General ⇒ LateX Design Principles

[bkh]

Hi Community,

Is there somewhere I can read about the design & layout principles of Latex? - Im looking for the general guiding principles for size-ratios, positioning, linespacing and the like. Im interested in how Latex has architectured this and the thought process behind it, as well as what guides the development of it.

Thank you for your help!

/Bo

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Bo,

welcome to the forum!

A quick opinion by me and a few recommendations.

Design and Layout of base LaTeX itself is perhaps not a strong point, regarding text/margin ratios (page typography) and micro typography (fonts, spacing etc.). It provided a set of options for customizing such things (paper size, margin commands, a few base font sizes and derived sizes), but the defaults with LaTeX 2.09 are somehow chosen like what was ok in the US at that time, when it was invented nearly 40 years ago and updated like 30 years ago as LaTeX2e and then the default design did not change anymore. There were considerations regarding the placement of figures and tables, page filling, balancing, and paragraph justification. The best would be reading the book by Leslie Lamport, who invented it, because it followed his thoughts. I just would not expect much about design.

But, luckily, a lot of LaTeX classes and packages appeared since then, some come with excellent design texts. For example:

• The koma-script manual has a great section about page design, size-ratios.
• The memdesign manual explains much about book design.
• The booktabs package talks about table design.
• The microtype package talks about micro-typography on font and character level.

So, LaTeX is great regarding modern design, it's just the modern packages and not the base LaTeX.

Stefan

[bkh]

Thanks a lot for you in-debt answer Stefan! I will dive into the excellent links you have posted.

I always thought Latex with default settings looked beautiful, and assumed a lot of thought went into it, but possibly it is "just" typography standards.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

I always thought Latex with default settings looked beautiful, and assumed a lot of thought went into it

That's true, especially regarding math typesetting (that's perfectly valid today), I just meant today we have some excellent additions.

Stefan