About writing in the layout, I didn’t even notice that you prefer to make line breaks at points of punctuation. While I can see the intent of keeping syntactically related groups together in the same space, I think you’re putting effort into something that has almost no payoff. I scan down a paragraph rather quickly and often take it in as a whole. There’s no need to expend energy trying to make the paragraph symmetrical or syntactical on a line per line basis. In fact, I found it somewhat distracting at times, wondering if the sentences were falsely elongated to accommodate structure rather than to simply communicate content.

Sorry if I came across as harsh. I simply think I was the wrong audience and came into the book with more expectations about design and layout.

You are right in stating that the book is primarily geared toward “my usual audiences of engineers, scientists, and managers”, as the book’s foreword (available as part of the sample pages) makes no secret of. Still, I was surprised at how easily you dismiss the applicability of the book’s advice to the work of technical writers. I have run (and still run) many workshops for the STC community on various parts of the book: structured writing, slides, visual communication, magical numbers, Web design, etc., all with positive feedback about their relevance. Then again, I understand that these topics were not your primary interest; page layout was. I have been encouraged repeatedly to write a book on page layout, and I might well do so, but I decided to take it one book at a time.

About the rectangular paragraphs: I do indeed “write in the layout” for many reasons, one of them being optimization of paragraph shape. If you are going to tax me publicly with (hopefully subclinical) obsessive-compulsive disorders, you might as well go all the way and point out the optimization of line breaks, too: I strive to keep on the same line what is tightly related syntactically, giving preference to line breaks at natural breaks in the discourse, such as at punctuation marks. As you point out, I do not discuss this preference, because I do not necessarily recommend such a tight constraint to others, even though I receive very positive feedback about the resulting pages — not that readers notice the paragraph optimization as such (if they were to, it would be noise), but they comment favorably on the visual structure and on the flow of the discourse. In a book on page layout, however, I would definitely discuss “writing in the layout” for its other, more obvious benefits.

Incidentally, the visual harmony of the pages stems from many more self-imposed constraints, which I would also find appropriate to discuss in what may well be my next book. (I would explain it here, but there is a lot of math — no calculus, though, just geometry — and, yes, some definite influences from quantum physics.)