It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography
is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag.
For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just not understood by the program.
More complex, the amount of space under a heading. A heading's bottom is neither its bottommost pixel (the space between the bottom of an "a" and "g" is mostly empty), nor its baseline (that space isn't entirely empty); it has a soft bottom, a fade to emptiness. The ideal spacing is a function not only of what's being separated and by how much, but also the gradients that border it.
Does anybody know of good resources on this subject? What I find tends to be more about habit than derivation.
For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just not understood by the program.
More complex, the amount of space under a heading. A heading's bottom is neither its bottommost pixel (the space between the bottom of an "a" and "g" is mostly empty), nor its baseline (that space isn't entirely empty); it has a soft bottom, a fade to emptiness. The ideal spacing is a function not only of what's being separated and by how much, but also the gradients that border it.
Does anybody know of good resources on this subject? What I find tends to be more about habit than derivation.