Tag Archives: typesetting

A good article on kerning in InDesign magazine for July

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Kerning is that area of typography rarely talked about. Ilene Strizver has a good article on kerning, both what it is and how to accomplish it, in the July issue of InDesign magazine. One of the sure signs of a pro book designer is in the kerning of the heads and subheads. That along with solid widow, orphan, and runt control are major areas of page layout normally ignored completely by users of Words. Of course, the sad … Continue reading →

What desktop publishing did to graphic designers, self-publishing is doing to authors

Skilled Workman Posted on by

OK! I’m a little punch-drunk I’ve been through this before. In fact, I’ve been through it five times now. it’s been pretty much non-stop since 1991. My life and career [yours too, probably unless you’re a kid born after 1980—especially after 1990] has been radically transformed on a continual basis since 1990 with five major paradigm shifts. Hand-drawn art and metal type to photo-production [Offset Lithography]—the 1960s & seventies:  I started in the midst of this change. My … Continue reading →

Looking professional: Letterspacing, kerning, and tracking

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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

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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 →

Using styles enables global control of your book’s typography

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Today I’m mentioning the basic structure of typography. There is one concept which enables typography as we know it in modern book publishing. This is the concept of styles. These styles are contained in styles panels. InDesign has five of them: paragraph, character, object, table, and cell. Styles are also available in word processors—even though they are not nearly so powerful there. What is a style? A style is a collection of specialized typographic defaults that can … Continue reading →

Fonts are not typography, fonts are used to create typography

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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 →