Category Archives: Book Production

Font families, font widths, italics, and obliques

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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 →

Creativity is a major part of God’s image

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We are made in the image of God. Creativity is a major part of God’s image. One of the primary attributes of God is His creativity. Even a casual examination of flowers, clouds, trees, mountains, or anything else in His creation will prove to you His immense creativity. Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the … Continue reading →

Sizing your type

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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

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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 →

Typography: Type has nothing to do with typing

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It is obvious that even the terminology is different. However, we have hardly begun. Much more significant than the new language are the actual mechanics of typesetting. The rules have changed! In fact, one of the difficulties in teaching publishing classes today involves a paradox. Writing classes are secretarial. Classes all teach writing using Word: but Word cannot produce professional typography or the formatting services required by the reader. Writing groups assume Word: if you give them … Continue reading →

Get a grip about Amazon! They’ll sell your books.

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Writer Folks – Time to “Man-up” about Amazon. You don’t matter that much. « Andy Holloman – Novel – “Shades of Gray”. Andy has nailed it here. Amazon is too large to personally deal with each one of us. We need to be thankful that they’ll let us in—at all. Lulu is just as bad for the same reasons. The point is: You do not have to use them!  

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A typographic opus from Smashing…

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Alexandar Charchar put together a major statement on modern typography yesterday—written by Espen Brunborg called Respect Thy Typography. You need to read it. Espen starts out with a strong statement of hope for me: Good typography shouldn’t have to rely on ornamental crutches to stand tall. Yet despite all the tools and knowledge available to us, we readily embrace a flourishing, decorative typography, with cheap tricks used in a misguided attempt to make it “pop”. This ancient art may rapidly … Continue reading →

The easy way to fix your default paragraph and character styles

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I received this question today from a friend: I made some mistakes when I set the original para styles and they have become some sort of default that has to be corrected for every new project. Do I have to delete the whole thing and start over again? I can do it, but I hope I can do it an easier way. Resetting your paragraph defaults is very easy. To do it globally (for InDesign as a whole), … Continue reading →

What is a font, part 2?

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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?

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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 →