Typesetting notes

In the interests of writing longform things that are not novels, I’ve looked into a few products that are intended for typesetting stuff like ebooks, scientific papers, books-as-websites, and the like. Here lie some unstructured notes with links to interesting prior art that I might come back to.

Mattew Butterick seems to have poured an incredible amount of time into work on applying classical rules of good typesetting to the web. Butterick’s Practical Typography is his, but he also did something as specific as Typography for Lawyers. Being some sort of weird polymath, he also designed a number of his own typefaces. He is also a good model for giving information away and asking for money (and for suing bad actors who abuse the commons).

There are a few more practical style guides probably inspired by Butterick’s. The Proportional Web is recent. The Elements of Style Applied to the Web are directly inspired by the classic book The Elements of Style by Robert Bringhurst. Also linked from The Proportional Web is Dave Liepmann’s Tufte CSS, inspired by Edward Tufte. It contains a CSS file and written guidelines.

Pandoc and LaTeX are the grandaddies of fussily rendering type. As such, their tools are quite bad to work with and thus far I’ve relied entirely on Pandoc templates without any funny business. Quarto is an open source technical publishing system that seems to be used for stuff like programming language manuals and O’Reilly books published online.

Typst seems to be growing in popularity. It looks like it’s both a markdown-like (but not compatible) markup language and a proprietary and paid suite of products for working with it, including a renderer with output formats including PDF and HTML.