Tag Archives: font

First-line indents and a second interior alignment

Skilled Workman Posted on by

First-line indents I have briefly touched on first-line indents for body copy paragraphs in talks about styles. This is the preferred method of telling the reader that a new topic sentence is being developed—a new thought expressed. I also mentioned my practice of adding a point or two after paragraphs to help the reader see that first-line indent on a busy page. I realize that this is anathema to many, but they should get a life. If … Continue reading →

The use of small caps is required

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Use small caps. Small caps are a specialized letterform. They are a smaller set of capital letters (often a bit larger than the x-height), used in place of the lowercase letters, which are designed so they have the same color as the rest of the font. Many of the OpenType Pro font families have real small caps. Faux small caps One of the typesetting options in most professional software (and many word processors) has been the use … Continue reading →

Bulleted lists are highly attractive to readers

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Use bulleted lists The typographic use of bullets and dingbats is conceptually unknown to typists. Lists are at the core of non-fiction and blog typography. Bulleted lists are an extremely effective means of attracting the reader’s attention—as are numbered lists. In fact, there has been a lot of study to find out what readers see and respond to. There are specific paragraph types you can use effectively to attract the reader’s eye or to re-attract it if it is … Continue reading →

Looking professional: Letterspacing, kerning, and tracking

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Letterspacing Here is another typesetting capability that cannot even be considered by word processors. We mentioned letterspacing earlier. Letterspacing is the built-in spacing between characters in a font. The basic idea is that the white space between letters should be identical for all letter pairs. Obviously, this is not simple or easy. AT, OOPS, and silly have very different spacing problems—especially the ill. The better the font, the better the letterspacing. In very cheap fonts, individual letters … Continue reading →

How your readers see your letters: legibility

Skilled Workman Posted on by

8. No ALL CAPS As mentioned in the underline section, setting letters in all caps is the other way to emphasize words on a typewriter. Typesetting has many more options like italic, bold, bold italic, small caps. Plus we can use a larger size, a different font, a different color, and more. In fact, we must be careful we do not get carried away in our enthusiasm for all the options at our disposal. ALL CAPS IS … Continue reading →

Font families, font widths, italics, and obliques

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Font families Over the years, font design has developed groups of fonts that are obviously variants of the same basic font. They are called font families. These families can have differences in weight and width. Commonly, they have also have italic variants; but that is really a special case, as we will see in a bit. Font weight Weight is the thickness of the stroke. Here are the common weights arranged in order from thin to thick: … Continue reading →

Sizing your type

Skilled Workman Posted on by

The major point to remember is that all letters of a given typeface and a given size fit into rectangles that are the same height. We’re spending a lot of time on this because it is an important concept to understand. Often paragraphs or lines of type look very different in size, but in fact they are the same point size. This is primarily due to variations in x-height and built-in leading in the specific font chosen. … Continue reading →

Fonts are not typography, fonts are used to create typography

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Before we can get into this, though, we have to start with terminology. Typography requires a new language. Much of this is based on historical printing usage and the font design process. Without at least a few of these terms you will be lost. This has been complicated now that all of the digital terms have been added to the mix. So, we really need to start with a little of font design. Not only the different … Continue reading →

What is a font, part 2?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Last week I talked about the basic 256 characters in a “normal 8-bit” font . We covered the keystrokes used to access what the PC calls the Upper ASCII glyphs. Then I began to talk about additional characters that will not fit into a normal font. We started with small caps and numbers: oldstyle figures, lining figures, and small cap figures. Today we finish a very brief coverage of additional characters. Ligatures In some cases, letters simply … Continue reading →

What is a font?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

A font is a very specific thing. A font is the entire set of characters for a given type style. In the days of letterpress (1460 to 1970), a font was all the characters in a given point size. You had Times 12-point, Times 14-point, Garamond 18-point, and so on. In some old fonts, this was hundreds of characters. When phototype became available in the 1950s, a font came in several sizes. These film strips could be … Continue reading →