The Professional Look – Part XII
The Professional Look, The Complete Guide to Desktop Publishing, is a book I co-authored with Scott Tilden in 1991. Each Thursday I post an excerpt from the chapter I wrote about typography. Many of you dye-subbers also design some of the graphics you print, which includes setting type. Hopefully these posts will give you new insights into typography. Click here for my previous post.
Avoid rough types
Properly done, rag-right typography follows all the normal procedures of hyphenation and wordbreaking used to justify copy, except that extra space isn’t added to fill out line lengths. Set well, it is called tight rag.
Loose rag-right typography, called rough rag, looks unkempt and slows reading.
If your rag-right lines consistently vary in length from line to line by two or more picas, check to see if possible hyphenation points were missed.
The justification of space
Justifying type involves calculating how much short of a full line measure each line will fall, then distributing that extra space between words — called word spacing — and even between letters — letter spacing — to fill the line out to full line width.
As a desktop publisher, you don’t have to worry about the math — the computer program will do it for you. However, most DTP software allows you to control both word and letter spacing to some degree if you don’t like the way it is doing it, or to make the type fit better into the space you have allotted.
Don’t space out
Watch out for overly wide word spacing. It makes type more difficult to read.
It’s like listening to an incredibly slow talker. You get edgy waiting for the next word to come out. The same thing happens when you read widely spaced copy.
Is your word spacing too wide? Turn your typeset page upside down. If word spaces are still clearly visible, chances are word spacing is too wide.
Next week: Letter spacing
Tags: letter spacing, rag right, word spacing
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