27 August 2026

St Monica, mother of St Augustine Bishop, ora pro nobis

Dear Registrar,

I am writing about the setting of the Institute’s annual report, which arrived this morning and which I read with rather more attention to its margins than to its contents. I hope that is taken in the spirit intended.

The text column runs to something near a hundred and ten characters. By the second page I had lost my place twice, and by the fourth I had stopped reading and started measuring. The report itself is careful work; it deserves better than a layout that makes it tiring to read.

This is a cheap problem to fix, and I have enclosed the specification I use for my own documents.

Yours sincerely,

Enc. typeset.css; two specimen pages

P.S. The tables were excellent — tabular figures throughout, which is more than most annual reports manage.