Many professional typographers exist. Sometimes I am one. Most published type needs to be professionally typeset. The difference between a typical word document and a professional-quality document is far less about the software than it is about the person operating it— there’s a lot of nuance to doing it well. Many folks in the engineering trades tend to see it (and many other types of visual design) as quaint or frivolous, but having really tight typesetting is still very important for many applications. I know because at least half of my clients for that sort of work come to me, exasperated, after struggling to get something from consumer-focused automated tools or premade templates that’s even sorta polished without being totally generic.
There are also type designers who design typefaces. Most people have no reason to like, but check out how many type foundries there are and how much professional fonts cost. Making a good font is incredibly labor intensive.
Can't reply to the GP as they are (rightly) flagged, but this engineering mindset that anything which adds elegance or beauty is frivilous really limits the ability of an 'engineer'. Look at the works of the great 19th century engineers like Watt and Brunel, or for more recent examples, the work or Cecil Balmond. There no reason why the elegance of the solution employed in these examples of civil and structural engineering shouldn't translate to software 'engineering'. In fact, take a leaf out of industrial designers book; solve problems as elegantly as possible. Thinking of typographers as 'layout engineers' may help...
It also really limits the ability of a lot of software. Design, including user interface design, is a communication medium— not even primarily aesthetics. I don’t blame people for not seeing the depth and complexity in fields they’re not in, but as someone that’s worked professionally as a (back-end) developer even longer than i have as a designer, I’m still perplexed by dev culture’s open disdain for design fields. I’ve spent many thousands of hours of my life contributing to FOSS projects, but not as a designer, because most are weirdly hostile to it. The FOSS movement could have so much more impact on the world if we addressed the fact that inscrutable dev-created UIs are unusable to people without a working mental model of software development. The big user-facing FOSS projects like blender and Firefox are foundation or corporation backed with professional designers.
I’m comfortable with layout not being engineering— the processes are quite different. What annoys me is that so many in engineering look down on it because of that.
