The Return to the Classics
Pablo Rosell-González
Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM
pablo@ciencias.unam.mx
Sunday July 20, 2003
When did width margins in a page become less important than having a
small number of pages in a book? We have been inundated by bad printed
material since most of the publishers are now more interested in
getting as much profit as possible, leaving the art of publishing
aside. The premise of book designers should be to create not only
attractive printed material but to provide a pleasant reading.
There are quite a few examples of designs that are now considered
classics because they have prove themselves to be aesthetically
incomparable. These designs include
- Ternary canon:
- 2:3 page proportions where the height of the
typographic box is equal to the width of the page, the left margin is
half the right margin and the top margin is half the bottom margin.
- Gutenberg's Göttingen bible:
- same as above but in two columns
with a width column separation.
- Universal Scaling:
- the page is created when the user defines a
unit box and the design takes multiples of three times the unit box;
the left margin is the unit's box width, the top margin is the
unit's box height, and the right and bottom margins are twice the
unit's box width and height respectively.
- Diagonal and double diagonal methods:
- the page dimensions and
the left margin are provided by the user and all the other elements
are defined in terms of either a diagonal or using both diagonals.
- ISO 216:
- the typographic box is sized either A5 or A6
depending on the choice of A4 or A5 paper size, and the left and top
margins are half the right and bottom margins respectively.
- 2-3-4-6 system:
- page dimensions and the margin unit are
defined by the user; and the typographic box is adapted to
have two, three, four, and six times the margin unit as left, top,
right and bottom margins respectively.
In this paper I am going to present classics, my brand new
class that allows the user to typeset camera-ready books
using any of the afore-mentioned designs.
This class uses the calc and geometry packages
to create the design, and crop to generate the
crop marks.
If classics is used with Hŕn Thę´ Thŕnh's microtypographic extensions, the user
will get state of the art printed material. Let's recover centuries
of publishing tradition!
Wendy McKay
2003-12-20
