Chicago InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

January 18, 2007

Topic: Type, Type and more Type

Presenters:

Eda Warren, Desktop Publishing Services, Inc., a graphic design and training company, Chicago. Adobe Certified Instructor and Expert-Certified on InDesign CS2, (www.go-training.com)
Tim King, who has spent the last decade or so working in advertising, at both a small specialty boutique and a global agency. He typically works on the IT side of the shop, but specializing in the needs of creative and production workflows. (TimothyKing@mac.com)

Jim Maivald, our group leader, opened the meeting with a spirited Q& A. They get better each meeting, with more people bringing problems to the group for solutions.

Eda Warren talked about and showed the whys and wherefores of hyphenation and justification, “H&J,” as it’s been known for many decades prior to desktop publishing. This material was drawn from the long article, “Mind the Gaps,” that I wrote for the cover story for InDesign Magazine’s February–March/07 issue.

H&J. Hyphenation and justification are intricately connected ever since type alignment was fully justified left and right. The simple fact is that when type is justified, it needs to be hyphenated if you want your text to look good and read easily.
Typographic color. Getting “even typographic color” is the key to when and how you need to hyphenate text. When you squint your eyes and look across a page or spread, the body copy should have an even grayness, rather than dark and light patches. Dark areas happen when words are crammed together in order to justify text. In the lighter areas, words are spaced too far apart. After all, the type engine simply has to justify, so whatever it takes to get the job done, it uses all possible means. Hyphenation for justified text as well as flush-left evens out the spacing so you get better “color” and your readers can glean your message more easily. While flush-left text uses the default letter and word spacing built in by the font designer, you can still see uneven typographic color when there are big variations in the longest to shortest lines, especially noticeable with a shorter column width.
Design considerations: controlling the frequency of hyphenation is not “one-size-fits-all.” Each document has a given line length, usually based on the column grid—the number of columns, as well as your margins and gutters. In a two-column setup, standard page size, the longer length measure means that you can be looser in your controls. For justified text, the type engine has lots of words and word spaces to even out the spacing without much ado. For flush-left text in a two-column-per-page measure, you can pretty much let it “do its own thang” with big swings between the shortest and longest lines. But, when the measure gets shorter, as with a three-column grid, then you need to bring more muscle to the job. Justified text needs more hyphenation to retain good color and flush-left text needs more also, to avoid short lines with only a few words. You need what’s called a tighter “rag”—the profile of the in-and-out line endings—less fluctuation in the lengths, more uniformity.
First big step: turn hyphenation on after you have placed text. While hyphenation is on by default (applies to text you type or paste in a new frame only), you’ll notice that when you place text, hyphenation is decidedly off. When text is highlighted, click the Hyphenation checkbox on the Control palette, Paragraph view. Best practice: include your hyphenation and justification settings in your body copy paragraph styles to standardize and simplify production.
Frequency of hyphenation. Controlling how much hyphenation you want is the hardest part of this story. However your text is aligned, start with the Hyphenation dialog (Control palette menu, paragraph view) and for justified text, you’ll probably need the help of the Justification dialog as well, same palette menu.
“Mystery-meat” slider bar. For flush-left text, you can increase hyphenation for your shorter line lengths by engaging what I call the “mystery-meat” slider bar in the Hyphenation dialog box. But not much mystery with flush-left. Move the slider to the “Better Spacing” end, on the left, to increase hyphenation. Go towards “Fewer Hyphens” to decrease. For justified text, now comes the mystery. Better spacing may mean more hyphens but other powers are at work, but you’d never know. To get the complete picture, you’ll need to check in to the Justification dialog. Here you see a grid for Word & Letter Spacing, as well as Glyph Scaling. For the Spacing controls, the Minimum to Maximum values establish a range that the type engine strives to fulfill, squeezing the word spacing down to four- fifths of a normal space (80% Minimum default) or expanding the space by one-third (133% Maximum default). To increase hyphenation for selected text, raise the Minimum and lower the Maximum, forcing the type engine to push more hyphens, using more uniform spacing. Not too hard.
Letter Spacing and Glyph Scaling are attributes you can add to the mix. They are not on by default. I find that justified text is more even by adding as much as 15–20% Word Spacing. Sounds like a lot but doesn’t look noticeable. Glyph Scaling is the condensing or expanding of the letterforms themselves, another way to even out the color. Many people use a small amount, such as 98–102%.
More mystery. Now, think back to the Hyphenation slider. Here’s the biggest mystery about H&J. With justified text, when you drag the slider towards Better Spacing, you’re not just adding hyphens. You are allowing the type engine to punch in or pull out Word Spacing that goes beyond the ranges you set in the Justification dialog! It’s true! And when you engage Letter Spacing or Glyph Scaling by changing their defaults, the type engine takes further liberties with these attributes when Better Spacing is in command. Remember, “even typographic color” is the goal to give you the best solution possible.
Adobe Paragraph Composer. By default, the hyphenation engine is the Adobe Paragraph Composer (Justification dialog). This wonder of desktop typesetting allows superior hyphenation to be applied to a paragraph by evaluating the entire paragraph to determine where hyphens are most needed, rather than taking it a line at a time, from first to last, which can cause bad breaks near the end. This is one setting you should virtually never change. The only time you might switch to the Single-Line Composer, your other option, is when you want to hand-rag your special flush-left type, line by line, perhaps for an ad. The Paragraph Composer may adjust lines above the line you are correcting, most disconcerting!
Policies. The Hyphenation dialog also contains a series of options that some designers mistake for controlling the frequency of hyphenation. Actually, they are simply rules or policies. These choices are usually left to the editors—how many lines of hyphenated lines should be allowed, minimum number of letters in a words you will hyphenate, etc.

Final words. You can be a bit lazy about H&J when you have long line lengths, but in any event, turn hyphenation on to improve justified text and probably also flush left. But when you get to shorter line lengths, don’t abandon your type to the defaults. Kick in more hyphens and if your text is justified, that means two steps: both the Hyphenation and the Justification dialogs.

Jim Maivald added his two cents about optical kerning, excellent advice. Try applying the Optical Kerning setting for highlighted body copy (Control palette, character view, in the pop-up menu). It can really make a difference in getting smoother-looking text, I was amazed! I had never tried that because kern controls are normally applied at an insertion point, in all other aspects. Thanks Jim!

Tim King, now an independent consultant after being in the ad agency business for years, skimmed off the top of his deep font knowledge to share with us. You could hear a pin drop! He confessed that he’s talking primarily about Mac fonts, that’s his specialty. First he talked about types of fonts: Bitmap, PostScript, TrueType, and OpenType. Although OpenType, developed by Adobe and Microsoft, promises to be a landslide eventually, PostScript Type 1 is still the most used font type today. Multiple Masters were a great idea for specific niches but were generally more trouble than they were worth. Double-bytes are primarily for Asian fonts with tons of characters. TrueTypes are pervasive, particularly on Windows, but less so in professional contexts. Dfonts are a TrueType variation introduced by Apple, motivated by going to the Unix-based OS X. Some you can delete, some not. More about that in a minute.

What fonts should you use? Tim says that PostScript fonts are “going away,” gradually being supplanted by OpenType fonts. One of OpenType’s big advantages is that it addresses the major problem of cross-platform woes. One OpenType font works on both Mac and Windows, finally a solution! As many InDesigners know, OpenType fonts also contain a wide variety of special characters including ligatures, fractions, swash characters, and more. And when you use OpenType ligatures, two or three letters blended together to look more graceful (ff, fl, fi, etc.), and they can be spell-checked.

TrueType fonts are supported almost universally, but they’re a mixed bag. Problematic for older systems (especially older RIPs), PostScript is safer, though most of those problems have gone away on current systems. TrueType still has a reputation for poor quality, mostly due to all the free and extremely cheap fonts floating around, which often have poor or no hinting or kerning and incomplete character sets. TrueType fonts from legitimate foundries won’t have these problems, however.

There are different terms when referring to the varieties of style/weights that a font may have. Most fonts have four “variants”—plain, italic, bold, and bold italic.

Font locations. Mac users went from easy to hard. There was one location for fonts in OS 9, going back to the start of Mac time. But now we have the daunting conundrum of five locations for fonts in OS X:

Home folder > Library > Fonts
Library > Fonts
Network > Library > Fonts
System > Library > Fonts —do not touch!
Classic fonts: Mac OS 9 System Folder > Fonts

Then there are also fonts in application-specific folders for both Microsoft and Adobe. Did you know that if you want instant access to a new font in InDesign, you can plop it in the Fonts folder, inside the InDesign application folder? If InDesign is already running, do nothing -- the font is already available.

Font management. A big topic. Tim couldn’t have stressed more that if you have a lot of fonts, you should use a font manager. If you don’t, your fonts will suck up a lot of memory, your system slows down. You want to keep your font load small. By the way, although it was verboten to put a font family in a folder in OS 9, it’s just fine to do it now in OS X, so don’t hold on to old habits. More on font managers. They solve another really big problem, font ID conflicts. You may have more than one PostScript version of the same font. Sometimes the system shows you one, another time the variant. And of course they compose differently, often causing changes in line count. Font managers warn you of bad fonts and conflicts as well as managing the system fonts.

Font management software. Apple’s FontBook is not a great solution for professionals; it’s really designed for less intensive use, but if your needs are basic, you can’t beat the price (it’s free with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger). Instead try one of the major font managers, like Extensis Suitcase, Extensis Font Reserve (Suitcase & Font Reserve have now been merged into Suitcase Fusion) or Font Agent Pro. And Linotype Font Explorer X is a newcomer on the block, which many people rave about—and it’s free! One reason to choose Suitcase is that it comes with a great utility, Font Doctor, which can verify the status of your fonts, flagging corrupt fonts and other problems. Corrupt fonts are a major source of technical problems and corrupt font caches are another. Font Finagler is good for clearing out system font caches.

Be sure you check out Tim’s PDF doc (linked below) that he prepared for us. Tim points out all the fonts you can NOT throw out in the various locations — and also notes that the others can (and should) be. It was clear that Tim had barely scratched the surface when the time ran out and Jim suggested he come back to continue with this fascinating topic. His final words? Build a “good” font library, meaning keep your fonts free of corruption and “one version of any font—that’s it!”

Font Best Practices
Download [PDF: 114 KB]

Tim also recommended the Extensis booklet: Extensis Best Practices for Managing Fonts in OS X. He says it’s the best detailing of font problems and solutions that he’s ever seen.

Extensis Best Practices for Managing Fonts in OS X
Download [PDF: 116 KB]

Jim Maivald chipped in to say that on Windows there is a practical limit to the total number of fonts you can install. If you have more than 700 active fonts, your fonts start to magically disappear. Harry Potter, anyone?

—The Chicago InDesign User Group meeting notes have been prepared by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS2. Thanks to Tim King for help with these notes.

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