Kinross describes the ‘visual tables’ of Anthony Froshaug’s Typographic norms as ‘beautiful constellations; mysterious reports on typography’. Having appreciated that beauty for a long time, we wanted to lessen the mystery a bit to understand better what was happening under the hood. So this is a modest attempt at doing that by writing a computer program to render one of the iterations in the browser.
Of the choices available, ‘Quadrats (Anglo-American)’ seemed like the right one to select. It’s the coolest-looking and, from an, uhhh, Anglo-American perspective, is the most familiar in terms of body sizes. (We presume an equivalency between Anglo-American points and CSS/browser points.)
The recipe for generating the data that, in turn, yields the output we want, is as follows:
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the x-axis (unlabeled, even in the numerical rendition, since the labeling there would be redundant) ranges across what appears to be a complete set of known standard sizes, starting at 5 and going up to 168
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the y-axis (helpfully labeled in the numerical rendition of the table) also starts at 5, but includes only a subset of -- and we do not know the right term here -- the most commonly-used sizes: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42. (48, 60, 72 are also part of this set, but they are omitted, possibly because quads wouldn’t be available at those large sizes; other types of furniture might instead have been used at that point, we guess).
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iterating over the y-axis sizes, from 5 to 42, we construct rows containing cells. Each row will have exactly four quads in it, probably because there would be four types of quads available: (1-)quads, 2-quads, 3-quads, 4-quads.
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a quad is placed in a cell when the following condition is true: the x-axis size is the same as the y-axis size or the x-axis size is evenly divisible by the y-axis size. To be explicit: the width of the quad placed in the cell is equivalent to the point size of the current position on the x-axis; the height is equivalent to that of the y-axis.
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a quad is determined to be a multiple-size-use quad, thereby receiving the alternate color in the visual table, if it is (1) not a 1-quad and (2) has a width equal to one of the commonly-used sizes enumerated above.