Berkeley Electronic Press have just launched a new International Journal of Digital Typography dedicated to the distribution of research results in the areas of electronic document design and presentation. There are some interesting people on the editorial board including Kevin Larson from Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technology Group and Mary Dyson from the University of Reading. Both have conducted detailed research into legibility issues for screen typography.

E-ink technology has been adopted by Sony in their new digital book. There have been lots of different attempts to launch an ebook reader, could this be the ONE? Perhaps, it needs the design ingenuity of Apple to make an ebook something we all feel we can’t live without. Does anyone remember life before the iPod? Detailed information about the Sony Reader can be found in the following press release:

LAS VEGAS (CES Booth #14200), Jan. 4, 2006 _ Destined to transform the electronic reading experience, the lightweight Sony ® Reader is expected to bring a whole new meaning to “book smart.”

This is a brilliant site by Marko Dugonjíc. It enables you to preview different styles of typesetting for the web using css properties and to generate the css code for that style! It’s a remarkable resource. There are three columns so you can compare different typefaces, settings and styles. It is a great teaching tool.

Having failed to get this site looking the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (I haven’t even tested it in Camino), I have decided to abandon IE for now. IE is being discontinued on the Mac anyway, though the user base for IE is huge on the PC. I will revisit this issue later when my css and php skills have improved. In the meantimne, it further indicates to me just how tricky it is to achieve the same typographic design and display across multiple browsers and platforms. This site is best viewed in Firefox or Safari.