I lived in the province of Quebec from 2000 to 2005. The nested levels of information created by secondary bullets make for difficult reading and almost impossible scanning. Then go out for a latte and think about it some more. Can you imagine a novel or other sustained narrative featuring bulleted lists? Not really (though there are a few novels out there based on tweets reading them must feel like skipping through endless bullet points).įinally, think very, very hard before using sub-bullets. What’s more, some material doesn’t lend itself to bullets. Readers subjected to page after page of bullets-think of it as literary buckshot-will be confused by a bunch of scattered ideas that never cohere. But like boldface, or any other device that’s meant to highlight, bulleted lists can be overused. (Williams apologizes for the somewhat tasteless acronym that these principles spell out.)īullets are great for lists that are important or complex and need highlighting. Proximity: Related elements should be grouped together into one visual unit.Alignment: Related elements should line up on the page in some deliberate way.Repetition: Repeated visual elements give a sense of organization and unity.Contrast: Differentiated elements on a page draw the reader’s attention.This Robin Williams is the queen, because she is a woman, of page design.) In Williams’ opinion, an effective design embodies the following four principles: (Not that Robin Williams, the king of comedy. In fact, they follow all four principles outlined in The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. And because they dole out ideas line by line, they make processing those ideas much easier.īulleted lists are as much about design as they are about language. Because bullets differentiate a list from the surrounding text, they attract the reader's eye to that list. The workplace has some advantages over the bad side of town, one being that in the office, bullets are usually our friend. Around 1600, in Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare referred to "quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain." In 1900 Danish critic Georg Brandes used bullet imagery to extol the power of print: "Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types." A while back an editing colleague raised the subject, saying: "Bullets will be the death of me."Īs you might have guessed, my colleague was in despair over bullet points-or more precisely bulleted lists, or vertical lists, as some guides call them because the items can be preceded by things other than bullets: numbers, letters, dashes, smiley faces (if you’re under 16) and the like. Fonts that do not need such precise corrections, like fixed width fonts, will not be subject to kerning.There’s a natural association between language and bullets. Note that kerning is controlled by information in the font data (in particular the font metrics). In the Spacing section, check the check box Pair kerning. Right-click on each paragraph style that's being used.Click the paragraph styles icon to open the list of paragraph styles.Press F11 to open the Styles and Formatting window (or choose Format → Styles and Formatting).If you need the whole text to be kerned, modify the styles, as follows: In the "Spacing" section, check the check box Pair kerning. Highlight the passages of your text for which kerning needs to be enabled.If you need kerning only for selected parts of your text, follow these steps: The A should be moved a little towards the V.Īs you can see, the space between the letters is just too wide. For example, when a V is followed by an A, the shape of the letters would result in a little too much space between them, and this just doesn't look nice. Letters is adjusted to the appearance of the letter and its neighbour. Kerning is part of the typesetting process, where the space between It would look better if that space were reduced. The space between the letters in a word seems just a bit too wide.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |