request for recs

[kaberett]

I'm not going to get to them in the near future, and also I am extremely aware that this is a very large topic, but for some reason (... the same reason I'm currently limited in my ability to take in new information...) I am currently thinking a lot about page layout and font choice and scientific illustration and all that sort of thing, so: do you have any favourite resources on the topic?

(Also: I am totally failing to scrape together the brain to hunt down guidance on Best Practice when it comes to choice of font size for data tables in long documents, but if you have thoughts on that and the extent to which just throwing my hands up and setting everything to \scriptsize I would be very grateful in a much more immediate sense.)

Comments

[alexwlchan]

Board a scholarly train at your nearest port, spend fifteen years travelling the islands of the railsea, gather samples of typography from different cultures, and use those to inform the way.

…

You don't have fifteen years? Okay, the sparknotes version:

* I like Typography for Lawyers, for both lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Lots of sensible advice. It's aimed more at people using word processors – you get a lot of this for "free" if you're using LaTeX – but dive into any headings you think look interesting.

* I'm a big fan of the booktabs package for doing tables in LaTeX (e.g. Better LaTeX Tables with Booktabs), and siunitx for doing proper spacing with units.

* Font size in tables: bigger is generally preferable, but that's not always easy on A4 – many columns don't go into a narrow, portrait-sized space. My escape hatch for this is to use the lscape package, put the table on a separate page, and trade height for width. Whether that's useful will depend on the shape of your tables.

[kaberett]

Ooh. I already had booktabs but did not know about siunitx, and that seems like something I can probably drop in right away.

I did, after asking this question, spend some time looking at the professionally typeset versions of my papers, and convinced myself that in fact the professionals force smaller font sizes on table contents with sufficient regularity that I don't need to feel too terrible about doing it.

Thank you lots for other link. <3