At the ATypI conference at Stanford in May, I launched the digital publication of Type is everywhere: a history of the Association Typographique Internationale. ATypI has been central to the world of type since the 1950s, and this history, which got interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, has taken up a lot of my effort over the last few years.

What makes it interesting here is the form it took. With some art direction from me, Jason Pamental turned my multi-chapter manuscript into a responsive digital book. Not only will its typography adapt to various screen sizes and other factors, but there’s an option for pagination. If you enable “Swipe UI” from the Settings menu (hidden up in the top right corner), the text will break itself up into pages, fitting the available room on your screen, and you can move from page to page by swiping left or using the arrow keys. If you change, say, the font size or the leading (also available on the Settings menu) then refresh the page, it will adapt seamlessly to the new parameters. No more scrolling down a long web page (unless you want to; that is still the default behavior).

The next step in website pagination would be to make it possible to format the text in multiple columns on a wide page. This is apparently harder than it sounds, but I am hopeful.