Some glyph terminology First we better define glyph. To be honest, I’ve never gotten this straight. To me it is just another term for a character or letter. Technically, it is typespeak for variations of a character. An A, an A with a swash, A small cap A might be considered three glyphs of the letter A. In my font design books, a glyph has a separate design window for a character in a font. Before we … Continue reading →
My goal in this little series is not to give you an academic dissertation, but a practical guide to fonts you can use on a day to day basis—or not. One of the more entertaining resources on the Web was Jonathan Hoefler’s Typography 101 writings on typophile.com. Regrettably, I can’t find it there this morning. Like Bringhurst, his classes make a lot of sense and we’ll include them in our practical list as we go through. He … Continue reading →
What skills do you need? The idea is that InDesign can be learned and you can become comfortable enough with the software so that it becomes an extension of your creativity. For example, as I started this chapter in the Writing In InDesign book, I hit the shortcut to set my headline. This started the chapter on the next odd page (which is the norm). When I wrote the headline and hit the Return key, InDesign changed to … Continue reading →
Drop caps One of the typographic devices used to indicate the beginning of a story or chapter is the drop cap. In this use, the first letter or letters of the first paragraph is (are) made large enough to be three, four, or five lines of type tall and inset into the paragraph. The first-lines of that paragraph are tabbed around the letter or letters. First of all, this is very easy with page layout software. InDesign’s implementation … Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
6. Real quotes and apostrophes Here is another place where typewriters are limited by the lack of characters. All typewriters have is inch and foot marks. Quotation marks and apostrophes look very different. This is another typographical embarrassment when used incorrectly. There are more keystrokes you need to learn, though you can solve most of the problems by turning on Use Typographer’s Quotes in Type page of Preferences. The shortcut is Command+Option+Shift+’ by default to toggle this … Continue reading →
What follows is an excerpt from my new release, Writing In InDesign Second Edition. ******************************** Typography determines reader reactions It goes far beyond your font choices—important as they are. This is the first and most important thing you must understand. You are not only trying to control or at least predict the reaction of your typical reader to your content. You are also working you make your book a comfortable, friendly, and familiar part of the life … Continue reading →
Be very careful with your column choices—especially in books. (It’s the main reason blogs and ebooks are so hard to read.) Your focus must be easy, comfortable readability. Generally, the asymmetrical (off-center) layouts with wide margins are good. Of course, you can go crazy and make things totally illegible. Modern style tends to be chaotic, splashy, and overly complex. But your innate taste and discretion should keep these tendencies in check. The problem, of course, is that taste … Continue reading →