Creative Tips 5: Avoidables, Part 2

When people made the switch from typewriters to word processors and proportionally spaced type, the term "typing" stayed with us. It makes sense: "I'm word processing a letter" is a clumsy mouthful, so the simpler, more traditional term stuck. The problem is, when you use almost any font on a computer you aren't really typing, you are really typesetting, a very different thing.

In case anyone missed it earlier, the difference is simple but profound. Typewriter fonts (that includes some of the typefaces, such as Courier, that came with your computer) are monospaced. That means each letter, figure or punctuation mark occupies the same amount of space on a line. This sentence uses Courier New, a standard font on Windows computers. Notice the huge space occupied by the comma and period, and the "i" in "Courier" or "Notice." The letter i and the letter w in Courier both use the same space on the line. Most of the fonts on your computer, and all the ones that look good, are proportional spaced. Each character has space assigned to it by the type designer who created that font. Skinny letters get less space than fat ones.

The art of typesetting proportional fonts is now largely handled automatically by the computer (often poorly, but that's a story for another time) as you type. The point is, what you are doing is typesetting, not typing, and nobody bothered to let you know.

That's a shame, because the result is that many things typesetters (a highly paid, highly skilled profession) take for granted have never been communicated to the present generations of computer users. Worse, the typing practices that are taught are just plain wrong, unless you are actually using a typewriter (or a font that mimics one, such as Courier).

Spaces Don't Come In Twos

Many, many computer users automatically put two spaces after every period, colon, or closing quotation mark, not realizing that the space designed into punctuation already takes into account the extra gap needed after the end of a sentence, so one space, not two, is correct. This has been standard typesetting practice for several hundred years. The Chicago Manual of Style says: "In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence…" without mentioning the reason. Typeset matter, as a glance at any magazine or book will tell you, is always proportional-spaced. Like I said: you're typesetting, but nobody bothered to tell you.

In typewritten text, two spaces help to make the text more readable by providing a visual clue to the beginning of a new sentence. In typeset text, two spaces not only don't improve readability, they also create random blobs of white space that make the text look subtly but definitely wrong, (especially when you know the difference). Here is some text set with two spaces between sentences, then with one. The typeface is Tunga Regular.

First-Line Indents

If you indent the first line of your paragraphs, NEVER use spaces or a tab. And don't make the indent enormous. Whoever started the "indent five spaces" thing should have been smothered at birth, because that's way too much. If you look at professionally set text, you will see that a proper first-line indent is much smaller. Specifically, it is standard to use a special kind of space, called an em-space, or an indent setting equal to 1 em. The em gets its name from the fact that it is the same width as an upper case M, in almost all fonts. The easy way to think of it is: the same width as the point size of the text.

In Microsoft Word, the first-line indent setting is part of the Paragraph format. It is very well hidden. Worse, the default is one-half inch. Awful! Here's how you set it up:

From the Format menu, select Paragraph. The first line indent is concealed under the cryptic label "Special." Not terribly intuitive. But it gets better: When you select "First Line" from the drop-down menu (where the word "None" appears), the default of .5" shows up, but (here's another secret) you can set a measurement in points by typing the letters "pt" after the number you want, and pressing "Enter." So if your text is 12 point, you can type "12pt," press "Enter," and voila! – a first line indent of 1 em. Here's what it looks like:

Other common computer malpractices are using double blank lines instead of paragraph spacing, as we covered last week, and using multiple blank lines to push the next paragraph onto a new page (use Control-Enter or Command-Return instead), which was a bonus tip a few weeks back.

If, like me, you are old enough to have actually (gasp!) used a typewriter, don't worry—your secret is safe with me. However, there may be another stray habit or two:

Don't use a lower case L in place of a figure 1. We used to do this because on a typewriter they often looked the same (some typewriters didn't even have a figure 1). They don't on a computer.

Don't use asterisks (*) or, worse, dashes instead of bullets. They look very amateur and will only get you talked about around the water fountain. Use the "Bullets and Numbering" feature (under the Format menu) to create real bulleted lists.

Bonus Tips

When you need to insert a trademark symbol, hold down Control and Alt and press T, which inserts a ™ into the text.

If you have Word's Autocorrect feature turned on, typing "(" followed by "c" followed by ")" will give you a copyright symbol, but if you are typing "501(c)3" that's NOT what you want. Press Control-Z (on the Mac, Command-Z) to undo, and the © will turn back into "(c)." If autocorrect is turned OFF, though, you can insert a copyright mark with Control-Alt-C (Command-Option-C on the Mac).

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director

 

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.