Piggin's Library of Latin Diagrams
Presentation Rules
This style guide is all about how visual browsers can display different genres of text for the greatest readability. Its focus is on the architecture of information, and useful ways to categorize and label it as early as possible when building a site.
The emphasis here is on the macro-typography, the sort of thing that people who code HTML call "block-level" content, such as paragraphs, lists, tables and headings, but some attention will also be paid to micro-typography.
The distinction between micro- and macro-typography was popularized by the book designer Jost Hochuli and is now a commonplace in the German-speaking countries. Whereas micro-typography involves lettering— designing, choosing and mixing fonts, spacing letters and punctuating words— macro-typography is the business of laying out bodies of text in logical and pleasing patterns: distributing blank space, choosing colours and conveying meaning by proper arrangement.
We rarely give thought to the role of presentation as a conveyor of meaning, yet we expect in almost every act of reading that certain rules will be respected: that paragraphs will group together ideas; that a change of speaker in a dialogue will be marked by starting on a new line; that items in a list will be logically parallel to one another.
We see and draw meaning from presentation before our eyes can even resolve the individual words. Cast onto a table, a letter is usually recognizable from 10 metres away for what it is: the salutation and signature have a certain standard location, and when we pick up the letter in our hands, they provide the entry points with which we usually begin: to whom? from whom?
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Introduction Poetry Footnotes Glosses Deeds History
Antiquity
- The Great Stemma, circa 400
- Boethius's Porphyrian Tree, circa 520
- The Stemmata of Cassiodorus, circa 562
- Isidore, before 636
- Vatican Mappamundi, circa 760
- Albi Mappamundi, circa 770
Medieval
- Stemmata
- Graphic: The Stemma of Cunigunde (> 1002)
- Graphic: Real-Life Demonstration of Consanguinity (1043)
- Graphic: Amiatinus Stemma (circa 1050)
- Graphic: Lambert's Stemma (< 1122)
- Graphic: The Stemma of Hildebrand and the Property of Isola (> 1144)
- Table: Petrus Pictaviensis and his Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi (ca. 1185) (with links to facsimiles)
Aftermatter
- Glossary
- Further Reading
- Published Stemmata
- Index of the 473 Images in Murdoch's Album
- Archived Versions of Selected Site Pages
Discussion and Blog