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A Typograph y Primer
Word Processing for Publishers Series
We’ve come a long way from Pica and Elite. Today there’s an almostunlimited number of font styles and sizes to use in your writingprojects and tons of ways to use them. Fonts are addictive with manyof us constantly adding to our collections. For scrapbookers, fonts addto the design of a well-crafted page. For self-publishers, they impactboth the design and the readability of your document.This guide takes a look at the principles of typography and discussesthe issues that will affect your family history project. Learn how tomake your publication easier to read and to use type to pull thereader’s eye to the things you want to emphasize.
What’s Inside . . .
Legibility 2Readability 2Terms of the Trade 2Font Types 3Fonts and Layout 5Resources 7
Legibility
The typeface designer creates a font style so that each character iseasily distinguished from the others. Your responsibility is to choosefonts that make it easy for your readers to read your narrative. Doesthis mean you shouldn’t use those great fonts you love? No. What itdoes mean is that decorative and script font styles are hard on thereader’s eye and should be reserved for decorative and impactpurposes, not in long swaths of body text.
Readability
Readability is your responsibility. Here, you are helping your readersmove through your publication without straining their eyes. Thisbecomes an issue in longer texts, like books. There’s a reason you’reseeing more “large type” books on the market - readability for oldereyes. Readability includes not only the choice of font style, but fontsize, character and word spacing, line length and spacing betweenlines.
Terms of the Trade
Many of the terms still used when discussing type issues date fromthe early days of type-setting. Some of them include:•Points. A unit of measure when discussing type. Font sizes aremeasured in points. There are 72 points to an inch.
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•Pica. Also a typesetting measurement, a pica is frequently used todescribe the width of a column. There are 12 points in a pica and 6picas to an inch.•Kerning. The term used to describe adjusting the white spacebetween characters. Look at the capital “T” in this guide’s headings.Notice how the next letter has been tucked up under the crossbar of the “t”. The font designer created his typeface to do that so therewouldn’t be awkward white space between the characters. Sometypefaces handle this better than others.•Leading. Usually called line height today, it represents the distancebetween lines of type. In the days of manual typesetting, a strip of lead was used to separate each line. Today it’s a setting in your wordprocessor.
Font Types
There are two groups of type - serif and san-serif. There’s ahuge number of font groups. What’s the difference? Whilethere are all kinds of fonts, not all are suitable for the body text- or type - of a publication. The Silly Sister font may be greatfor a scrapbook page, but it would be a big headache (literally)for anyone trying to read a 150 page family history.The serif type group has little widgies - called serifs - at theend of each stroke as shown in this example. San-serif typefaces do not. Serif fonts have been considered more
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