Hyphens et al.
Hyphens are the most bastardized character in design. The shortest of the group—hyphens—are for hyphenating compound words or words over line breaks. It is slightly bigger brother, the en-dash, is used to describe a range, as in “1865–1904.” The em-dash is the heavyweight champ of the three and is used as a graceful pause or interjection in a sentence. And remember the golden rule: two hyphens don’t make an em-dash.
Quote, unquote
Quotation marks and apostrophes are not straight up and down lines; they have direction, facing either left or right and they are designed specifically for each typeface. Turning on ‘typographer’s quotes’ or ‘smart quotes’ will catch most of them but text imported from another file such as an email message may bring in a straight imposter. Sniff them out, unless of course you are actually denoting feet or inches.
Leading
Rhymes with bedding and refers to the vertical space between lines of body text. There is a fine line between too little and too much leading and either can reduce readability. The right amount of leading is a judgement call but there are a few things to watch out for. 130% of the point size is a good place to start i.e. 10-point type on 13-point leading. Whether this works or not will depend on a couple of factors. Despite being set in the same point size, different typefaces have different sized x-heights (literally the height of the lower case ‘x’, try comparing 10-point Times Roman with 10-point Helvetica). As a line gets longer, it will generally require more leading to stop the reader’s eye slipping down to the next line, instead of following the same line to its end. Do not rely on program defaults, as they are often stingy with their leading.
The space race
Tracking refers to the amount of space between all characters, while kerning is concerned with the space between letter pairs. The purpose of kerning is to increase readability by creating an even space between characters. Ones to watch include the uppercase Y or T. They may need to be kerned closer to a mate in order to compensate for the large space that surrounds the letter. You aren’t looking at the black blobs on the page, concentrate on the spaces between them and make sure they are equal. Most fonts are auto-kerned, but you’ll inevitably need to do some by hand for display type, especially when using all uppercase letters.
Doing lines
Try to keep lines of body text around 50 to 70 characters in length or 10 to 12 (English) words per line. This is just a rule of thumb, but it is a very good starting point. Some writers’ words tumble out so fluently that they seem to demand long lines; alternately, in captions or sidebars or any kind of very short text, a narrower column with a shorter line may work best. But if you start with a line of 50 to 70 characters, you can play with it until you find the best line length for your particular situation.
Unjustified
If you need to use narrow columns or short lines of text, range them left rather than set them justified. The awkward, loosely spaced lines and ‘rivers’ of white space that tend to result are common in newspapers, even though they undermine readability.
Clare Sinkinson, Black Sheep ©07
