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Typography: letter spacing vs word spacing in book typography

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    • December 3, 2009 at 7:55 pm #54112
      Magenta
      Member

      Hello all; new member. I'd like to hear opinions on my typographical conundrum… let's see if I can tell you all the details.

      I've been laying out an academic journal for a while now (Lucida Bright 9/11 justified with 4.75in line length), and seen a change of copy editors. The current copy editor has strong preferences about loose lines, but also has an aversion to hyphenation and to ragged bottoms. So I am test-driving allowing letter spacing of 3% max in paragraphs where she complains. I think it degrades legibility somewhat, but compromises are necessary. I can turn on hyphenation on some paragraphs and use letter spacing on others to break it up. I really thought I had this beat when I changed my word spacing parameters, and it did reduce the incidence of loose lines a good deal, but didn't get them all.

      What more can I do? Is Paragraph Composer the best choice or would I have better luck with Single Line Composer? I probably should have chosen a font with more Greek and Math symbol glyphs at the outset, but changing font now would be a major major deal. Is there anything else I haven't considered?

      cheers!

    • December 3, 2009 at 11:51 pm #54122
      Dwayne Harris
      Member

      Hey Magenta–I'm in book publishing as well. And with your column width I don't see how you could have too many loose lines. I think 28p8 is very good.

      I would definitely use the paragraph composer. And with that being said, I'd set your hyphenation for only one hyphen limit (two if worse comes to worse). Then slide the slider over to “less hyphenation.” I think it will definitely give you what you want.

      I'm not sure what your H&Js are, but you can always tweak them. I usually use 80% minimum, 95% optimum, and 120% for maximum. Our clients don't like letterspacing or allow it, although we sometimes manually kern an entire paragraph with a -5 or so to pull a line back.

      In any event–I would definitely use the paragraph composer. If you use single composer you'll be doing a lot of tweaking of lines and it will take you twice as long to do the job.

      doc

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