licentious radio

Thursday, August 1, 2002
[12:44:00 PM]

Licentious Radio is proud to announce our new Typography channel. In addition to commentary here, check out draft essays at my other website:
Typography Manifesto
Type Boom

And more explicitly web-oriented:
Web Typography
Link text usability
Print Stylesheets: the Wrong Approach
Using Cascading Stylesheets

Note that the Cascading Stylesheets essays fill some details missing from Web Typography, which is a rather old essay.

[9:41:34 AM]

The classic post that made licentious radio the media giant it is today:

CSS tip: Make your blog easier to read! The single best thing you can do with stylesheets is to add a little extra space between your lines of text.

The simplest approach: put a <div> with the style information around the content part of your template. Radio inserts the body of the page at the <%bodytext%> macro. So adding this to your Radio template (Click on Preferences, then Main template) would look something like:

<div style='line-height: 1.5'>

<p><%bodytext%></p>

</div>

What number should you use for the line-height? 1.5 is good for rather long lines. 1.2 is good for rather short lines.

This works in new browsers that support stylesheets. Browsers that don't know about stylesheets will just ignore it. Stylesheets are something of a problem for Netscape 4, but line-height works pretty well (as long as you use a relative measure like '1.5').

[9:15:02 AM]
MacEdition on Apple's latest screw-up with font rendering....