[scribus] Page construction - Part deux

[John Culleton]

On Tuesday 28 July 2009 11:12:54 pm jwminer at accessvt.com wrote:
> Jean B. wrote:
> > Thank you for your answers on the first thread. And Greg,
> > although you already know that - you are right. I thought some
> > more about the Gutenberg's initial design and the space is
> > excessive. Not because today's standards or economic
> > constraints, but because that book was intended to receive
> > annotations. So for the time being I have chosen 2:3:4:6cm
> > space on a two-fold on A4 paper.
> >
> > The next question is if it is ok a two column design on a A4
> > page. From what I gather is quite seldom used. But it's that
> > unusual look which I find rather interesting. It does fit about
> > 48 characters per column line (not counting the space - is this
> > how it's supposed to be counted?) and justified text leads to
> > some rivers in texts.
>
> The character count per line does include spaces. Let your eye be
> the judge.
> --Judy M.

Following Bringhurst, I make a dummy document using the same font at 
the same point size. Using a large enough line width I type a line 
of 65 characters with no spaces 
consisting of a-z, a-z, a-m, with no spaces. I print that out and 
measurre it.  That gives me the "ideal" line measure.  I can then 
either reduce point size or play with the measure.  Since it is one 
long string with no spaces there is no distortion because of
word spacing. 

Anything from about 45 to 85 is OK.

I do all this in plain pdftex because it is simple. But it could be 
done in Scribus just as well.    
-- 
John Culleton
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