Typesetting

What is it ?
The composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and symbols are retrieved and ordered according to a language.

The line- Reading Process
As you read your eyes spring jerkily along the lines. These movements are known as saccades, and they alternate with fixed periods lasting 0.2-0.4 seconds.


Typography- 3 elements
The letter: the individual character/ glyphs and anatomy.
The word: how these glyphs fit together.
The line: combinations and arrangement of words in a body sequence.

The history
Using letter press, very time consuming.

Now
Using InDesign, a lot quicker
Digital tools- font choice, pt size, metric or optical kerning, leading, tracking, scale and skewing options.

Principles-

Hierarchy, type can be used to create a hierarchy such as having a bold heading to signify its importance.

Alignment,
Left aligned ranged left with ragged right edge
Justified text - clean and classic
Centred and right aligned, hard to work with and look nice very rarely used
'rag' is the irregular/ uneven vertical margin, usually goes in out in out in out to the end. (even rag)

Paragraphs,
indented
full line break

Letter spacing (leading)
refers to the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type.

Tracking (same as leading but horizontal)
refers to amount of space between a group of letters.
Rules: don't go below -40 or above +40

Kerning and pairs
- the distance between two letters however some pairs of letters need specific kerning to bring them closer together such as AV Ty

Hidden Characters
Invisible characters such as returns, spaces and tabs. Only shown when you have 'show hidden characters' on. They indicate the structure.

Line length
Efficient reading depends on comfortable line length usually 40- 75 characters/ 7-12 words.
An overly short line length causes a more extreme and ugly rag in a body of text.

Widows and orphans
words that are left alone at the end of a paragraph/ sentence. Avoid where possible.
To get rid of one widen or shorten the tracking.

Dashes and spaces
Hyphen - used for hyphenating words (check-in)
en dash - shows a range e.g. London – Glasgow (slightly longer than a hyphen)
(ALT & - = –) can be used as a bullet point
em dash - shows interruption in speech and can also be used to show a pause.
(shift alt & -) —

http://www.thepunctuationguide.com

Rivers
the white gaps in typesetting. Usually found in justified text

Baseline Grid
everything has to fit on the grid regardless of size, aligns all text to a vertical grid.




Anthony Burrill Letterpress
A practice for everyday life




Typesetting Task:



Ideas:





































A square, bold, block of text to replicate the description of his father.





Making the title smaller to highlight the importance of his father and his dominant role.



Creating a hierarchy to show his father dominating his mother. Showing her insignificant role in society, she is described as 'wife of the above' on her tombstone therefore isn't important enough to give a decent description of her role in society is to be a submissive wife.