Donald Knuth, the Mac, and practical typography

You could call me any combination of fussy, perfectionist, OCD or just plain anal when it comes to matters of typography.

I wasn’t always this way—at least not about matters of type. I think the root cause of my problem is that I’m an intuitive learner. I can’t stand to learn things by rote and then spit them back out again; in fact I’m woeful at it. The way I learn is to understand things; once part of my working knowledge, I can reapply a concept or technique a theoretically unlimited number of times.

How Donald changed my life

I never used to have a clue about typesetting. I just tried to make my documents look as professional as possible. (Unfortunately, that also never took me much farther than the default styles sets in Word 2007.) But something happened when I began my IT degree—I somehow stumbled across an amazing typesetting system based on the TeX typesetting language created by Donald E. Knuth. It was a bizarre set of circumstances too. At the time I was doing an introductory programming course in Python, and one of the exercises listed, amongst a bunch of other famous computing names, Donald himself (I had no idea at the time that they were famous). As a result of a search for an introduction to TeX, I read this book—joining the dots, I realised that the guy was actually quite brilliant and has had an immense impact across many academic and computing circles.

He was a fellow nerd who actually valued well-designed and typeset documents, and rather than complain about the state of typography on computers of the day, he wrote a programming language to fix it. And it’s still being used and built upon even today. Wow.

Knuth’s TeXBook provided me with a great introduction to the principles of typography, many of which have been lost or at least ignored in desktop publishing. But, things are improving.

A year later, and my approach to writing and creating good copy has been radically and fundamentally changed. Changed how? Well, for one I actually want to create good copy now.

How the Mac changed my life

Disclaimer: I have not been brainwashed by Steve Jobs. Many like to poke fun at Apple culture, but there is a reason that iPods have become so ubiquitous. Apple is single-minded in its desire to create top-notch products, and incredibly good at marketing those products.

The Mac is far more than just an alternative to a Wintel machine. Yet, finding an alternative to Windows is indeed where it began for me. I did not enjoy the thought of using Vista, so I shopped around, researched for about a month, and eventually dropped the cash on a shiny white MacBook. Best thing I could’ve done when beginning my degree. Why? It opened up amazing new territory for me: the Mac is a platform that helps power-users and IT professionals, rather than impeding them. Not only am I more productive then I ever was in Windows, OS X gave me free access to the Xcode developer tools,¹ and it’s a much friendlier platform for typography.

The Mac has given me two opportunities that I may not have gotten otherwise: the desire to design and build the highest-quality software, and the ability to typeset beautifully and without heartache or great expense.

A bit OCD I think

I spent maybe 4 or 5 hours today typesetting. I didn’t produce a single word of useful copy. I could have been actually writing something useful, but let me tell you why I didn’t.

This is what happens when I sit down to write—be it a journal, a report, a user manual, or whatever. Whether I’m writing something that will be read publicly or not (that’s right, even if it’s just a journal that no one else will ever read), I invariably spend an hour or two just making it pretty first. I start writing in TextEdit, decide I don’t like the typeface, line spacing, lack of lowercase figures, lack of italic face, then wish I had the immensely useful styles drawer from Pages, then decide to get over myself and just finish in TextEdit, then go to print and realise I have no control over the margins, completely throwing out my line length, then copy it over to Pages, take 10 minutes replacing the default set of styles with the styles of my TextEdit document, fixing the margins, and finally saving to a PDF before finally printing it out.

See that heading up there? Case in point.

So rather than go through all this pain every time I sit down to write, I decided to put myself through two or three times the pain and produce nothing except a meaningless sample document. No, I can’t let you think that; what I’ve done is produced for myself a good quality, immensely reusable template for most documents and ramblings which is hopefully flexible enough that it will only require minor tweaks for the foreseeable future.

Now the next time I sit down to write, I won’t need to waste time getting started. What I want to achieve is type that is completely invisible—all it does is serve the reader by delivering fundamentally readable type. It was a joy to create (not painful, as I suggested), but I hope that it will make what I write a little more of a joy to read.

A final note

As you will have gathered, my primary writing tool on the Mac is Pages ’08, for Mac OS X Leopard. I haven’t yet forked out the $119 AUD (education price) for iWork ’09, but with tax season coming along it may soon be time for an upgrade. Full screen mode and outline view, not to mention the transition away from the package format for iWork documents, would be welcome.

If you’d like to know how I went about setting up my default template for Pages, I’ll have a complete write-up finished very soon.

Happy typesetting.

1. I am aware that Microsoft also allow this with their DreamSpark program, but Apple don’t require me to be a student to provide me with all their libraries and developer tools—they’re free for everyone. And yes, I know there is open source and Linux, but duh, I get all that in a Mac too. [↩]