Typographic manual (PDF)

Typography is language and design for reading. Typographic manual is the first manual for the cluster text style, i.e. for texts intended to be read for longer periods of time. Since the birth of typography (Gutenberg), we have created books with text rectangles that are nice to look at. The picture of the rectangle text held us captive. This manual clearly shows the inaccuracies in that approach.

Depending on how we read, 100-600 wpm, and if we measure reading speed in wpm, day span, or week span, the cluster text style can be 5-30 percent better to read. Its longer line length, wider text column, larger sentence spacings, and better line changes improve legibility. All in all, this gives an exact typographic style, and therefore, it is not reflowable. So, please note that this book needs to be read on tablets at least 13 inches wide where you can read a line length of 95 characters (smaller tablets and smartphones are inappropriate).

Typographic Manual (170 pages) is included in a collection of books with Readability - the Birth of the Cluster text (1000 pages), Typographical Investigations (500 pages), and Are Texts Wrongly Written? (130 pages) intended to shed light on questions about texts, typography, and reading in relation to questions about philosophy, science, and learning. The two shorter books can be seen as summaries of the two longer ones, and they are all written for the general public. The starting point is that it is both practically and philosophically interesting that we earlier have missed the opportunity to create a better typographic style - a cluster text style.