Wednesday August 08, 2007

Free the fonts! Free the colors!

I've been reading Winston Churchill's magnificent history of the First World War, and I noticed that in one of the chapters he uses a seemingly archaic stylistic device -- he capitalizes important words, as in "And behind smoke lay a more baleful development -- Poisonous Smoke: smoke that would not only obstruct the vision, but destroy the eye...."  For those of us admonished by 20th-century grammar school teachers to only capitalize proper nouns (names) this is anathema, but perhaps something has been lost by enforcing such an austere style.

In the eighteenth century, great prose stylists used capitals freely: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Is it "right" to use typography as a stylistic device in literature? One of the few examples of this that still seems to be within bounds is to use italics for emphasis, though magazines like Cosmopolitan are often derided for overdoing it.

All the other arts eagerly embrace technology. The invention of oil-based pigments revolutionized painting. The computer and video transformed filmmaking. And note that these technologies were not used to do the same old thing more efficiently, but to create wonderful new effects that had hitherto not been possible. Computerized typesetting now gives us the power to use hundreds of different fonts in the same document, if we so choose, or to print text in multiple colors. Why shouldn't we? Is there some purity of plain text that makes prose more "artistic," and that must be preserved at all costs? Is it something about our era that abhors decoration? We now believe that those revered, pure white marble statues of the ancient Greeks were actually painted in their day, so it seems clear that the æsthetic of purity is something that evolved in the West in our own era, not something timeless. Closer to our own time, the monks of the Middle Ages illuminated their manuscipts with colored inks and gold leaf, and used wonderful stylistic devices like ligatures.

The invention of movable type, and later machine typesetting, made possible the explosion in publishing that underpins our civilization, but also destroyed the use of most typographical enhancement in literature. With the advent of the computer, encoding systems like ASCII, with their very limited character sets, reduced the possibilities even further.

But the computer long ago gave enhanced typography back to us. TeX has existed since the late seventies. Why do we insist that only black and white, single-font type may be used for serious literature? It's not due to an economic or technical constraint: pick up any magazine and you'll see black and white text set next to garish color advertisements.

It seems clear then that our insistence on plain text is purely æsthetic. But this may be slowly changing. A serious novel, Gould's Book of Fish, uses the device of printing each chapter in a different color to reflect the different fluids that its prisoner narrator is forced to write with, for instance. As we do more and more of our news and information reading from screens, where hyperlinks are colored and underlined, and all kinds of embedded hypermedia objects are considered perfectly acceptable, perhaps our own internal æsthetic view of what literature should look like will change.

Update: Now that I view my own text as published, I see that most of my embedded experiments with colors and different fonts didn't come thorough. Gaah! We artists are always being thwarted.