Typesetting Seminar

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalent. Most importantly 'The Line - The Reading Process'.
There are three main elements of typography;
- The Letter: Actual Letterforms, individual glyphs and characters and the anatomy of them.
- The Word: How these glyphs fit together to make a word.
- The Line: General term for the body or sequence, and the arrangement of words.

Adobe Type - Point Size, Metric/Optical Kerning, Leading, Tracking, Scale and Skewing.


'Typography is not an art form, or an exact science, but more the craft.'

- Hierarchy, most important information , type size, weight.
- Alignment, left aligned, justified text (no rag) , centred, right aligned, (hard to work with) 'rag' refers to the irregular or uneven vertical margin. Rag is a really important thing. Convention of the rag, in out in, out in out, each line alternates in length, even down the whole body of text, making it easier to look at.
- Paragraphs, indented, full line breaks
- Letter spacing, leading (vertical letter spacing), - leading, + leading, automatic leading. Lack of white space impairs reading. Leading needs to be higher than point size.
- Tracking, same as leading but horizontally. -40 and +40 are not advised. Wide tracking opens up type giving it a more airy feel.
- Kerning and pairs, distance between two letters, there are some letter parings that may need particular attention when kerning.
- Hidden characters they indicate the structure of your body of text and show how the type is set. Useful for finding double spaces and unintentional line breaks. 
- Line length, efficient reading depends on a comfortable line length. 8-12 words long. 40-75 characters. Long length makes it hard to find the next line, short length means more hyphenation and more rag. 
- Widows and orphans, words that are left alone at the end of a paragraph or sentence. Use tracking and line length to remove them.
- Dashes and Spaces, en dash (used to show a range of things) needs spacing. Em dash, multi use, showing speech, interruption, can be used as a pause. Gives a human aspect and voice to your typography. Different sizes of spaces, hair space, thin space, regular space, en dash space and em dash space. em — en – hyphen -
- www.thepunctuationguide.com
- Grids, key element in modernist typography, The Raster Systeme, using a grid to break it or using a grid to structure it. 
- Rivers, rivers of white or gaps in typesetting. Use tracking, paragraphing, leading to get rid of them. Can test for rivers by turning the proof sheet upside down. It is a disadvantage to justified text. 
- Baseline grid, aligns all your text to a horizontal grid, where the bottom of each letter is positioned onto the grid. Just like writing on lined paper. 
- To hyphenate or not to hyphenate, sometimes you have to hyphenate, different opinions on hyphenation.