Typography Essentials

THE PAGE94 Commentary, marginalia, and alternate languages

AS EARLY AS THE HEBREW TALMUD, commentary on the main text—indeed, layers of commentary not unlike the text threads that are everywhere online—needed to be accommodated on the page. The Talmud, a marvel of typographic structure and hierarchy, employed many ingenious techniques for incorporating commentary, which ran around the central text. More common is the practice of allowing an extra-wide margin outside of the primary text area (hence the term marginalia). In order to set the text apart even further and to respond to the narrower measure, marginalia is usually set in a smaller point size with correspondingly proportional leading; sometimes its color or slope are also different from ...