Pearls before machines
After being sick for almost a week now, I’ve decided to start doing homework so that I’ll be caught up when I finally do get better. For my History of the Book class, we’ve started reading Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which is an amazing book. No typographer should be without it.
And on page 42, I came across this: “No typesetting software should be permitted to compress, expand or letterspace the text automatically and arbitrarily as a means of fitting the copy. Copyfitting problems should be solved by creative design, not fobbed off on the reader and the text nor cast like pearls before machines.” Them’s strong words, there. 
And I agree. Yesterday when I wrote that auto-PDF post, I originally was dead-set against it and was going to write about why human-crafted is better. But something got the better of me. That something is now gone (whatever it was), and I won’t be casting my lot with any automatically generated PDF crowd any time soon. Book design is an art.
