Prices crossed out, a shadow behind the title

A shop marking its shelf down does it with a pen: a stroke across the old price, the new one written beside it, and a line over the sum at the foot so nobody reads it as one more item. On a page a program writes, those strokes have to be put there — and putting them there by hand means choosing a height for each one. Choose badly and the stroke lands across the middle of the figures on one machine and under them on the next, because the lettering changed and the number you wrote did not.

The card below asks for the mark by name instead. A line under the words, a line through the letters, a line over the top: for each of the three, the lettering itself says how far from the words its own line belongs and how thick it is, and the three follow whatever size the text is set in. The title and the red words laid across the foot carry one more trick — each is set a second time behind itself, shifted a little and in a paler grey, which is what keeps big lettering readable over a photograph. The pale copy under the slanted words leans with them, so it falls on the sheet the same way as the one under the title.

What this example shows

• An old price crossed out, standing beside the new one.
• A sum with a line over the top, the way a total is added up.
• A title and a slanted mark, each set a second time behind itself.

The code that writes it, in full

Whole programs, hundreds of lines long, for whoever writes your software. The third is not a program at all: it is a plain list of what the page has to say, which the service is sent.

Read the Rust source Read the Python source Read the JSON source

The document itself

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