[Product Beta Recruitment] Typography

Yes, quite a lot has changed already (maybe just for those signed up for the beta test?).

Paragraphs now have native spacing, as do headings - very welcome! The typography of the headings has also changed. The typography of the page title is not very pretty in my opinion, just too bold for my taste).

The blank lines we previously had to use to visually separate paragraphs from each other have been automatically removed (very smart, so no need to rework texts after the update, thanks, Coda Team!).

Spacing between layout columns and paragraphs is now no longer different, so text in columns blends perfectly with normal text (without columns):

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hi @Michael_Singer I did not sign up for this Beta and noticed the same changes., even in my older docs I opened this morning. Like you am I glad to see progression on this point.

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Upon further exploration, I see that creating line breaks within a paragraph is unfortunately not possible at this time. The key combination Shift+Enter only creates a new paragraph, and not a line break within the current paragraph as expected.

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and we have new arrows, more of the kind I see them in Medium when I write a blog post

image

The new typographic improvements are all very satisfying and visually appealing!
Already got used to the new title style… :grinning:

Thank you, Coda Team!

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Hi everyone! As some of you keen observers have already noticed, this has launched! You can find more details in this post.

The new typography is available on new docs, and is being deployed to existing docs over the next few days. Thanks for all your feedback thus far!

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Some of the new typography changes are nice. I focus on the suggestions though. As a typography geek and multilingual typesetter with over 15 y of experience I can tell that:
a) Adding paragraph spacing by default is a huge mistake for typography and limits the posibilities to create different styling. Paragraph spacing is added on specific styles (create more styles if you want) but not to all styles.
b) Fonts should be smaller! Guys please! Get your heads out of the retina screens and see how it looks like on 34" screen, 15.6" Win laptop. Remember, the most important is that the users of the docs are happy; not the creators!
c) H1, H2, H3… is just not good enough. You can’t limit the sizing that much and think that you’ve allowed formatting. That’s simply not correct. What you’ve done is limited the sizing and the layout options.

2/5 from me for these updates because you basically didn’t solve much of general issues.

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@Stefan_Stoyanov Sorry, but I can’t agree with any of your points. What has just been “typographically” improved here is actually the usual standard for comparable applications, no more and no less. What I’m still missing, as I mentioned before, is the possibility to set a line break within a paragraph. But that’s all I can complain about. Why you find literally all changes (a to c) bad is beyond my comprehension.

Which is not to say that I wouldn’t like to see more responsiveness regarding different screen widths, but that’s another story. For now, I’m happy with the current improvements.

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Improvement is improvement. But whether this is a level up? I am not convinced. I don’t like the font characters, the kerning (lack of it).

I would have to disagree because it’s not the usual standard to some comparable applications. Comparable applications have custom font size, line height and paragraph spacing like in wordprocessing and publishing apps.

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I’d be interested to know what applications you have in mind. Perhaps you mean ClickUp, which does indeed offer a lot of customization options (font size, line height, paragraph spacing). But otherwise I can’t think of any application. Notion doesn’t have that and I don’t know any note app that would offer such options.

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Font weight for page title is now 800 which is too much in my opinion. I think it would look better if font weight was set to 700.

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Overall I think most of the changes are great and the spacing is a lot more “automatic” and pleasing!

However as far as I can tell this update was pushed out without the option to create a new line without the extra spacing which in my opition is a huge oversight!

As others mentioned, the spacing I created before with the double line breaks have been converted to just a single line break but with this new spacing which is great. But all the single line breaks I had with no spacing have also been converted to this new single line break with extra spacing so now everything looks the same and therefore a lot of spacing data has been lost!
Would it not have been better to wait until the line break within paragraph with no spacing is also a possibility and then convert my single line breaks into that so everything stays the same? Now I’m going to have to go through all of my docs to reformat once this option arrives, assuming (and hoping!) it does.

Also, a lot of my functions now create rows of data that are difficult to read and waste space because this spacing behaviour is also present in Text columns. For example addresses that should look like this:

221B Baker Street
London
NW1 6XE

Now look like this:

221B Baker Street

London

NW1 6XE

It’s quite unpleasing! I think text columns should behave the way they were before as they are different to how the main part of a doc feels, or if not we need a new LineBreakWithoutSpacing() function.

I can’t help but feel like this should’ve been tested out as Beta like originally planned rather than pushing it out to every doc and suddenly change they way things look.
Or do others not mind, am I the only one annoyed at this?

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Nope, not the only one :pensive:

I really don’t mind the auto-creation of new paragraphs when hitting ⏎ Enter (while typing on the canvas) but the real problem for me is that it’s not escapable … I.e.: ⇧ Shift + ⏎ Enter gives the exact same result as a simple ⏎ Enter :pensive:

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hi @Daniel_Meszoly , I am with you!
I observed the same line break issues, but did initially not related it to the update since I know nothing about typography and without your comments I would have looked in my code to see what I did wrong…

I do not see yet how I can solve many of the issues I observe in documents I prepared for printing (trying to work around the many limitations Coda has in this area).

Maybe this is a wake up call that print & pdf generation do matter to many SMB

cheers, Christiaan

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Hard to believe actually, but they have forgotten to implement the line break, it simply does not exist. Every line break was automatically converted to a paragraph.

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hi @Michael_Singer , well if this is the case, I guess they can solve the issue early next week. It would solve many many issues in my ready for print (which are now not anymore that ready…) docs.
Cheers, Christiaan

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just want to +100 this comment- i couldn’t put my finger on what had changed making my docs look all wonky but this is it! overall big fan of the typography cleanup but spaces after paragraphs by default throws off most of my commonly used docs… makes it really hard to make app-like docs in general. even if this remains the default, can we at least have the ability to control line spacing?

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Same here, hopefully it is fixed soon :confused:

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Just adding a +1 to this. I have several use cases for which a single line break option is quite important (writing talks, arranging song lyrics, brainstorming, etc.)

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No line breaks!?!? At all?

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