Everyday we see professions become extinct because of the computer or the internet. One of the first to go, soon after the introduction of desktop publishing, was the professional typographer. It's regrettable, not so much that a vocation was lost, but because the standards of good typography have fallen by the wayside. Our current software (for both design and business) offers great capability for executing good typography, but a vast number of users are just not aware of what quality typography is.
Many elements of “good” typography are subtle, but they all add up to professional look. For everyone of you who uses a computer to create text on a page, we’d like to share the most common typography standards that contribute to a professional appearance. I'm sure you will recognize many of the bad key board practices are remnants of the typewriter and word processor.
• Use one space between sentences, whether they end in periods, colons, exclamation marks, question marks, or quotation marks.
Two spaces after a sentence is only needed using a typewriter because the characters are monospaced (they each take up the same amount of space). Typographic fonts which are used on the computer are proportional. Each character takes up just the amount of space it needs. Thus the letter i uses one-fifth the space as the letter m.
• Use real quotation marks and apostrophes.
These might require a little more effort, but the added professionalism they give your work is well worth it. The marks next to your return or enter key are inch and foot marks. Some software will convert these to real quote and apostrophe marks automatically if you set that in the preferences. However if you sometimes need inch and foot marks it is preferable to get used to using the (invisible-key caps) keyboard combination for the real quote and apostrophe.
An example is: use “people”—not "people", or dog’s—not dog's.
• Never use two hyphens instead of a dash.
Again, the typewriter is the culprit. Typewriters didn’t have dashes as typographers did, so we learned to use two hyphens when we wanted a dash.
• When to use a hyphen, En dash and Em dash:
Here are only a few indications of where these are to be used. A punctuation style manual has directions for extensive usage.
1) The hyphen is strictly for hyphenating words or line breaks.
2) The en dash is used between two words to indicate a duration like 3–5 years, or January–June. This is not a hyphen. The en dash is also used for a compound adjective or to separate two hyphenated words. To create an en dash on the PC while holding down the ALT key, type the numbers 0150. On a Mac keyboard you would use the keys option/hyphen.
The em dash is twice the width as an en dash and is used instead of a colon or parentheses or it indicates an abrupt change of thought. There should be no space on either side of it. To create an em dash on the PC, while holding down the ALT key, type the numbers 0151. On a Mac the keys are shift/option/hyphen.
• Don’t underline. Use italic or bold for emphasis.
The only way we could emphasis words on the typewriter was to underline them. If you really need to underline something use a rule or any means to control the weight of the line as well as the distance from the baseline. Just don't use the underline style as it appears in a menu as it will cut into descenders (g, j, p, q and y) and is generally too bold.
• Don’t use all capital letters.
A short headline might benefit from all caps, but anything else in all caps (sentence or paragraph) is hard to read. Research has proven people have to read letter by letter if it is all caps. The use of bold and/or a size change is much more attractive and more effective.
• Use tabs and first-line indents to align text. Never use the space bar to indent or line up words and numbers.
Then there is kerning which is critical to good typography. Kerning is the space between characters which is totally dependent on your eye. This topic is to extensive for us to cover here.
Our suggestions for achieving a better looking page is just an introduction to what quality typography is. We hope you will explore typography further.
For a quick reference guide to PC keyboard shortcuts go to http://www.takeflightgraphics.com/PC_keyboard_shortcuts.pdf.
On the Mac key caps special characters are accessible in page layout software as glyphs or go to http://www.forlang.wsu.edu/help/keyboards2.asp