Tabular Typography

Summary

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the typographic issues for laying out information within two-dimensional tables. Early typesetting systems formatted tables by coding the table style and layout into the program, and later systems provided a limited range of typographic features. The typographic issues include table structure, alignment of rows and columns simultaneously, formatting styles, treatment of whitespace within a table, graphical embellishments, placement of footnotes, various readability issues, and the problems of breaking large tables. Extending the table formatting problem to both page layout and arrangement of mathematical notation is highlighted, as is the need for interactive design tools for table layout.

Introduction

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the typographic issues for laying out information within a two-dimensional table. Tables are a concentrated form of the more general layout problem; one can find table formatting analogies in both the larger-scale problem of page makeup, and the smaller-scale problem of aligning notation within a mathematical equation.

Few table formatting tools have addressed all the issues raised by this paper. In fact, it was a challenge to identify the various issues that typographers, compositors, and graphic designers have managed with great skill through the traditional graphic arts processes. Thus this paper provides a checklist for the designs and implementations of new table formatting tools, algorithms, and structures.