Printing terms I'm going to begin my discussion with printing terms and where they came from. When I was the copy editor on my university's newspaper, The American University Eagle, back in the Days of Yore, the editor and I would make the weekly trip out to the shop where the paper was set into type. I talked a lot with the woman who ran the typesetting machine. She impressed me when she told me she made more money typesetting than she did with her master's degree in English.
Type that looked rather like dies was kept in wooden trays on the upper portion of the typesetter's machine. The capital letters were stored in the trays, called cases, at the top, while the little letters were stored in the trays at the bottom, thus the common printing terms uppercase and lowercase. Newspapers and magazines did not use small caps, so when the copy editor meant for a letter to be made cap because someone had typed it lowercase, he or she would just underline it twice. In book publishing, caps are indicated with three underscores, because two mean small caps. Small caps are fonts unto themselves and not just full-size caps made smaller.
The lines of type were made out of lead, so when a newspaper wanted to fill out a column to make it align with the column it was next to on the page, they would take small slices of lead and add more space. To this day, this action is still referred to as leading. For most text type, the leading between the lines is indicated by a figure measured in points. Points are fractions of a larger measure called a pica. These days, 6 picas equal 1 inch, but in the old days, before computers, 6 picas equaled slightly less than 1 inch. Then as now, there are 12 points in every pica. I had to buy a special ruler for my typography class that measures in computer type sizes, not the traditional picas and points. If the typesetter wanted to make a short line fill a line in a column, she would kern the type, meaning she would add little pieces of lead between the letters.
(The following information, while commonly known, is borrowed here specifically from Designing with Type: A Basic Course in Typography by James Craig and William Bevington, published by Watson-Guptill Publications in 1999.) Lowercase type is usually measured by something called the x-height, because the x hits both the baseline and meanline of the type. The bottom of the x rests on the baseline while the top hits the meanline, an imaginary line that runs along the top of most lowercase letters.
"Typeface refers to the specific design of an alphabet. . . . Each typeface is identified by a name," frequently that of the person who designed it, or other considerations. "Traditionally, a font [my italics] was one size of one type style in a particular typeface." "Font" is used today is used more loosely and no longer refers specifically to one size of type. It is very easy to confuse the terms for font and typeface, and people, including me, do it all the time. The easiest way to remember the difference is to recall that Garamond is a typeface, while Garmaond roman is a font, Garamond italic is a font. In the days of hot metal, they would each have their own cases of dies. Nowadays, the computer eliminates the need for such rigid definitions and divisions.
The type itself is measured in points; however, it is measured from the baseline of one line to the baseline of the line below, expressed as B/b. Thus, 12/14 points means that the letters are 12 points in height with 14 points being occupied by both type and space; in other words, there are only 2 points of space between each line. For simplicity, word processing programs usually use only the most common sizes of body type, such as 8 pt, 9 pt, 10 pt, 11 pt, 12 pt, 14 pt, 16 pt, and so on up to 72 pt. In order to change the default space between the lines of type, one must go to the style menu in the program and reset it by hand; otherwise it will always be either auto or 12 pt. In typesetting programs such as InDesign, there is much more flexibility in the sizes of type and amounts of leading between lines of type.
When I speak of the height of the type it's important to understand that the measure is calculated by the tallest letter in the typeface, usually the tallest capital letter. You measure from the top of that letter to the bottom to obtain the type size. Fortunately, most of us don't have to do this; the computer does it for us. But it often can help to understand what you're doing at a keyboard when you select a typeface for your project.
Rules for better typesetting Newspapers continue to lead out columns and kern type, but magazines and books generally do not. Both noticeable kerning and extra lead between lines are considered in these media as bad typography. When computer typesetting houses began taking over from letterset houses (or hot metal typesetting, as it was called) we had a terrible time getting them to align type across a spread (two pages side by side), meaning no leading, and using kerning with great care. Now that typesetting has taken another change in development and moved to the desktop, one sees the same errors in typography all over again. (There are exceptions to this situation, as when the columns are very narrow and it is difficult to align type or fit enough words into a line to fill it out. But these should be challenges to the designer, not things to ignore. Sometimes I think it's the case that these new typesetters simply don't know the old rules about good page makeup anymore.)
Typewriter FAILs I was horrified to learn that typing instructors are still teaching people to type by adding two spaces after a period and a colon. I believe that was the point of the book I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. In print, the space after a period and colon is just one space, as it is after all other punctuation marks. You will find that no matter what font you choose for your document, especially for a resume, it'll look a lot better if you only add one space after a period or colon.
For anything you choose to make on a computer, you should never use an even-space font such as Courier or American Typewriter. These fonts are not proportioned, and they look like old-fashioned typewriters used to. Basically, the i takes up no more room than the m. In all the other fonts you can choose from, you get proportioned type, where the m is always going to be larger than the i.
Setting tabs efficiently All word processing programs come with tabs automatically set at every half inch. It isn't at all necessary to use this setup. You can, through using style sheets, set up however many tabs you need, placed as you need them placed (left, centered, or right) by entering the measure on the ruler that you can make visible on your page using the "Page Layout" selection and by selecting to have the rulers show. Thus, if you need two tabs, you set them and don't have to space every half inch across the page to get the text where you want it. And if you want to format your page so that certain elements start from a right-hand tab, you can set it that way. This one step alone saves hundreds of unnecessary keystrokes in any document you make. Things you type actually align perfectly. It's worth the trouble to figure it out.
A word about fonts Here is a paragraph I've added from the New York Times, David Brooks's column for December 7, 2010: "People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts."
There are two types of fonts you should not use, say, on Facebook or for e-mails or other kinds of normal writing: YOU SHOULD NOT USE ALL CAPS, nor should you use all italics. Both fonts are difficult to read. Selection of fonts is all about ease in reading, so you should try to use fonts that are inviting and easy to read. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course, because book designers often use different fonts to differentiate elements in the book's design from one another. But that isn't really what I'm talking about.
- If you want to make a flier for some event your church or organization is sponsoring, avoid putting the important information in all caps or italic.
- Avoid using type that is too small, and so on.
- If you are writing a cover letter for e-mailing a resume, it is of utmost importance that you don't use all caps to write it, and that's the sort of usage I'm talking about.
To learn more about how these different elements work, you should try using the style palettes in your word processing program to set your type size and leading. Now that I've given you some basics, you'll be able to interpret and understand the terms used in the palettes to give you flexibility and choice.
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