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Topos Uranos
English

Formatting with meaning

Summary

This lesson teaches how to format text by saying what each passage is rather than how it should look. It distinguishes logical markup from visual markup and explains why the difference decides the fate of a long document; it presents emphasis with \emph and its behaviour when nested, the commands that change the family, the series and the shape of the type, with their declaration forms, and the sizes, which exist only as declarations; it shows why it pays to define one's own commands that name functions; it goes through the three lists of LaTeX, their nesting and the enumitem package; it distinguishes the alignment environments from their declarations; and it ends with what is best avoided: spacing by hand, faking headings with bold type and underlining.

Learning objectives

  1. Distinguish logical from visual markup and justify, in a long document, the preference for the former.
  2. Predict the result of nested font commands, in their argument form and in their declaration form, including nested emphasis and sizes.
  3. Choose between numbered, bulleted and description lists, nest them, and adjust their labels, spacing and numbering with enumitem.
  4. Align a passage with the appropriate environment or declaration, explaining why an alignment declaration must include the end of the paragraph.
  5. Recognize in a source the visual markup that should be replaced (manual spaces, bold headings, underlining) and rewrite it according to its function.

Mark the meaning, not the appearance

One and the same appearance can serve very different functions. In an essay, italics mark at once an emphasized word, the title of a book, a Latin expression and the scientific name of a species; in a manual, bold type marks a term being defined and, at times, a heading. Whoever writes the italics directly practises visual markup: they say how the passage looks. Whoever writes that the passage is an emphasis, the title of a work or a term practises logical markup: they say what it is, and let a single decision, taken elsewhere, fix how it looks.

The difference is hardly noticeable on one page; in a two-hundred-page thesis it is decisive. Suppose a journal requires species names in italics but titles of works in quotation marks. If the author wrote \textit for both, they must go through hundreds of passages one by one and decide in each case which is which, at the risk of getting some wrong. If they wrote a different command for each function, changing one line of the preamble is enough. Hence the rule of this lesson: every formatting mark must answer to a function of the text, and visual commands are kept for defining those functions or for isolated cases that do not recur.