSIWYG (coordinate-based) and design 2 or 3 layouts based on

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's because you're doing it wrong. You're not supposed to control the UI for the users, you're supposed to describe the content you're sending and let the client determine everything. Doing that, all you need to concern yourself with is the ordering of the elements. The browsers will lay them out horizontally or vertically as the space allows.

      I understand nearly all modern pages don't do that, and that's exactly why web development is filled with such bullshit. Learn to stop being so controlling.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        let the client determine everything

        Again, the client is stupid: it does not make wise layout decisions in many cases.

        Maybe it's possible for a "perfect" and concise auto-layout language/convention to be invented that automatically flows and resizes wisely and nice, but I haven't see such yet. They all have areas they foul up on or are weak on.

        Until the bots get smart, let the human have more damned control so we don't spend all day second-guessing retarded bots to work around their flaws.

  • Long, long ao (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:38AM (#56494891)

    Nowadays, the layouters and designers have long been sacked.
    Widows and orphans on every (other) page, nobody knows anymore that title size and the extra space below should be a multiple of the normal text, so the alignment of the articles in the previous and next columns are completely ignored. If it is too obvious, some poor soul inserts a vertical line between the columns.

    Look closely at your local newspaper and check one online from 30-40 years ago and you'll immediately see the difference.

    Since the day Pagemaker was invented, it has gone downhill.

  • Keep it to the outside margin so some idiot doesn't screw up the printer files. Source: idiot who has screwed up printer files.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In the centre of the page would seriously mess up the flow of text too.

  • The Manual does warn, however, that folios should “should never be distractingly large.”

    The same could be said of images, that they "should never be distractingly animated."

  • ... I need to search for is page three.

  • The latex style file from my publisher decides where to put the page number.

  • more thought is put into it than you might imagine. Should it go at the top or the bottom of the page? In the right or left margin? Or in the center? These are all conscious and deliberate choices made by designers.

    Page numbers go at the bottom on the outside of each page.

    There is no need for thought, just do that and follow what everyone else does. While other options are possible, there is no need for them. yOU MIGHT AS WELL INVERT CAPITALISATION. iT IS POSSIBLE, BUT STUPID. jUST DO THE RIGHT THING.

    • Nonsense, don't pull rules out of your ass. Plenty of books have them at the top where they are more useful, so the eye can then read from the top down to find portion of interest.

  • Infinite scrolling is one of the most abominable inventions ever.

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