Chapter 8. Displaying beautiful text
This chapter covers
- Text basics, like the TextBlock
- Text wrapping, fonts, alignment, spacing, and more
- Displaying rich and multicolumn text
- Using OpenType font features
Over the years, the use of text in UI design has gone in and out of fashion. Back when I was learning how to program, text and ASCII (and PETSCII) graphics were the mainstay of UIs. Other than the occasional boxed-in border or menu, interfaces were heavily text based. Those poor unfortunate souls toiling away at 12” CRT mainframe terminals at the time rarely had even that—just a sea of amber or green text on a greenish-black glass background, with the only variation being some of it was in reverse.
It was depressing!
Then came Xerox with its GUI (graphical user interface) research, and then the Apple Lisa (which wasn’t successful because it cost more than most cars of the time), the more successful Apple Macintosh, Geos on the Commodore computers and eventually the 286, and, of course, Windows on the PC. These OSs (or shells in some cases) eschewed text and focused more on icons: pictorial representations of elements in the system. Not long after, designers began experimenting with trying to make the UI look more and more like a real-life metaphor. From that you got desktops and the always-good-for-a-laugh Microsoft Bob.