Safari Bookshelf

Friday, September 12th, 2008

In a small company like ours, where everyone wears several hats, The O’Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf has become an indispensable resource for the person wearing the hat with the propeller.

My Safari Bookshelf in September 08Safari is a big electronic reference library of information technology related books from O’Reilly and other technical publishers well-known to IT departments. (O’Reilly books are the attractive ones with the old-fashioned engravings of animals on the cover.)

Cost savings and flexibility

Anybody who has bought this kind of book knows that they cost about $40 each. And that many, especially the introductory ones, will be one-time-reads.

Avoid paying for stuff you don’t want

However useful and technically correct they may be, are marred by the grating bonhomie exemplified in this, taken almost at random from a pretty good Flash book we paid $45 for in pre-Safari days:

It’s completely mind-boggling why Macromedia didn’t introduce a spell checker into Flash before this version. Just because Flash doesn’t produce reams and reams of text doesn’t mean that the text that it does produce can’t be misspelled. Hey, even the best spellers among us misspell a word or two now and then, and need the occasional help of a spell checker. For those of us who can’t spell our way out of a paper bag (myself included), the spell checker is that much more of a blessing.

Yuck. That’s a lot to wade through in order to learn that Flash has a spell-checker, something we had not, in fact, noticed before.
With Safari, we pay $20 a month for a bookshelf of ten-books. The text is searchable — it’s a lot easier to find out how to do something by searching an authoritative book than by searching the web. There are other plans for bigger book shelves. But we generally replace one of two books a month, as something new comes up. I keep a few essential reference books like JavaScript:The Definitive Guide on the Safari shelf more or less permanently so I can look up stuff when the (physical) book isn’t at hand.

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Affair of the Century Font Family

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

In selecting typefaces, if you’re not a professional typographer, a good practice is to stick with one font family (e.g., Univers, Helvetica) throughout a document.

Our company has often used the combination of New Century for body text and Franklin Gothic for headlines. It turns out that, in a way, these fonts also come from the same family. The original Century was designed by Linn Boyd Benton for The Century Magazine in 1894. His son, Morris Fuller Benton, designed Franklin Gothic. The prolific Morris also made the Century family fuller with Century Schoolbook, New Century, and other variations that remain popular.

Attractive font couples

Not being any sort of typographer myself, I couldn’t name another pair of fonts from different font families that complement each other notably well. But the designer Daniel Will-Harris has developed a list of fonts he likes to pair up. His list is oriented to fonts for printing.

Fonts for computer displays

Computer displays require fonts that look clear at low resolution. Will-Harris also recounts an interesting conversation about screen fonts with typographic luminary Charles Bigelow, co-designer (with Kris Holmes), of the Lucida family. Here are some of his recommendations:

  • Verdana is a font designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter. It is among the best choices for text type on screen. It’s kinda outsize, though.
  • Georgia is a serif font designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter. Notice the numerals — 1234567890. When numerals don’t all line up on the baseline, they’re oldstyle numerals, good for invitations, novels, and mailboxes, but not necessarily for tabular display.
  • Rockwell is a slab serif or “Egyptian” font, so-called, because it was used to signal troop movements in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
  • Arial is a remarkably clean and legible font, which some disparage for its lack of stylishness. We like it.
  • Lucida Sans boasts true Italics, meaning that the Italic characters are individually designed. In many other fonts, the italics are nothing but roman characters slanted to the right.

No serif font looks really good in body copy on the screen, says Bigelow, because, at low resolution in small sizes, the number of pixels it takes to form a serif makes up too great a proportion of the whole. In other words, they don’t look the way they’re supposed to, no matter what.

I had assumed all the Lucida fonts supplied with PCs were suitable for screen use. Not so, says Bigelow, who singles out his own Lucida Bright as a particularly dim choice for on-screen display.

A good choice for text editors

Speaking of Lucida, if you use a text editor for scripting, you might want to try changing from the default screen font to Lucida Console.

Here is Courier New, the default for some text editors I’ve used, at 11pt.

Here is 11pt Lucida Console.

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The allure of the sidehead

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

One of our company’s first projects was to edit and format the strategic plan of a telco spun out of AT&T (the planning group wanted to display forward-thinkingness by using the then-new technology of desktop-publishing). We devised a business-like layout with sideheads (headlines in the left margin), that we’ve updated from time to time for desktop publishing projects. But we haven’t used it for a few years, and I had forgotten about it until one of our clients sent us a white paper, handsomely formatted with sideheads.

I thought it might be helpful to pass along a method for making sideheads in Microsoft Word. This is adapted from an approach posted in 2002 to the MS Word Pagelayout Group by the estimable Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill.

Set the margins

Sideheads go in the margin, so we need a wide left margin. Something like this should do.

Create the sidehead in a frame

You’ll need to have the forms toolbar available (right-click in the toolbars and select “Forms”). Type your headline, select it, and click the “Insert Frame” button.

Format the sidehead


Right-click the shaded frame boundary and choose “Format frame.” Give it a width and put it on the left margin, as shown, by setting its position relative to the page.

At this point, things get a little confusing. The sidehead gets its vertical position from the style of the paragraph it was extracted from (Body Text 2 in this case, which has 36 pts of built-in space before), and from the style of the paragraph immediately preceding (BigItalic, with 12 pts of built-in space after).

To compensate we make the space before 24pt. Get it? Neither do I, really. But it works.

Besides paragraph space, the sidehead will need a distinctive headline font. You’ll also probably want to get rid of the border. Choose ” Borders and Shading” from the Format menu to do that.

Once you’ve got it looking pretty much the way you want it, assign the format to a heading level (I use heading 1 for level 1 subheads). This keeps you from having to go through this rigmarole next time you want a sidehead.

Here are the style attributes. Note that there is a style set for the following paragraph. This way, as soon as you type a carriage return in the sidehead, the cursor moves into the lead paragraph of the section.

Wasn’t that fun?

You may reasonably ask, Why don’t you just use tables? Well, it’s harder keep page breaks in order, for one thing, and you can lose year’s off your life coping with Word’s preference for selecting whole cells instead of paragraphs

.

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A chart that frames the issue and calls for action

Monday, August 18th, 2008

The final installment of a survey of global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker (May 9, 2005), sets forth some ideas for attacking the problem advanced by Princeton engineering professor Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The article features a striking illustration based on a chart Socolow and his colleagues devised. The magazine illustration is not available online, but the original, found here, is even more striking.

Cutting wedge ideas

Greenhouse gas emissions will continue along the top curve labeled “currently predicted path” here, but more colorfully called “Business as Usual” in The New Yorker. There are seven wedges, each representing something that can be done to reduce emissions by a billion tons per year.

Rather than lay out a specific program by labeling the wedges, Socolow lists 15 alternative actions that could achieve 1/7 of the target reduction, such as

  • use biomass to make fuel to displace oil (100 times current capacity)
  • replace 1,400 gigawatts of coal power plants with natural gas
  • capture and store carbon emitted from 800 gigawatts of new coal plants
  • use biomass to make fuel to displace oil (100 times current capacity)
  • replace 1,400 gigawatts of coal power plants with natural gas
  • capture and store carbon emitted from 800 gigawatts of new coal plants

    • The list appeared in the August 13, 2004 issue of Science and is reproduced at
    Environmental Entrepreneurs.

    Strength in numbers

    What makes this chart so effective, I think, is its insistence that if we choose a goal, we can also evaluate a combination of specific actions to reach the goal. Any seven actions will do, but some combinations might be easier.

    By quantifying the problem of global warming in wedges on a graph, the scientists have taken it out of the realm of hand-wringing and into the realm of practical horse-trading. Some people will even see in these wedges ideas for making money with good ideas. That’s what good business graphics should do.

    We used a chart like this in a 2-Minute Explainer describing how Activplant’s manufacturing performance management software works.

    — BGM

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    Exactly repeatable pictorial statements

    Monday, August 4th, 2008

    Cover of Prints and Visual CommunicationWe owe more to the printed picture than to the printed word. That, paraphrased, is the thesis of a wonderful book, Prints and Visual Communication, by William M Ivins, Jr., first published in 1953. Ivins was for many years curator of prints at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the title and cover, you might expect an art-historical survey of works by Durer, Hokusai, Escher, Warhol, et.al. But the book is nothing like that.

    By “print” Ivins means what he calls “the exactly repeatable pictorial statement.” You have only to recall how you learned Cartesian coordinates, Newtonian mechanics, the periodic table and the double helix to see that exactly repeatable pictorial statements are essential for learning and passing on practical, scientific knowlege. It seems quite obvious, but it’s not something that I had thought of before reading Ivins.

    Starting the modern era off with a bang

    There were prints before there were printing presses, but their primary purpose was edification, amusement, moral or religious uplift, not information. The same could be said of most of what was printed by Gutenberg and his immediate successors.

    Print of primitive machine gun The first printed book identified by Ivins as using pictures for informational purposes, is Valturius’s De re militarii (Verona 1472). It contains this wholly unedifying picture of a machine gun.

    Botanical printThere soon followed books of anatomy, botany, geometry, and other more ‘humanistic’ pursuits. Ivins’s book is much more about engineering than about art, as he follows the proliferation of printed visuals through the development of lithography and photography.

    Historical polemics

    A gifted polemicist trained as a lawyer, Ivins makes good company for people who enjoy watching conventional wisdom stood on its ear. Here he is on the notion that the Renaissance was all about the revival of ancient Greek thought:

    In the first place, what is called Greek thought is not a homgeneous body of doctrine and knowledge reflecting a reasoned and unified attitude towards life and the world. What remains of it is a highly accidental heap of notions and odds and ends of the most violently contradictory kinds. If you care to look for it you can find a phrase in it that can be twisted to the purpose of almost anything you want to argue on any side of any problem. The Greeks never agreed about anything; they actually knew very little; it was quite customary for them to be intellectually dishonest; their arguments were designed, not to bring out the truth, but to down the other fellow in a forensic victory; and they had very loose and careless tongues.

    Looking at technology

    The point here (other than recommending a very good book), is that if you’re trying to sell or explain something, especially to technical people, think about how they’re used to learning: from charts, tables, diagrams, and other visualizations. It makes sense to use pictorial statements in your sales messages. Show, don’t tell.

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