Printing Should Be Invisible Not Be Irritating

In “Printing Should Be Invisible,” Beatrice Warde likened good typography to a crystal, rather than gold, wine goblet. The crystal goblet, she argued, is better because “everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing that it was meant to contain.” As the manuals many of us produce tend more to the prosaic than the beautiful, this talk aims for the lower bar that printing (formatting) should not be irritating. A whirlwind tour of aspects of formatting from styling tables of contents to formatting indexes, this talk covers ways that the styling can aid rather than impede the comprehension of the text.