💾 Archived View for crynick.ru › typography-rules.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:35:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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My typography rules set for creating readable, fancy gempages.
One of the most attracting thing in gemini protocol for me is that the way how content are displayed is controlled not by authors but by clients. That makes all capsules looks in one style and gives me as a reader controll to make it more appropriate for me. But another great thing is that authors still have opportunity to make their text more readable and beatiful by putting a gemtext headers, adding a capsule map and etc. Although gemtext by design very limited it is really important to create a clean, fancy typography rules for implementation in your capsule. So, that page is dedicated to describe my vision how to do it and I will implement it in all my gempages. It can be changed by time when I will receive more expirience in practical implementation.
First of all, let's describe main goals -
Because of the nature of gemeni protocol it's important to test typography rules in different clients, at least two-three most well-known. I will keep in mind three clients which I use -
Lagrange by default have additional decoration for first paragraph and, although I prefer to disable it because sometimes it makes whole test harder to read, as author I will use it for structuring pages. I would use first paragraph as a one-sentence description of the whole page to make the reader decide whether he want to read it or not. If those decorations is disabled in lagrange or reader using another client it still will look good and easy-to-understand.
For my expirience, sometimes you get lost and forget in which domain you are currently are, especially when url is extremely longand hard to read. To avoid that problem all gempages should have "Author: Crynick" row with a link to index page of a capsule. Therefore, after they read description they can go to main page if they decided to not read it. It better than just put 'go to index' text on link because you have to click on it to understand who is a author.
As for headings, I think authors should use them carefuly, because it looks bad when there is a lot of headings with little amount of text. So, we should try to split text on relatively big parts of text and if page contains not so much text then we just don't need them on it. I will use only secong-level headings '##'.
For example, I could split that page in sections like 'Introduction', 'Goals', 'Clients', 'Description', 'Headings', etc. But it completely pointless since there is no such a lot of rows in those sections and the reader can navigate throught text without it.
All links should be as more verbose as possible - to provide as more details as possible in one sentence. We need it to give the reader understanding of what is hiding behind it. If we talk about links to the gemtext that would be a good idea to make link text match the description in a 1st paragraph of that text.
For example, bad link description:
And a good one:
As for links to the media it should be even more verbose! It should not only provide to the reader understanding of a content, but even replace it, make it unnececary to download, enough to just imagine it.
For example, compare:
It also extremely important to always note how many disk space it used.
It just a draft for now, I will updating it and fix typos and grammar mistakes.
