Friday, December 30, 2005

Another help system teaser

5 comments:

Keith Gaughan said...

Slava, you really need to add leading to its text.

Slava Pestov said...

Can you elaborate? I know nothing about typography, having cargo-culted the text rendering by arranging the code so that it somewhat resembles what SDL_ttf does.

Anonymous said...

leading would be "gaps between lines" (derived from lead strips put between lines on a mechanical typesetter, so the 'lead' is pronounced like the metal, with a short 'e').

Basically, he's asking for a little whitespace padding surrounding the subsections so they don't make a jumbled mess bumping up against each other. Just a few pixels can make a big difference.

Keith Gaughan said...

What our anonymous hero wrote.

A good amount of leading would be approximately 20-30% of the height of one line, so if you had 12pt text, an appropriate line height would be approximately 15-16pt.

Keith Gaughan said...

I highly recommend the book The Elements of Typographic Style, if you want a good guide.