[HN Gopher] Typography for Lawyers, 2nd Edition (2018)
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Typography for Lawyers, 2nd Edition (2018)
Author : notpushkin
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-11-07 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (typographyforlawyers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (typographyforlawyers.com)
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| The author is also one of the lawyers bringing suit against
| (Microsoft) Github Copilot.[2]
|
| [2]https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
| kderbyma wrote:
| I cofounded a company years ago with a bunch of people around the
| core concept of 'Legal is Code'. Had a falling out with my
| cofounders but the company is still going.
| jamesliudotcc wrote:
| Matthew Butterick is also the author of Beautiful Racket
| https://beautifulracket.com/ and several fonts
| https://practicaltypography.com/mb-fonts.html.
|
| As an ex-lawyer turned coder and one-time type setter for a
| school paper, I can only marvel at his accomplishments.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| I found the most interesting section to be on the copyright
| status of fonts: https://typographyforlawyers.com/the-copyright-
| status-of-fon...
|
| It describes how there is some debate as to whether or not fonts
| can be copyrighted, and it ends with:
|
| > Fonts are digital files, and like every other digital file, the
| internet will happily provide you a free copy. Yet the font
| business--completely opposite to the music business in this
| regard--has continued to grow and thrive in the internet era.
| Therefore, the font business must be based on something closer to
| the honor system. It remains an unusual counterexample to the
| idea that digital rights management and litigation are
| indispensable tools in intellectual-property economies.
| stuntkite wrote:
| One time I cofounded a legal deposition application that would
| compile transcripts and exhibits for submissions to the court. We
| also did auto transcription and time stamping. It was this whole
| thing and is gone now.
|
| Anyway, The submission requirements vary WILDLY region to region.
| The typography and margin constraints as well as occasional weird
| other features like in one county (parish?) in Louisiana it had
| to be filed bound with a yellow ribbon or something like that.
|
| How much time I spent with weird minutia of legal typesetting,
| this book seems like a great and interesting read.
| sosull wrote:
| I've spent years admiring his work as a type designer. It's
| vexing work to create a serif that's versatile enough to compete
| with the simplicity and legibility of standard office-type fonts.
| I think he pulled the rabbit out of the hat with the Equity font.
| It's intended for lawyers, IANAL, but it's genuinely useful in a
| much bigger mixture of situations.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| I'm sure the information in this article is close to canon, as
| the usual suspects of fonts get mentioned and from the start they
| seem to be hitting the basics...
|
| However, for a self prophesied typography article on the web when
| viewed on a mobile device this is humorously unbearable to look
| at.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| This is where I learned some of the fundamentals of Typography.
| I'm a design engineer by trade.
|
| Highly recommend.
| tiahura wrote:
| This lawyer says "bleh."
|
| Two spaces after a sentence make paragraphs easier to parse.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Two spaces after a sentence make paragraphs easier to
| parse._
|
| Correct. Most readers of any legal document have zero interest
| in sipping and savoring each word as if the document were a
| fine wine. Readers want to learn -- as quickly as possible --
| "what do I need to care about," and then move on to the next
| item on their to-do lists. Two spaces after a sentence help the
| reader do that (as do short, single-subject paragraphs).
| philderbeast wrote:
| sounds like your stuck in the past, two spaces after a
| paragraph has been a dead convention for years by this point.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _two spaces after a paragraph has been a dead convention
| for years by this point._
|
| It's "a dead convention" among people who care about the
| aesthetic pleasure that they get from the visual beauty of
| the paragraph and who don't like the "ugliness" of the extra
| spacing.
|
| People who care more about serving the reader are less
| dogmatic about two spaces after a sentence, and even prefer
| it for legal documents, because two spaces makes it easier
| for a skimmer to jump from sentence to sentence.
| Blahah wrote:
| That's a styling issue, not to be solved by typing two
| spaces unless you're using a typewriter. Just adjust the
| size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is
| rendered for the reader (in a word processor for example).
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Just adjust the size of a space to the appropriate
| size_
|
| That would work IF the rendering engine knew it was
| supposed to use a horizontally-larger space at the end of
| a sentence (comparable to the CSS styling element
| "padding-right"). A uniformly-larger space would defeat
| the purpose, namely to make it easier to spot the end of
| the sentence through the extra space after it.
| leni536 wrote:
| LaTeX renders slightly longer space between sentences by
| default. You need to put "\ " after a dot that is not an
| end of a sentence to have a normal space there.
| dctoedt wrote:
| Relatively-few lawyers even know what LaTeX is, let alone
| would be willing to use it for drafting documents for
| client use.
|
| (At a family reunion a few years ago, I was discussing a
| book-in-progress with an extended-family member, who at
| the time was an exec in a very-large Silicon Valley tech
| company. He was astonished when I mentioned I was using
| LaTeX, via emacs org-mode, for the manuscript.)
|
| And MS Word is ubiquitously used for contracts and other
| documents that get circulated for revision, because of
| Word's redlining- and commenting features. It's a network
| effect: "Everyone" uses Microsoft Word because "everyone
| else" uses Microsoft Word.
| wnoise wrote:
| Even though it is a styling issue (I want about 1.5), you
| still need to distinguish the cases to the renderer. If
| you want different intersentence spacing than interword
| spacing, you can't just check for the presence of a
| period -- the rendered versions of abbreviations like
| "Mr.", "etc.", etc. need to not have two spaces after
| them. You either need a whole lot of exceptions built-in
| (which still fails for sentence that end with
| abbreviations), or to somehow mark the difference.
| Multiple spaces is still a nice source convention,
| because it's minimal and shows up approximately
| correctly.
|
| (LaTeX does do simple finding of periods to support
| different interword and intersentence spacing. The
| recommendation is to use ~ after abbreviations; as a non-
| breaking space it also keeps Mr.~Whatsisname from
| appearing on two lines.)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > That's a styling issue, not to be solved by typing two
| spaces unless you're using a typewriter. Just adjust the
| size of a space to the appropriate size when the text is
| rendered for the reader (in a word processor for
| example).
|
| Except that advice is _way_ less accessible and has a
| fairly high cost-benefit ratio:
|
| * Typing two spaces after a sentence: something everyone
| who can type already understands.
|
| * "[A]djust[ing] the size of a space to the appropriate
| size when the text is rendered for the reader (in a word
| processor for example)": something only a tiny fraction
| know how do do, and even fewer are comfortable with. It's
| likely some unintuitive UI that is nonstandard, and that
| has even been changed at points between different
| versions of the same Word Processor.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| It's clearly not a dead convention in the legal sector, given
| that you have heard from numerous lawyers who use it. I am
| one such lawyer - it is part of my firm's style guide.
| nathell wrote:
| I just noticed that it overlaps with ,,Practical Typography"
| (https://practicaltypography.com/) to a large extent. So much so
| that I'd consider them two flavours of the same book, rather than
| two separate ones.
|
| Also, if you liked the book and feel that you got value out of
| it, please pay for it - if only to support the experiment in Web
| self-publishing that it is. I've procrastinated it for far too
| long, but finally bit the bullet, and touched on it here:
| https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/09/24/paying-for-books/
| hkhanna wrote:
| My company, Magistrate [0], has elements that are heavily
| inspired by this book!
|
| Legal documents should be written in plain text, not Microsoft
| Word. Then, typographical conventions from books like this one
| can be enforced at the editor level with linters and
| autoformatters.
|
| Lawyers spend way too much time and money on formatting Microsoft
| Word documents. How much unnecessary effort could be saved if we
| had black (the python package) for legal documents?
| Uncompromising formatting and typography for legal documents
| would go along way to eliminating the bikeshedding that lawyers
| do around useless formatting.
|
| If this is the kind of thing that interests you, please reach
| out!
|
| [0] https://getmagistrate.com/
| bavila wrote:
| Have you found it to be problematic that some (perhaps many)
| lawyers like bikeshedding in Word, as it gives them an excuse
| to pad their billable hours?
| hkhanna wrote:
| Only to the extent we market to folks who bill by the hour.
| But there are lots of people who work with legal documents
| who don't bill by the hour, and that's the target market for
| now.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| black but for prose would be Vale, https://github.com/errata-
| ai/vale
| kemitchell wrote:
| I did https://commonform.github.io/.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm certainly not a fan of Word and only use it when I have no
| other choice, but while the OP is specifically about typography
| I wonder about the lack of (that I could see) discussion of
| revision tracking and other word processor features that seem
| to be pretty important in a legal context. (And specifically in
| a legal context where Word seems to be pretty much the
| standard.)
| bitwize wrote:
| Legal typography is persnickety and its own kind of weird. There
| are courts in the USA that have _very_ specific rules, including
| odd paper dimensions and font sizes, that need to be observed
| when filing with them. To my knowledge these serve mainly as
| brown M &M clauses to ensure that the lawyers filing in these
| courts are paying attention.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Why do the headings not start with capital letters?
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