- Body text is the key, because there’s more of it
- Four main items for body text, point size (10-12 for print, 15-25 for web)
- Line spacing is the vertical distance between lines, which should be 120-145% of the point size. The CSS is “line-height”
- Line length is the width of the text blog, and it should be 45-90 characters, or 2-3 lowercase alphabets. PT uses 12-13 word per line.
- Biggest thing is font choice: buy a font like equity or concourse.
- Best thing you can do is upgrade your fonts to something professional
- Avoid times new roman and arial
- Use curly quotations, not straight ones
- Only one space between sentences
- Don’t use multiple whitespaces in a row
- Never use underline unless it’s a hyperlink
- Rarely use centered text
- Use very little bold or italic
- ALL CAPS are ok for less than a line
- Don’t use small caps if you don’t hav ethe real thing
- Use 5-12% extra letter spacing with small caps
- KERNING should always be turned on (adjusting the space between characters in a proporotional font) a word space is the distance between two words, and it should only be one use of the spacebar–noever more
- There’s such a thing as
- Justified text needs hyphenation
- Hyphens and dashes are not the same. Hyphens connect words, dashes are pauses
- Don’t use ampersands much
- Put a nonbreaking space after paragraph and section marks
- Make sure apostrophes point downward
- Make sure foot and inch marks are straight, not curly
- Typography is the visual component of the written word
- A text stays the same no matter how it’s rendered, but when you print it typography is involved
- Fonts are part of typography, but they are not the same. Typography goes beyond font
- Typography is for the reader, not the writer
- Treat reader attention as a luxury that you must preserve
- Typography is not supposed to disappear; it’s supposed to be a visible as necessary to do the job of enhancing the text
- Straight quotes are from teh typewriter, in traditional printing all quotes were curly. Typewriters nerfed them to save space. Never use straight quotes
- Emphasis is done with bold or italic, not quotes
- Straight quotes are ok in email–especially on a mobile phone
- Don’t use two single quotes
- One space between sentences
- Change things into questions. Use the question mark.
- The exclamation point is overused. You get one exclaimation point per three pages.Never use more than one – exclamation point
- Semicolons to combine two sentences, also separates liste lements with internal commas
- The colon is for introducing and then completing an idea. I own three cars: a convertible, a sedan, and an minivan.
- The paragraph mark is known as a pilcrow
- Parenthesis are for separating citations or asides from teh body
- Brackets show changes within quoted material
- Braces should not be used outside of technical stuff
- If you use braces or parents, do not match the bold or italicized of teh text
- Heyphens break words across lines, multi-part words, phrasal adjectives (dog and poony show, high-scool grades
- There are two dashes, the en and the em. The em is teh sise of a capital H, and the smaller one is half that size. Don’t use hyphens to build them.
- The en dash is for ranges of values and contrasting words like conservative-liberal split
- The em dash breaks a snetence into pieces using a pause. It’s when a comma is too weak, but a colon/semi/or parents is too strong (underused).
Notes
- This content is pulled from Butterick’s Typography guide.
