Apple’s rise and fall in typography
Thanks to implementing a GUI that people could actually use and inventing GUI standard principles such as the desktop metaphor and pull-down menues Apple spearheaded not only the GUI revolution, but with it they revolutionised printing and typography.
That was in the eighties, but looking at Apple’s recent developments it appears as if they are now abandoning all the visual and typographic excellence they used to be known for.
Some history: Before the DTP revolution, the life of a typographer felt more like being a mechanic, either using a machine that looked like a steam-punk typewriter, casting type in lead as one line of type (guess who’s company name was inspired by this), or computers with a CLI1 directly writing in a page description language somewhat similar to HTML or TeX/LaTEX. Previews on screen were only approximations as was the output to a computer printer. To make sure whether you got it just right you often had to expose the layout on film, an expensive way for proof-reading…
If you wanted to do anything fancy, hand-setting was often more flexible. Others used manual photo-setting techniques with a camera, to achieve more creative freedom. For anything out of the extremely limited ordinary you’d have to be incredibly inventive.
Apple’s and Adobe’s contributions
Adobe came up with PostScript—a page description language mainly for printers that would standardise the output of text and graphic to computer printers and even RIPs2. Adobe also invented their own scalable font format to go with it. Before that there wore only Pixelfonts, not usable for high-quality output for print and also not a pretty sight on the screen either.
Adobes PostScript Type-1 fonts changed that. But anybody who wanted to use Type-1 fonts had to license the technology from Adobe. Adobe’s licenses for PostScript and the Type-1 fonts were expensive, the PostScript license for a laser printer for example roughly doubled the price of the printer itself. So while Apple dearly wanted those scalable fonts for their platform the license cost was prohibitive.
So Apple invented TrueType. This solved the license cost issue, improvements were made for better hinting and kerning. TrueType also had better control over the look of a typeface at low resolutions and small sizes (important when Monitor resolution was around 640 × 480 px at 72dpi). Unfortunately making properly designed TrueType fonts was a royal pain in the neck, so most professional fonts ended up being offered as PostScript Type-1 fonts only. The reason that nonetheless TrueType became so popular was ironically because Microsoft decided to make it the standard on Windows.
More typographer love
What else had Apple to offer typophiles? Scalable fonts on a computer long before Windows even existed, was only the first step followed by font smoothing (anti-aliasing of fonts, introduced with Mac OS 8.5 in 1998). Also the fact that you can type most special characters directly on your keyboard (here for the US layout):
opt+u+u → ü
opt+c → ç
opt+2 → ™
opt+1 → ¡
or typographically correct dashes:
opt+- → – (n-dash)
opt+shift+- → — (m-dash), etc.
Handling fonts was and is also easy. You would simply copy or move fonts into the Fonts folder within the System Folder (or on OS X double click and click install).
On the Mac you always had a decent selection of default fonts. Palatino from Hermann Zapf, a real Helvetica, Hoefler Text, Futura, Baskerville, Gill Sans, Optima and since OS X for Japanese you get the incredible Hiragino Gothic, Mincho and Maru, each with 15.000 characters and even traditional shapes.
The devil is in the details
So on System 1-7, Mac OS and OS X there have always been many things that make a typographer happy, the fonts, the handling of special characters, systemwide spellcheckers, Unicode throughout (since OS X), the typographically correct anti aliasing and subpixel rendering, proper kerning, support for all font formats since OS X, since 10.6 systemwide smart quotes and system wide symbol and text substitution 1/2 → ½ etc.
So, what am I complaining about?
Clouds on the horizon
It started with the iPhone/iPod touch. When I checked my other website pixelblast.jp on it I first found that Safari on iPhone wouldn’t use my @font-face fonts, although it looked perfectly alright on the full-blown desktop Safari. I soon learned that I could work around this using SVG fonts (why the need for two font types for Safari?). Then I noticed that for some reason, Palatino, which I used as the base font would not be displayed, but instead Times. Palatino has been included on even pre OS X machines for quite a while, so I simply cannot comprehend why they took it out. To save space?
Why is it then that we have Helvetica, Helvetica Neue and Arial on the iPhone, and Courier as well as Courier New? Do we really need two versions of the same font, and instead leave out another much better more versatile and more readable one instead?
Then the notepad on the iPhone is using Tekton Pro as the default. The one app that almost only consists of type as the interface and they go with that petrifyingly ugly and unreadable font. And you can’t even change it! Why the inclusion of this abortion of a font on the iPhone and at the same time the omission of beauties like Palatino or Hoefler Text? Are we already in Comic Sans land? Have Apple completely lost their marbles?
Then came the iPad
When the iPad was announced and Apple started to praise it as the one thing that could save the printing industry I of course had high hopes—typographically.
But I can’t help the feeling that Steve’s original liver must have been his gustatory organ and now it’s gone and we’ll be stranded with tasteless iPad atrocities like justified text in the iBook reader, with no way to adjust word spacing (and no hyphenation either to ease the pain). Reading “a river runs through it” on the iPad might give it a totally new meaning!
Whatever happened to right ragged text? I could live with justified text if the iPad was so advanced in handling it and handling the hyphenation and the word spacing adjustments necessary, that we would have a perfect layout. But instead it’s not even lacking, it is simply unreadable. Justifying text without human intervention does not work satisfyingly in most cases, on the iPad, however, it is a complete and utter failure, an abomination to the eyes. The saddest thing is now that the iBook reader is also available on the iPhone/iPod touch, things get even worse. Now we have even less screen real estate and justified text. It really looks like a bad joke to typographers.
Rearing an ugly face?
Apple has been accused to be “style over substance” in the past, and I always couldn’t disagree more. It was their craving for functional design, their scrupulous way of getting every detail just right that made the products good looking and well working—a pleasure to use. It was always form following function.
But now I am more than concerned about how Apple’s software and hardware is showing ever more ignorance of usability, and the preference of gimmicks over substance. Let’s take their trackpads on the MacBooks for example. Up until the Aluminium MacBooks they were excellent. Two-finger scrolling was extremely usable and also the two-finger-right-click was ergonomically better than using any two button atrocity combined with a trackpad (after all your thumb does the clicking there usually). But the new gesture enabled trackpads are just a badly implemented gimmick. The gestures (coming from iOS) really only make sense on a touchscreen. Now that the mouse button is gone, every second time I try to do a two-finger-right-click it gets misinterpreted as a pinch and I’m resizing fonts in Safari. That’s why I still own an “old” Aluminium MacBook. I can’t stand the unibody machines for that. For graphics work I still prefer the mouse, but when I’m on the go or I’m just typing I do not want to have to switch to a mouse just to be able to use the damn thing.
I find it even more ironic that Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort into Web and on-screen typography in recent years; to be honest Apple probably should have licensed some of the screen optimised fonts from Microsoft for the iPad and also should have stopped using Helvetica for the system font. I don’t know who’s decision it was when NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X, to change the system font from Helvetica to Lucida Grande. But it was the right one.
Even with the higher density of iPhones and iPads, Helvetica is never the right choice for base text be it on or off screen. I am planning an article on Helvetica in the future, for now let me just close the article by quoting a few famous designers & typographers to back up my claims.
Most people who use Helvetica use it because it’s ubiquitous. It’s like going to McDonalds instead of thinking about food. Because it’s there, it’s on every street corner. So let’s eat crap, because it’s on the corner.
— Erik Spiekermann
If you have no intuitive sense of design, then call yourself an “information architect” and only use Helvetica.
— David Carson
Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces.
— Wolfgang Weingart
1 Command Line Interface, such as DOS or UNIX shells (bash, csh, etc.)
2 Raster Image Processors. Computers that take the output from one graphic or DTP programme and produce a high-resolution rasterised image for film exposure and printing plate production.
posted on:
Jun 4, 2010 @ 12:54
filed under:
english, design & typography
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Your thoughts?
The lack of automatic hyphenation is notorius for all major rendering engines (be it browsers or iBooks) at the time being, afaik.
I don’t know what is holding them back, maybe support for enough different languages. Or it’s just not very high on the priority list.
At least Eucalyptus seems to get it right.
I could never really understand why people would want to use Helvetica (or even Futura) for body copy.
It is a difficult matter. Even QuarkXPress (a pro application for layout and print) never got the hyphenation in German quite right. Too many exceptions, so how could a browser handle all Languages?
Gets even worse in Japanese, where in there is no hyphenation in that sense at all, but tons of rules for where to and where not to put line breaks.
That’s why I say just DO NOT justify text in browsers, it will always look ugly and hard to read. Ragged right is just fine.
I don’t think it is necessary to achieve 100% accuracy.
Most importantly it should not produce wrong hyphenation. If this is a given, the results would be a leap form the current situation even if the engine only finds about 90% of the possible hyphens. See here
Quark uses a dictionary based approach. So they are highly dependent on a good dictionary. (InDesign has the same problems e.g. in Swiss German)
Languages that have a different structure (like Japanese) definitely need a different treatment. But this is a problem on its own. (Together with top to bottom text-flow or furigana) Don’t know how japanese websites handle this today.
It’s true that at this time justified text is just not usable in browsers (or on the iPad). Still it doesn’t stop me from wishing for it. Just like with real web-fonts it would be one more step towards richer typography on the web.
Furigana and vertical Text is not supported natively by any operating system AFAIK (except for BTron, maybe?). Implementations for this are always done on a per application basis and thusly rather inconsistent. But vertical text is really something I’d rather not want to have to worry about in a Web browser.
That hyphenator.js engine seems quite impressive. Does it also respect typographical peculiarities like not putting more than three hyphenations in a row etc.?
Of course for Apple to use something like this in an application always would put them in the almost unsolvable position to have the engine make decisions about the language of the text and how to hyphenate based on that information. As soon as you get a multi-language text you’re screwed again…
Yes, that’s true. Vertical text would complicate matters in a way which was barely manageable anymore.
But I don’t have any experience in this area, maybe someone comes up with a good solution one day.
Concerning furigana, there seems to be a proposal for ruby-text in the HTML5-Spec.
From a short test it seems that the script does allow more than three hyphens in a row at the moment. Another problem are widow lines containing only a single word which is being hyphenated. (Resulting in a line consisting of only a few letters). But still, these are complaints which seem not that complicated to fix.
The decision about the language is indeed one of the challenges. On the web it seems solvable with something like the lang-Attribute. (e.g. lang=“de”).
Interestingly Apple introduced a language detection feature with OS 10.6. The system-wide spell checker detects different languages on a per line basis. (works e.g. in Safari or TextEdit)
It’s still a little slow, but on the other hand mixed-language text isn’t too frequent after all.
But Furigana are already possible with XHTML. Actually, Internet Explorer displays it by default. For Firefox, there is a plugin (I don’t know for other browsers).
You can check at aozora bunko. They have many old texts with Furigana.
But I don’t share the problem about vertical text. Why shouldn’t it be possible? If the web designer would just select it and then adjust the design accordingly – I don’t see where it would be different to writing horizontally.
Of course, maybe because most of the browsers do not support it, the web designer always has to create two version.
But I really think, that would be nice. As far as I know, CSS3 has a option to define the text direction. Then you can just write tb-rl to get top to bottom, right to left (or e.g. tb-lr for Mongolian).
If you have horizontal text you usually have a fixed width of the text (to control the line length) and a variable height, now I have no idea whether any future version of CSS could handle having a fixed height of a block element, but a variable width.
Not to forget that you’d have to scroll from right to left to keep reading (as opposed to from top to bottom with horizontal text).
AFAIK CSS can’t deal with that yet. It just sounds like too much hassle considering that there’s no readability problem with Japanese written horizontally to start with.