Folio
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Setting text

Spacing letters, lines and paragraphs, and breaking them well, so that a page of text is easy to read.

Leading

Also: line spacing, line height

The distance from one line’s baseline to the next, in points. Type set at 11 pt on 14 pt leading is written 11/14 and said “eleven on fourteen”.

Snow came in the night, and by morning it had filled the lane to the top of the gate. My mother stood at the kitchen window with her coat still on, as if she had meant to go out and the weather had changed her mind. We did not talk about my father.

11/14 pt

Comfortable: about 120 to 145% of the type size. Designers write it as size over leading, 11/14 pt.

NotParagraph spacing: extra space between paragraphs. Leading is the spacing of every line inside them.

SaySet A Winter of Small Hours 10.5/14, and keep the leading the same on facing pages so the lines back each other up.

Tracking

Also: letter-spacing

Adding or removing the same space between every letter in a stretch of text. Small capitals and labels set in capitals usually need a little; body text needs none.

The summer issue

The harbour wall

0

Tracking is counted in thousandths of the type size. Capitals in a small label look better opened up, around +80; lowercase text looks best left alone, and falls apart when spaced.

NotKerning: which adjusts the space between one particular pair of letters. Tracking changes all of them at once.

SayTrack the section labels in Lowtide +60 in capitals, and leave the body text at zero.

Kerning

Adjusting the space between particular pairs of letters, such as AV or To, whose shapes would otherwise leave a gap. A good font carries a table of kerning pairs; a designer adjusts more by hand only in big headings.

AVATAR
Wave

The font’s kerning tucks each A under its neighbour and the a under the W, so the gaps look as even as the rest.

NotTracking: the same change to the space between every letter.

SayTurn on the font’s kerning everywhere in Lowtide, and check the cover lines by eye: the Wa in Wave looks loose at 96 pt.

Measure

Also: line length

The length of a line of text, counted in characters including spaces. Too long and the eye loses its place on the way back; too short and the reading is choppy.

Snow came in the night, and by morning it had filled the lane to the top of the gate. My mother stood at the kitchen window with her coat still on, as if she had meant to go out and the weather had changed her mind. We did not talk about my father. We talked about the milk, which would not come, and about the hens, which would have to be fed whatever the snow decided.

62 characters a line

Between 45 and 75 characters, counting spaces: the range most books keep to. About 65 is a common target.

NotColumn width: the space the column takes up. The measure is what that width holds at a given type size.

SayKeep the measure of A Winter of Small Hours to about 60 to 65 characters; widen the margins rather than lengthen the line.

Ranged left and justified

Also: ragged right, flush left, left-aligned, full justification

Ranged-left text lines up on the left with an uneven right edge, and every word space is the same. Justified text lines up on both sides, by stretching or squeezing the word spaces in each line.

In 1817 Karl Drais showed a running machine in Mannheim: two wheels in a line, a wooden frame and a saddle. Riders pushed it along with their feet, and on a good road it beat walking.

Every word space is the same width, and the right edge is uneven: the rag.

NotCentred: lines of different lengths balanced around the middle: for a title, not for paragraphs.

SayJustify the text of A Short History of the Bicycle with hyphenation on, and set the captions and callouts ranged left.

Rag

The uneven right edge of ranged-left text. A good rag goes in and out gently; a poor one has deep holes, staircases or wedge shapes that pull the eye away from the words.

The house was quiet in the small hours, and I
learned to listen for it: the stove cooling,
the wind in the chimney, and once,
very late, my mother
crying in the room below mine, so softly that
I thought at first it was the snow.

The red line traces the right edge. It steps in like a staircase, then jumps back out, leaving a hole on the fourth line.

NotJustified: which has no rag: both edges are straight.

SayCheck the rag on the Lowtide sidebars and rebreak any line that leaves a hole or makes a staircase.

Hyphenation

Breaking a word at the end of a line with a hyphen, at a point a dictionary allows. Justified text needs it to keep the word spaces even, and ranged-left text uses it to keep the rag smooth.

Her correspondence was extraordinarily disorganised: unanswered invitations, overdue accounts and handwritten recollections of neighbours who had long since moved away.

A justified column with long words and no hyphens: whole words move down, and the spaces left behind gape.

NotHyphenated word: a word like well-known, whose hyphen is part of its spelling wherever it falls.

SayTurn hyphenation on for A Winter of Small Hours with a British English dictionary, no more than two hyphens in a row, and none in the chapter titles.

River

A channel of white running down through a paragraph, where word spaces in several lines happen to line up. It is a fault of justified text set narrow without hyphenation.

It is hard to say why one house stays warm and the next one does not. A wall, a roof or a fire may be part of it, but a house can have all of these and still be cold. What makes the rest of it is the work: if there is wood to be cut, we cut it, and then we sit by it, and so the long winter goes by.

A narrow justified column with no hyphenation stretches its word spaces until they line up. Squint at the text and the white channels running down it appear on their own.

NotGutter: the deliberate space between columns or at the spine. A river is an accident inside the text.

SayThere are rivers in the narrow sidebar columns of Lowtide: turn on hyphenation there, or set them ranged left.

Widow

The last line of a paragraph left alone at the top of a page or column. Editors fix it by rewriting a line or adjusting the spacing so the paragraph ends a line earlier or later.

24
25

The last line of a paragraph has been pushed over the page and sits alone at the top of the recto.

NotRunt: a single short word alone on a paragraph’s last line. Many people call that a widow too, so say which you mean.

SayCheck every spread of A Winter of Small Hours for widows before the proofs go out, and fix them by editing, not by squeezing the type.

Orphan

The first line of a paragraph left alone at the bottom of a page or column, with the rest of the paragraph overleaf. Usage varies, and some people swap the names of widow and orphan.

24
25

A new paragraph starts on the last line of the verso, and the reader turns the page after one line of it.

NotWidow: the last line of a paragraph, alone at the top of the next page.

SayNo orphans in A Winter of Small Hours: if a paragraph starts on the last line of a page, carry it over and let that page run a line short.

Paragraph indent and paragraph space

Also: first-line indent, space between paragraphs

Two ways to show a new paragraph. An indent starts its first line a little way in, usually one em (the type size); a paragraph space adds a gap above it. Books use one or the other, not both.

A short history of the bicycle

The first bicycles had no pedals. Riders sat on a wooden frame and pushed it along with their feet.

Pedals came in the 1860s, fixed to the front wheel. To go faster, makers made that wheel bigger and bigger.

The safety bicycle of the 1880s, with a chain and two equal wheels, is the shape we still ride today.

Each new paragraph starts one em in, with no gap. The first paragraph after a heading is not indented: nothing comes before it.

NotBlock indent: which moves a whole paragraph in from the margin, as for a long quotation.

SayUse a one-em indent in A Short History of the Bicycle, with no indent after a heading; in Bread on Sundays, put a half-line space between the steps of each method.

Drop cap

Also: initial, drop initial

A large capital at the start of a paragraph that sinks down into the first few lines of text. It marks where a chapter or a long text begins.

When the snow came that year it came all at once, in the night, and by morning the village had gone quiet in a way I had never heard before. My mother lit the stove before it was light and stood beside it with her hands open, as though she were warming them at a story. Nobody went to work. Nobody, as far as I could tell, even tried.

The capital sinks three lines deep: its top lines up with the first line’s capitals, its foot sits on the third line’s baseline.

NotRaised cap: a large capital that sits on the first line’s baseline and rises above the text instead of sinking into it.

SayOpen each chapter of A Winter of Small Hours with a three-line drop cap in the display face, and use none anywhere else.

Hanging punctuation

Also: optical margin alignment

Letting quotation marks, and sometimes hyphens and full stops, stand just outside the edge of the text, so the letters themselves make a straight edge. It matters most in large type.

Tom Hale has fished out of Porthcarrow for forty years.

“You don’t fish the sea here. You fish the tide, and the tide decides.”

The opening quotation mark sits outside the text edge, so the letters of every line align on the red rule.

NotHanging indent: where every line but the first is indented, as in a numbered list.

SayHang the opening quotation marks on the pull quotes in Lowtide so the first letter lines up with the lines below.

En dash and em dash

Also: en rule, em rule

Two dashes longer than a hyphen. The en dash, about the width of an n, joins ranges such as 12–15; the em dash, about the width of an m, sets off an aside in American style. British style uses a spaced en dash for the aside.

The tide tables are on pages 12–15.

The harbour – busy all summer – is empty by October.

It is a well-kept secret.

British books use the en dash for both: closed up in a range, with a space either side for an aside.

NotHyphen: the shortest, which joins words such as well-known and breaks words at the end of a line.

SayFollow British style in Lowtide: closed-up en dashes for page and date ranges, spaced en dashes for asides, and no em dashes.

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