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 →
Proper accents for languages When you are using a word or phrase from another language, always accent it properly. Some of these things are commonly missed. Words like résumé, moiré, façade, and the like have entered common usage in English. Because InDesign comes with so many languages installed, you can simply change languages for the word in question and spell check there. But if you are using the pine nuts from the Southwest in your cooking, they … 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 →
Setting up an InDesign default paragraph-character styles set as you begin using InDesign THIS IS A PRACTICAL STEP-BY-STEP PROCEDURE FOR WHAT IS DESCRIBED IN ALL MY INDESIGN PRODUCTION BOOKS SINCE 1996. IT’S CURRENTLY CHAPTER 22 IN: Book Publishing With InDesign CC We are going to set up the styles shown in the book. This will give you actual experience in setting up styles. Plus you will begin developing your own personal set of styles—which will become the … 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 →
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 →
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 →
Be careful with hyphens. Because typeset line endings are automatic, so is the hyphenation. You can turn it on or off. Hyphenation is done by dictionary. You can set up the hyphens when you add new words to the user dictionary (see InDesign’s help). Another problem is that automatic hyphenation can create hyphens for many consecutive lines. Here there is sharp debate. Most of us agree that two hyphens in a row should be the maximum (a … 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 →