I am not looking to pick a fight on the “contents” of the currently approved healthcare bill. I want to examine something ELSE I found out when I went to look at and read the bill. The formatting of the bill from a font and printography point of view. the screen shot is an actual screen shot from the PDf version of the bill. Why look at the PDF version? There is no Word version, or even opendoc formated one. so your options are get the PDF version or a really horrible fixed width text version.
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Actual full page of the current healthcare bill as formatted and printed by the GPO. The things I noticed working for a publisher are as follows. 1. A really large odd font, it looks to be a Times New Roman font, but it is italic and my best guess is about 14 points. Keep in mind for my 3rd grader they have it set for 12 point, and most stuff you see printed is around 10. and there are parts of this document that are EASILY 20 or 30 point fonts for the headlines and top level bullets. 2. Odd and large margins, the margins I thought to be 2 inches on first glance. Turns out I was a little off. the actual size appears to be about 1.7 inches left and right. the top and bottom margins appear to also be a little over an Inch. 3. Justified alignment. You can tell by the clean right edge, that something annoying is going on, and that the person formatting this hates the reader. ok I jest.. err slightly. I don’t know anyone who when they read something formatted this way enjoys it. 4. The unusual numbering down the side. this seems to be a lawyerly thing to do. so you can say on page 300 line 27.. or something like that. but it takes that 1.7 left margin and adds another .25 or so to it. so at the end of the day you are left with a very small area to work with for content. then there is more.. 5. Hanging indents for the sub bullets. the individual bullet points dont seem to be indented overly far, but since the rest of those lines wrap to the indent point you have some pages that look really really silly, where you have more vertical space taken up by a simple sentence than horizontal space, and many of those words end up being hyphenated.
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good example of how the indents can take over a page. So lets see if I can recreate this in Word (albeit Word:mac) and here is where I start to make the turn into uber nerdland for those keeping score. I first copied a pages text out of the document and pasted it into the program. Then I adjust the margins so they looked about right. I adjusted the fonts, Alignment, Line spacing etc. I could never figure out how to do the line numbering, I expect that is a function maybe only windows or some government unix PS generator knows how to do. So after a little nerd outburst here is what I got.
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my “recreation of a press photo” (for all the Kilborn fans out there)
pretty close, 14 point, double spaced, italic, Times New Roman, Justified, with 1.7 inch margins left and right. Cool. I was really happy with this. I had been able to “recreate a press photo” reasonably well without too much effort. I still couldnt figure out exactly WHY they would CHOOSE to format the document that way, seems like some odd choices. Maybe it is because the average people in congress are like 70, or because they have to write a bunch or special loop holes in and that requires really large margins. And maybe a normal person would have stopped there.. But I got to thinking what would that look like formatted like a normal person, or heck even formatted in a way that can be turned into a 3rd grade class. and that was my next wrong turn. So.. here is what it looks like formatted by 3rd grade rules :
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(12 pt, justified, double spaced, 1 inch margins)
and then to drop it down to something like you normally see in the adult word..
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(10 pt, justified, single spaced, 1 inch margins)
As you can see, this is the SAME TEXT, but it takes up something like a quarter of the page.. So now I got to thinking.. which is usually the sign that I won’t stop where a normal person would but would instead choose to see how far the rabbit hole goes. I decided to see what would the WHOLE document look like formatted like a normal document.
Would it be 25% of the 2400 page count? could this really be a 600 page document, formatted to make it 2400 by some artless GPO print and font drones? Surely someone must have put this into a word document by now.. uhh google sez no. opencongress.org says no. well.. Hrrmm..I guess I will have to do this myself. So I downloaded the whole fixed width text formatted version. and began to write some macros to automate the process of stripping out the line numbers that were still embedded in the document!!! GRRRRRR… and getting the raw data into rough shape for loading into word and converting it to a well outlined and collapsable document. turns out word cant take just cutting and pasting in that whole. It kinda dies. So I had to do a lot of it in textpad. and then open it up after the clean up in word. I then got to work trying to create the outline bits in word and shaping up the document in general. I did not get ALL of the outline finished.. goodness that is a slow process, and I have a job and kids and all that to also allocate my time to, but suffice it to say the document when formatted the way I would want it formatted to actually read.. is more like 500-600 pages. check it out here: http://crocodoc.com/0iY9K (*note: not all of the formatting made it through the import process) I am a big fan of Edward Tufte, and he emphasizes that our information displays limit how much actual information we get, and in turn limit the quality of decisions we can make. In addition to being WAAYY less paper to print it off on than the normally quoted 2400 pages IT is also mush easier to UNDERSTAND what you are reading when formatted properly. the current standard of PDF output from the GPO is far too low of a fidelity information display and AS SUCH inhibits the publics ability to read and understand the bills that our government is considering. I think that is bad news for everyone.
Originally posted on Code and Hack.