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Blog: #plutarchs-lives

Introducing Life of Theseus, from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Available as a free PDF download.

Title page of the book
First page of the book
Second page of the book

Making-of notes

  • It’s set in LfA Aluminia, a resurrected version of Electra. I enjoyed this article about the making of the typeface.
  • Chrome still has the bizarre copy-paste issue in macOS Preview, so I used Firefox. But Firefox doesn’t yet support hyphenate-limit-chars, sadly. I decided not to stress about it.
  • It’s left-justified since browser justification still isn’t great and I didn’t want to spend eons fine-tuning the spacing. I did, however, tweak word-spacing to eliminate hyphens at the ends of pages and most widows and orphans (though I wasn’t fully strict here). Also manually inserted ­ to insert hyphens as needed (mostly in the Greek names — and I probably got some of those wrong but I did try my best) and turned off ligatures that crossed hyphenation breaks (“ff”).
  • I used Paged.js, which generally worked well. Whenever I made changes, though, reloading the page and finding my place again (usually by cmd+f with some string of text) started getting laborious. Thinking about either building a Firefox extension that maintains scroll position even on hard refresh or building an Electron app that does the same.
  • Not sure yet if I’m going to continue on with typesetting the rest of the Lives, but hopefully I do.

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