Rendering text is only a small part of typography. A significant part, sure, but not all of it by far.

For your consideration, this is the manual for KOMA-Script: https://mirror.las.iastate.edu/tex-archive/macros/latex/cont...

That's 552 pages worth of typography that only considers page layouting. It doesn't deal with fonts or kerning at all. It's actually a fun read even if just for the author's occasional frustration with how often laymen confidently ignore centuries-old typography rules that exists for a reason.

wow! the KOMA-script documentation must be the most unreadable LaTeX document I've ever seen

- no margin on the binding side

- silly colors everywhere

- mixes normal and reverse text for no reason

- uses german typographical conventions but the text is in english

- extreme abuse of monospace italics

- mixed serif/sans/monospace/boldface on every page

- nonstandard paper size (18x21 cm)

All of this could be expected, and not too worrying, for a text about any subject, except a fucking document about page layout!

The online and the book versions are different w.r.t. margins, colors etc.

The online version highlights everything you can click and has tiny margins to avoid on-screen whitespace.

Tiny margins... but only on one side. Because it still has weird version labels in the left margin, so it all looks asymetrical. Whyyy!

> The online version highlights everything you can click and has tiny margins to avoid on-screen whitespace.

This is ridiculously condescending... everybody is able to zoom-in with their pdf viewer.

What about this is condescending?

I suppose he wants to sell his book, which is probably formatted for printing. And German only.

https://www.amazon.de/KOMA-Script-Sammlung-Klassen-Paketen-L...

Being very interested in typography, I would like to buy this book. But the online pdf version sends the wrong message to me.

The context for the discussion is browser rendering for variable sized screens and user interaction in mind. Centuries-old typography rules can't be applied directly for screens.

For paper documents you can already do Markup -> LatTeX -> pdf for good quality documents.

> Centuries-old typography rules can't be applied directly for screens.

Some of it, certainly not.

A (larger IMHO) part of typography wisdom has really been distilled from experience making text easier and prettier to read over generations, and should not be thrown away lightheartedly because "screen is different from paper". Yes it is, but human eyes and brain are the same ;-)

Human eyes and brains don't necessarily treat screen the same way they treat read paper.

I am now more tempted to and also more scared of LaTex than ever before.

Does it say anywhere in that manual why the right margin is supposed to be so narrow? I find it very uncomfortable to read texts with very narrow margins.

A) LaTeX is a library for laying out papers and common text memes. It’s not actually necessary at all. You would want to use TeX, which refers to the actual rendering engine.

B) converting layout with css to Tex sounds like an absolute nightmare compared to just implementing proper word, line, paragraph, and page flowing/breaking in the browser. In fact, HTML is pretty opposed to page breaking at all, which is arguably a forte of TeX.

Funnily enough, the Closure web browser, implemented in Common Lisp, had (it's no longer actively developed) a TeX-like paragraph formatting algorithm. The results were great.

src/renderer/texpara.lisp in https://github.com/dym/closure

It’s opposite from what i feel. On one hand hand I suffer from seeing all the PDFs or papers with poor MS Office type set.

But when it comes to the web I feel like people spend too much time (and waste my resources) to arrive at a perfect layout. There I would prefer a simple robust layout that renders well on all devices and resolutions.