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Colophon

The base font for this page is Trebuchet MS, a free font from Microsoft designed for on-screen readability at small point sizes. The headlines are 32 pt Times bold italic, combining elegance, classical proportions, and compactness.

The logo is variation on the original logo from Aldus PageMaker and depicts Aldus Manutius, a student of Johannes Gutenberg and inventor of italics. This is to echo the roots of desktop publishing, both in the 1450s and the 1980s. The logo uses Courier from ITC to evoke the feel of metal type and Poetica from Adobe Systems to evoke the era of hand lettering.

Made on a Macintosh using Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia DreamWeaver.

Alternating Styles to Simulate “Green Bar” Paper

by Jim Dornbos and Peter C.S. Adams

"In order to make the rows easier to distinguish, I would like print them with what looks like the old green-bar paper. I can do this by drawing a box around every other row, shading the box, and setting the box lines to "none." This method is more than a little labor-intensive, however. Anybody have a better suggestion?"

Some paragraphs will have a green background.

Some will have a white background.

All automatically!

Great for setting lists, columns of numbers, etc....

Because the shading helps the reader tell the lines apart.

It will take some fiddling to get this right, but once it's done, it will be very easy. The idea is that by combining styles, custom colors, and rules above and below paragraphs, you can set up every other paragraph to have lines of a custom color as a background.

First define a custom color of light green (or whatever). Now go to the text menu and choose "Define Styles." Set up your base style the way you want it — type settings, tabs, margins, etc. Call it LINE-WHITE and save it. Now create a second style BASED ON Line-White and call it LINE-GREEN. Now for the tricky part. For this style you will use rules above or below the paragraph to simulate shading. Since this has been covered before, I will quote from Jim Dornbos' <dornbosj@DELPHI.COM> solution:

"If you're setting 10pt text on 12pt leading and you want your text to appear on a 10% black tinted box — make up a color that's a 10% tint of Black. Select the text, with the I-beam text tool, Ctrl-M/Command-M to get to the paragraph specs dialog and select the Rules button. Select Rule below text, select a Line style of 12 pt <or whatever leading value you're using>, set the Line color to 10% K and the line width to Width of column.

In my experience it takes some adjustments to get this looking right, and of course you may want to create a custom line size to make your green bar higher and lower than the leading of the paragraph. You may also want to add space after the paragraph."

Finally, before saving this style, change the NEXT STYLE to "LINE-WHITE." This means that when you hit RETURN after typing in your "green bar" paragraph, the next paragraph will be in the Line-white style (no green bar). Save your paragraph and re-select "Line-white" and EDIT it. Change the NEXT STYLE to "Line-Green" and save it.

You are now ready to start typing. Position the cursor and change the current style to Line-Green. Type the first line and hit RETURN. As soon as you start typing, you will see the green line appear. Hitting RETURN again will switch back to Line-White, and these will alternate back and forth until you switch to another style manually. (If the text is already typed you will have to change the styles of every other paragraph manually.)

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