Five Typesetting Mysteries Solved
Today’s digital environment has placed the responsibility of professional typesetting in the hands of the graphic designer, as opposed to the dedicated, highly-trained typographers of the past. This task requires knowledge of proper typesetting conventions, as well as in-depth understanding of the software being used. This can be problematic, as most designers and production people have little or no formal training in either of these, and have to learn by trial and error, along with hopefully some professional guidance or mentoring.
In my own experience setting type using Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, I have come upon a number of unwanted occurrences that I have had to solve on my own, or with a bit of research. Here is a list of the most puzzling and annoying of them, with an explanation and solution.
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All good points, and pragmatic! Though in the final example, the all-caps title *should* be letterspaced (though not the caps-and-lowercase “by Oscar Wilde”). Sometimes I’ll see a byline like that letterspaced by accident after a properly letterspaced heading.
Of course you’re completely right that the typographer should make these choices deliberately, not by accident.
Fine article! Thank you, Ilene. This sort of information reminds me of why I miss paper manuals.
When I was a compositor/typographer in the days of Monotype small caps were hair-spaced between each character; a pain to do as you had to cut them yourself. Good article though, thanks.
Thanks for this great article! Could you say a little more about this point in the last topic:
1) when the last type you set or styled has a plus or minus tracking value, which will then automatically be applied to the next type you style, without a warning
Could you give an example of when this kind of thing could happen?
Thanks!