Posts Tagged ‘double spacing’
Rules of Typesetting
Author: protypist
Typesetting has always had a standard in which most typists adhere to and have eagle-eye training to watch for. Most of these elements can be addressed prior to giving over the text for typesetting and editing making the typesetter’s job much easier, quicker and more effective as they can essentially watch for other things that are just as important. Keep these rules in mind when starting your project.
Tags: consistency, double spacing, font type, justification, punctuation, typesetter, word processors- When using spaces, use one space after the period. People from old school typewriters have had it ingrained into their brain for years that double spacing after a period or any other punctuation at the end of the sentence is needed. With computers though, there is no need to compensate for spacing with the font typeface
- Computers and word processors of our time period give us much more versatility to our spacing and using hard returns for paragraph breaks are completely unnecessary. Let the software do the spacing for you.
- Fewer fonts the better. The rule of thumb should be to keep your font type down to two, maximum. This provides for easier reading, easier on the eyes and more consistency.
- Find out if your newsletter should have full justification or left read. Full justification of text is considered more formal than left-justified so depending on your target audience and your intentions will depend on which one you might wish to use.
- Centering text is used sparingly and in very few areas does it work well. Using it with short lines or with your headings is a good place to start.
- Line balance is important as providing squished text on one line but space leading that is larger on another line below it is bad form. There are many ways to play with settings in software so that you can show good balance and structure to the text at hand.
- Cap usages has been overdone. Using full caps on a line of text can be determined as ‘yelling’ from behind your keyboard. Use caps appropriately and you will get your point across just as well as if you had capped the whole line of text.
- Punctuation is always something that you should elementally use properly. Use of proper punctuation can make a whole sentence change meaning or essentially make it easier reading. Make sure your comma’s, quotes and other elements are used appropriately and consistently.
Using the eight rules of thumb when initially sending a file to your typesetter or editor will make them much happier. It makes their job easier and essentially provides an excellent starting point for a perfect newsletter and project.
Posted in Typesetting | 
Tags: consistency, double spacing, font type, justification, punctuation, typesetter, word processors
Five Important Typsetting Tips
Author: protypist
Print mediums have guidelines and elements that should be followed in order to make things more legible and easier on the eyes for the individuals who are reading. Even though some of these elements may have evolved over centuries, they are still very effective and should be followed should you wish to impact your readers.
- Using “serif fonts” in the main body utilizes the human eyes ability to recognized the shape of words and not necessarily the letter by letter of each word. A serif font is a font that uses lines at the top and bottom of each letter to help guide the eye to each line easily and smoothly. A san serif font usually forgoes that line and can be used for smaller areas of text such as headlines, bylines and picture captions. Excellent examples of good serif fonts are Garamond, Century Schoolbook or Bookman.
- A “Lead-in” for the first paragraph of an article helps give a quick synopsis of what the article might be about, but also should be the ‘teaser’ that will get the reader to want to continue to read more. Identify these first few lines with a subtle change in the font and layout so that it does stand out and leads the eye to it.
- Avoid hyphenating words. Using hyphens should be reserved for phone numbers in most instances and a few other rare instances when it calls for last names and hyphenated combination words. Breaking a word at a syllable usually can be avoided when playing with the leading and spacing of the lines. This keeps the flow of the words and articles going smoothly for your readers.
- Old habits are hard to break. Including those that we had taught to us when the typewriter classes were taught to us in high school. This includes the double spacing after periods and colons. As a rule of thumb, any double spaces are now obsolete and professional typesetters don’t use them.
- Full justification may look good but does make it harder to read. Next time you get a chance, fully justify your article in your column layout and in turn look at the white ‘lanes’ of space that it creates. This can be extremely distracting to the eye and also cause distortion of short words just to fill in the space of the line to even it up. Use left justification when you have long lines and be cautious in using full justification when you don’t absolutely need it.