Typography Textbook

Useful.

Tips like:

“In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period [full stop]. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. As a general rule, no more than a single space is required after a period, colon or any other mark of punctuation.”

And:

If you do need to insert more than a single word space between sentences, or any other characters, then use one of the many space characters available in Unicode. Even if the character itself isn’t included in the current font, Unicode-aware browsers will display a good approximation. Avoid the temptation to use a non-breaking space,  , as this has a meaning in and of itself.

For example:

  •   en space
  •   em space

Comments

Amy says:

Double-spacing is a pain the proverbial. As are double returns, tabbing over to get to where you want the text to start and pretty much anything else you do in word.

Because then some poor sucker designer has to go and clean up the mess.

Look – my first comment of the year and it's a snarky one.

Also: not sure on the gothic titling by the way. While gothic fonts may hav ea lot going for them interest wise, readability is not one of them…