Typography

Fount and typestyle

Desktop publishing has put a wide range of typographical options into the hands of ordinary, computer-using people. Many make the mistake of using too many types of fount and typestyle. We should learn from experienced typographers to use just a few such options. The ideal is to have one style (possibly sans serif) for headings and another for body-text (preferably serif for readability).

Line-length (measure)

Many business-documents and letters are produced on paper which is about 200 millimetres (eight inches) wide with left and right margins of around 20 millimetres (less than one inch). The resulting line-length of around 160 millimetres is too long be read comfortably, particularly if 10- or 12-point body-text is used (as it customarily is).

Published printed material uses lines which are a good bit shorter than 160 millimetres. A small survey yields the following:

publication type-size (points) line-length (mm) length/size (rounded)

novel (Penguin Classics War and Peace) 11 85 8

newspaper (features-pages of the London Independent) 9 76 8

newspaper (news-pages of the London Independent) 9 39 4

The rule of thumb which emerges from the above is that, if the line-length (in millimetres) divided by the type-size (in points) is much above 10, the text will be hard to read. To rectify this, one should either shorten the line or enlarge the text.

An even simpler rule of thumb is that the type-size (in points) should equal the line-length (in centimetres). Thus, if one really must fill a 160 millimetre-wide space, one should use 16 point type, though the effect on the reader is a bit like being shouted at from close quarters. It is better to reduce the line-length to match the chosen type-size. For business-letters, a pleasing style is 130 millimetre-long lines of 13 point type.

Web-typography

If you make lines of text on a computer-screen the same width as the screen, they are very hard to read. Surfers can overcome this by resizing their browsers' windows, but the considerate web-designer does not fill the screen in the first place. Although frames can overcome this problem, the best way to make text narrow enough to be easily read is to enclose it in a borderless table whose width is defined. These pages' body-text is in tables whose width is 67%. Surfers can change their browsers' settings so that text appears in a fount they like.