Typographical Tips from Microsoft Publisher

Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill and Dave Rado

The fact that you have come to this Web site suggests that you are a user of Microsoft Word. In one form or another, Word is ubiquitous. If you buy a new computer, chances are good that it will come with a trial version of Office installed. Word is a powerful word processing program that incorporates many of the features of a page layout application, but there are times when a page layout or desktop publishing application is what is needed. If you are using any edition of Office other than the Standard or Home & Student edition, you have such a program: Microsoft Publisher.

Often Publisher will be better suited to your needs than Word, so it is well worth becoming familiar with it. It is a very user-friendly application, generally aimed at a more casual, less professional level of user than Word. But even if you use only Word, Publisher can be useful to you. Because once upon a time, at least, it came with an excellent manual. The Microsoft Publisher 97 Companion is a 328-page book (compare this to the 19 pages devoted to Publisher in Discovering Microsoft Office 2000 Premium and Professional), and it contains much material that can be equally helpful to Word users.

For example, the chapter “The Look of Words” discusses “what fonts are, how to choose them, and how to get the most from them.” The following tips, guidelines, and rules of thumb are excerpted from that chapter [with some comments interspersed]. We have not attempted to reproduce all the illustrations that appear in the actual manual, but even the text alone is helpful.
  

What's a font?

A font is all the characters of a single design – that is, a complete set of all the letters in the alphabet, plus numerals and symbols.…Each font belongs to a family. Just as the members of a human family have similar but usually not identical features, so do the members of a font family. One font might be italic, another bold, and yet another extra-bold. But they all have a common structure that ties them together. Some font families are large (like Rockwell); others have just one member (like Comic Sans MS).
  

Typeface and font
As you read other books about fonts, you'll encounter the terms type and typeface, which are generally used interchangeably with font in the desktop publishing environment.
  

Traditional fonts
In traditional typesetting, before the advent of computer fonts, different sizes of [a typeface] were considered to be separate fonts. Unlike your computer, which can transform most fonts from tiny to huge with the click of a mouse, every size of every font resided on its own specifically sized piece of metal.

Set in stone
Roman stonemasons chiseled a serif into each stroke they made in slabs of stone (the “paper” of that time) to correct the uneven appearance of the letters and to add a graceful finishing touch to the blunt chiseled edges of the letters.

Serifs entice the eye to move from letter to letter. It's this quality that makes serif fonts superbly readable and so suitable when there is a great deal of text to read.

Sans is French for without, so sans serif fonts have no serifs. Their clean lines make them ideal for headlines and other large text that must catch the reader's attention.

Script fonts look hand-lettered – the letters appear to be joined visually if not physically. Script is useful mostly for invitations to formal or ceremonial occasions, though some of the newer, less formal scripts are suitable for personal correspondence.
  

Font personality

Fonts are like clothing for words. As a man in a black leather jacket, jeans, and rugged boots conveys a very different image and feeling than he does in a three-piece business suit, silk tie, and Italian shoes, so it is with fonts. 

Mixing and matching fonts

Choosing fonts is a lot like planning a wardrobe. You start with some basic fonts that convey the idea and the feeling of your business or organization, and then from time to time you accessorize with fonts appropriate for a particular publication. It also probably goes without saying that the right font means one that you're comfortable with.
  

Choosing a basic look

	Lay the foundation with a couple of fonts that work for your business and stick with them. Those fonts will form the basis of your visual identity (along with a logo, if you have one, and the kind of paper you use), making all your publications instantly recognizable.	Figure 2: The font for Coca-Cola is so distinctive that even if you saw it in Russian, you would know what it was selling

Figure 3: To promote a welding shop, use a forceful, bold font     Figure 4: For a wedding consultant, use something graceful and formal      The goal of good design is communication. Since the bottom line of good communication is clarity, make sure that you're clear about your audience, the point you want to make, and the tone you want to set. Then choose a font that suits that message.   If you're making a publication that will be distributed by fax, avoid fonts with elaborate and delicate detail (like Harrington). The faxing process can fill in the open spaces of the letters and muddy the detail. [Note: this is one instance where sans serif body text can be better than serif.].

Think about the paper you're using, too. If you use newsprint, textured paper, or other papers that soak up ink, avoid delicate, detailed fonts.

Mixing fonts
Sometimes one font isn't compelling enough to pique and hold the reader's interest. The contrast between two fonts can attract the reader's eye and help clarify the organization of the piece. For example, designers usually use a different font for body text – the text that forms the main body of the publication – than for headlines (also known as display text). The following rules will help you mix fonts successfully.

The look of body text

As its name suggests, body text is the text that forms the main body of your publication. In a newsletter or a book, it's the story. In a smaller publication, it's everything that isn't either a headline or special text like captions and fancy first letters.

Choosing a font for body text
First and foremost, body text must be readable. If the words aren't readable, you've lost your audience. More subtly, pay attention to the emotional impact of the font. In the same way that background music in a movie affects the feeling you have about a scene, the font you choose for body text affects the mood of your publication and the response of your audience to it. Also, depending on how much you have to say and how much space you have to say it in, you might need to consider the compactness of the font. Once you've chosen a body font, stick with it throughout your publication; otherwise you can confuse your reader.

Readability

	We read words by their shapes and not letter by letter, so readable fonts are those that make it easy for the reader's eye to scan words and lines – to read blocks of text. Serifs give words distinctive shapes that the eye recognizes more easily than it recognizes sans serif shapes. But blocks of sans serif text can be readable as body text, especially when given plenty of white space.
	DON'T USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS or all italics for body text. They can all be practically impossible to read at the smaller sizes of body text.
	A medium-weight font – not too heavy and not too light – is most readable. If you have a text-intensive page, consider a light font like Goudy Old Style. If the text is sparse, use a dark font like Rockwell.
	Consider the height of the lowercase letters (the “x-height,” as it's known to typographers). The “x-height” refers to the main body height of the lowercase letters, excluding ascenders and descenders – “x” in particular because in the letter x all the terminals of the letter touch a line of measurement. At small point sizes, fonts with larger x-heights tend to be more readable.

Feeling

You might not think of black text as having color. But black text combined with white space “colors” the page. Consider the way the color feels to you and if that's how you want your readers to feel.

Figure 5

A light-colored body text has a soft, calm feeling; dark text is stronger and more emphatic. Take your printer into account, too – if it prints on the dark side, you can compensate by choosing a lighter font.

Figure 6		Compactness The number of characters per line varies from one font to another even when the same font size is specified. If you have a lot of information to fit into a small amount of space, choose a compact font.

Formatting body text

You can save yourself a lot of time and effort and easily keep the formatting consistent throughout your publication if you use text styles, particularly if your publication has more than a handful of pages.
  

Font size
Make all body text within a publication the same size – between 10 and 12 points is the norm; smaller text can be difficult to read. Obviously this doesn't apply if your publication is a poster that's meant to be read at a distance or a newsletter for people with low vision.
  

A quick lesson about points, picas, font sizes, and leading
When you're working in Publisher, it's helpful to understand typographic measurements and how they're used. One inch (2.54 centimeters) can be broken down into points and picas, as follows:

It seems simple enough when you use these measurements to determine spacing between lines (leading) – you can easily use a point scale or a pica scale to measure and verify the number of points of spacing between lines on your hard copy. It can get confusing, though, when you look at font size, which is also described in points (see the “E”s in the previous margin graphic). [The illustration shows the letter E at 11, 12, 14, 18, and 24 points.] You might say to yourself, “That 12-point E doesn't look as if it's 12 points tall!” And you'd be right – it's not. Font sizes are measured completely differently than leading, even though they're both specified in points, and the only way you can verify font size on your hard copy is by measuring it against the designated sizes that you'll find on an E-scale. Most art-supply stores carry precision rules, which combine a pica scale, a point scale, and an E-scale in one handy tool.

Space between characters
You can adjust the spacing of letters, or characters, in your text for a single word or an entire paragraph.

Space between sentences
Current publishing convention puts one space, not two, between sentences. You can see the spaces on your screen by choosing Show Special Characters from the View menu. [For more on displaying nonprinting characters in Word see What do all those funny marks, like the dots between the words in my document, and the square bullets in the left margin, mean?]. If you habitually press the spacebar twice at the end of every sentence, you can remedy the situation by using the Replace command from the Edit menu.…

The habit of putting two spaces between sentences is a holdover from the days of typewriters when the typed characters were monospaced (Courier New is an example of such a font). That is, the space each letter occupied was as wide as the font's widest letter. So, because this created big spaces between some letters, you needed an even bigger space to show that you'd reached the end of a sentence. Today, however, most fonts are proportional – “skinny” letters take up the least amount of space and “fat” ones the most, and so one space after the period is enough to make the division between sentences clear.

Space between lines
Space between lines is to words what air is to people. Publisher automatically puts some vertical space between single-spaced lines, and in most cases this is adequate. But there will be occasions when you'll want to fine-tune it. Too little or too much space makes the text hard to read. Following are some suggestions for changing the line spacing while keeping the text readable.

Space between paragraphs
Just as you add a space after the period to separate sentences, you must signal where a new paragraph begins. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first method is the most economical, allowing room for more words on the page; the second adds more white space.

Line length
Readability is affected by line length. A very general rule is an average of 10 to 12 words per line for a serif font and 8 or 9 for a sans serif font. [Another rule of thumb is approximately 1½ alphabets or between 40 and 60 characters.]

Alignment
You can change the alignment of selected text in a flash. Simply click one of the alignment buttons on Publisher's [or Word's] Format toolbar – the buttons are shown below next to the descriptions of the four ways to align text:

Adding emphasis
Well-set type is smooth and rhythmic, and adding emphasis should be done in a subtle way, without disrupting the even texture of the page. You can achieve this if you follow the basic guidelines below.

Punctuation and special characters

Apostrophes and quotation marks
Publisher automatically gives you typographer's apostrophes ( ’ ) and single ( ‘ ’ ) and double ( “ ” ) quotation marks (often called “smart quotes”), rather than foot ( ' ) or inch
( " ) marks. [Word also does this by default.] If you do want inch or foot marks for measurements now and then, that's easy, too: simply hold down the CTRL key while you type the quotation mark or apostrophe. [In Word, press CTRL+Z to reverse the AutoFormat correction.] These contribute greatly to your publication's professional look.…If you'll be typing lots of measurements, it's easy to turn the smart quotes option off [do this in Word on the AutoFormat As You Type tab of Tools | AutoCorrect. Alternatively, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to typographer's foot and inch marks – the prime and double-prime characters found at 0162 and 0178 in the Symbol font and also included in the expanded character set of many Unicode fonts.]

  
 Figure 7

Dashes
There are three kinds of dashes, each a bit longer than the other. 

[In the US,] you don't need to put spaces before or after dashes.

The look of display text: headings and headlines

Display text – headings and headlines – is meant to catch the reader's eye by being distinctive, evocative, and big: as a general rule, display text is larger than 14 points.

However, display text works differently in a publication such as a book or a report than it does in an advertisement in a brochure or magazine. In the former case, the readers are already involved and the display text helps them to see the organization of the publication and to navigate in it. In the latter case, the display text must capture their imagination so that they'll read the advertisement.

Choosing a display font
Start by playing around – set the headings in different fonts and see how they feel. Display fonts have a big impact on a publication because of their size, so it's important that they convey the mood you want.

Formatting display text
In Publisher, you can set display text as plain text or you can use WordArt for display text. [WordArt is also available in Word.]

Use plain, unadorned text for publications such as reports, in which display text helps organize the page, or in elegant or formal publications like invitations or awards. Plain text is very legible, which makes it desirable for critical information like road signs or telephone numbers. Plain text also gives you control over the spacing between letters, which is important when letters are set large. You can achieve the contrast you want by relying on a larger size, a heavier weight, or a different font. And finally, you might have fewer printing problems when you use plain text.

Use Publisher WordArt when you want splashy effects to heighten contrast. You can put white text on a black (or colored) background, pour text into a shape, add shadows to letters, or twist and turn text in a variety of ways. [Some of these effects are also available for plain text in Word.] Once you have placed it in your publication, however, you cannot directly edit the WordArt. To make changes, you have to reactivate the WordArt program by double-clicking the WordArt frame.

You'll want to limit the use of WordArt, though, simply because it is so memorable. Too much of it is like having a dinner entirely of desserts or a birthday every day of the year. A maximum of half a dozen words is a good rule.

Size and weight
To generate impact, set main headings between two and four times larger than body text – even five times larger for greater punch. Let your eye be the judge, but headlines that are much larger and darker than body text attract the reader's attention immediately. [For long documents such as books and reports, headings are not usually so large; Word's default Heading 1 is 14-point Arial, while Body Text is 10- or 12-point Times New Roman; Arial is admittedly heavier than Times, however, with a greater x-height.] You can also use color every effectively in headings.

Another effective way to set off subheads and make their associated text clear is by placing a horizontal line (also called a rule) above the heading. [You can do this in Word by applying a top border in the Format | Borders and Shadings dialog.]

Make sure that the size of the heading reflects its importance – the more important the heading, the larger its size. Larger sizes help readers figure out where to look on the page, and smaller subheads pull them along through the story. [The Headings in this article illustrate the point.]

Capitalization
Be judicious in your use of all capital (uppercase or all caps) letters – they're often not as legible as a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters and they don't necessarily look more important.

The look of fancy first letters, captions, and other special text

There are other kinds of text that don't readily fall into the body text and display text categories – sidebars (information that might interest a reader, but that isn't essential), fancy first letters that attract the eye to the page, captions with pictures, and pull quotes (excerpts from the body of the story, often set large). Use these elements in moderation, however, or your publication could look tacky and confusing. And once you've chosen the font and style for any of these elements, use them consistently throughout the publication.

Fancy first letters
It's easy to create a fancy first letter (also called a drop cap or raised cap) in Publisher. If the font doesn't work with your publication, you can change it to match the heading font, or use another font that complements the style of your publication. [In Word, use Format | Drop Cap to make a drop cap or a large initial in the margin; for a raised cap, merely increase the font size.]

If you have more than one fancy first letter on a page, scatter them and make sure they don't line up along the top of the page. A fancy first letter often takes the place of a heading, so you don't want it at the bottom of the page either.

Captions and callouts
When you mix fonts in your publication, it's a good idea if the font you use for captions and callouts is related either to the body text font or to the display font, as shown in the following illustration [which shows Arial Bold headings and a smaller Arial Italic for captions and callouts]. You'll notice, though, that the designers of this book used a third font (Blueprint) for the captions and margin notes –proving that it's okay to break the rules sometimes!

Pull quotes
A pull quote extracts a short statement from the story to add visual interest to the page and to attract the reader's attention.

Using text styles for  fast and consistent formatting

Text styles are formatting descriptions that you can use to quickly apply text formatting on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. Text styles contain all the formatting information that you need: font and font size, indents, line spacing, tabs, and special formatting such as numbered lists or character spacing. By using text styles, you can make even complex formatting easy by just choosing the style name. And by using text styles for specific purposes – a heading style for headings, a list style for lists, and a body style for body text – you can maintain a consistent design throughout your story, your entire publication, and even multiple publications.

Text styles can come from a variety of sources. Some text styles are created by Publisher, such as the Continued-On Text style, which Publisher uses when a “Continued on page…” notice is automatically included in your text frame. [Word also uses some styles automatically; among these are Header, Footer, Caption, Footnote Reference, and Footnote Text.] You can create other text styles in your word processor as you write your text, and those styles will be included in Publisher when you import the file. You can also define your own styles in Publisher, import text styles from other publications, or use text styles that have been saved in a template. [All of these are true in Word as well, and there are even more good reasons for using styles in Word.]

See also:
Creating a Template – The Basics (Part II)
Understanding Styles.