Practical Typography — The World's Most Impressive Online eBook

Matthew Butterick, a typographer and lawyer who'd previously written the book Typography for Lawyers, just released a brand new book: Practical Typography. Yet, rather than printing it and releasing it as a normal for-pay eBook, he turned it into its own eBook web app designed 100% for reading in your browser. Its content — the basics of typography explained for anyone to understand — is impressive enough, but the book's web app is equally impressive.

You'll find chapters devoted to everything from quotes and apostrophes to text formatting with OpenType features and the line spacing settings you should use. There's a Typography in Ten Minutes chapter to get you going quickly, font recommendations so your documents and sites won't look outdated, sample documents, and more. All of it, for the low price of free — but if you find it useful, you should check out the ways you can pay for the book. It's more than worth it, and it'd sure be neat to see more books released like this.

Oh, and the book recommends Pitch, my favorite monospaced font, in the font recommendation section, which is neat to see. It also lists Source Sans — the font used in Techinch and Techinch Magazine — as exceptions to the rule that with free fonts, you get what you pay for. Also nice to see. Perhaps I have somewhat decent taste in typefaces.

But why are you still here? Go check out Practical Typography, make some time to read it, and bookmark it for reference. That's exactly what I'm doing.

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