Typography on the Web ANNOTATION
Designed for webmasters and other Web professionals, this comprehensive Web typography guide details typography fundamentals, digital typography and cascading style sheets. You study TrueDoc and font embedding. The book does NOT cover graphic design, font design or digital font technology.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Now you can publish perfect Web pages using typefaces that you can provide to your Web site visitors. This comprehensive book for webmasters and other Web workers on the new Web typography begins with a few chapters for those who missed Desktop Publishing 101 and quickly moves on to provide the groundwork for understanding the new typesetting and layout enabled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), TrueDoc, and font embedding. Two chapters make using CSS easy by featuring hands-on work with CSS as well as a handy reference, and other chapters help you master TrueDoc typesetting and font embedding. The book also explores dozens of ideas for typography using only HTML and covers specialized Web pages such as for NetTV (e.g., WebTV), Java, and cross-media publishing.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
A guide for Webmasters and other Web page authors who want to grow beyond Times New Roman in their Web-based publications. Topics include an introduction to desktop publishing, the new typesetting and layout enabled by Cascading Style Sheets, TrueDoc, and font embedding and typography using only HTML. Also includes discussions of specialized Web pages such as for NetTV, Java, and cross-media publishing. The focus is on creating and presenting readable text, not on making glitzy specialized pages. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Jack Woehr - Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books
Typography on the Web
Typography on the Web teaches the elements of typography to
professional and amateur web experts who wish to improve the
readability and the aesthetics of their web site.
Typography is a renaissance art, and its practitioners are
renaissance guildsmen. In Typography on the Web, Joseph
Sinclair successfully imparts some of the flavor of the mingling of
the traditional craft with the new spice of web technology. This is
not a book about computer science; it's a book about artistic use of
computing. Some of the author's technical utterances must be taken
with a grain of salt.
Sinclair describes himself as possessing "qualifications to write
high tech books as an expert computer user (not as a computer
programmer) and author." His bio states that Sinclair was formerly a
member of the Board of Directors of the North Bay Multimedia
Association, Chairman of the Education Committee, and Chairman (and
founder) of the Multimedia Internet Special Interest Group (SIG) for
the Association. He is currently a contributing editor covering
digital multimedia technology for the "Multimedia Reporter," an NBMA
multimedia industry periodical.
The first section of the book is "Fundamentals of Typography."
This is a topic that has spawned many books on its own, but the
author manages a credible overview of the raw mechanics as they
relate to computer typography. The book also presents a Spartan but
adequate bibliography for those interested in going deeper.
In the second section, "Digital Typography," Sinclair warms to his
task. The emphasis is on the layout of fonts and their mapping to
displays. The elements of modern GUI representation of text are
introduced, along with XML and SGML, a little breathlessly, as again
we have stumbled into deserves-a-bookshelf territory.
The third section, "Typography on the Web" introduces HTML from a
typographer's point of view, and presents a cogent critique of the
basic markup tags, along with numerous techniques for working around
some of HTML's limits.
The fourth section, "Cascading Style Sheets" is one of the more
comprehensive treatments in the book, and possesses an amount of
reference value.
The fifth section is a light treatment of TrueDoc, and the sixth
section deals with Microsoft's Web Embedding Font Tool.
The seventh section, "Advanced Topics in Web Typography" takes the
reader to greater depths in topics already introduced, as well as
delving into NetTV.
The CD-ROM accompanying the volume contains example documents,
installable font samples for PC and Mac that allow the reader to view
the examples as intended, and some trial versions of web authoring
software. A little more effort could have been expended on organizing
the material on the CD-ROM for easy navigation. It is left to you to
explore the install-less disk and to grapple with font installation.
There also seems to have been little effort to correlate the soft
resources with the text of the book itself.
While Typography on the Web absorbs you in its entertaining
and appealing artistic theme, Sinclair gets lower marks on his
nuts-and-bolts web acumen. For example, he is under the impression
(p. 409) that "[Java] applets evaporate; that is, they
disappear after a user either closes his or her browser or shuts off
the computer ... giving a user no opportunity to copy or redistribute
them." This is misleading; any material transiting the wire to the
user's computer can potentially be stored by the user for later
retrieval.
In any event, Sinclair's sound grasp of classic typographical
considerations in presenting textual information and his ability to
relate his knowledge to actual Web practice serve to excuse minor
blemishes and make Typography on the Web a useful tutorial in
the field.
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