Summary of key rules
The four most important typographic considerations for body text are
- point size,
- line spacing,
- line length, and
- font
because those choices determine how the body text looks.
Typografie
Schrift erklärt
Online Publikation mit Grundregeln der Typografie:
RW-6166_LESEPROBE.PDF
Butterick's Practical Typography
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Detailtypografie
The four most important typographic considerations for body text are
- point size,
- line spacing,
- line length, and
- font
because those choices determine how the body text looks.Key Rules
- point size should be 9–12 points in printed documents, 15-25 pixels on the web.
- line spacing should be 120–145% of the point size.
- The average line length should be 45–90 characters (including spaces).
- The easiest and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to use a professional font, like those found in font recommendations.
- Avoid goofy fonts, monospaced fonts, most free fonts, (and system fonts).
- Use curly quotation marks, not straight ones (see straight and curly quotes).
- Use bold or italic as little as possible, and not together.
- Never underline, except perhaps for web links.
- all caps are fine for less than one line of text.
- Use centered text sparingly.
- Put only one space between sentences.
- Don’t use multiple word spaces or other white-space characters in a row.
- If you don’t have real small caps, don’t use them at all.
- Use 5-12% extra letterspacing with all caps and small caps.
- kerning should always be turned on.
- Use first-line indents that are one to four times the point size of the text, or use 4-10 points of space between paragraphs. Don’t use both.
- Always use hyphenation with justified text.
- Don’t confuse hyphens and dashes, and don’t use multiple hyphens as a dash.
- Use ampersands sparingly, unless included in a proper name.
- Use proper trademark and copyright symbols — not alphabetic approximations.
- In a document longer than three pages, one exclamation point is plenty (see question marks and exclamation points).
- Put a nonbreaking space after paragraph and section marks.
- Make ellipses using the proper character, not periods and spaces.
- apostrophes point downward.
- Make sure foot and inch marks are straight, not curly.
Grid
Editorial Grids - Christopher Moorehead | Information Design + Typography
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Typolexikon.de | Das Lexikon der Typografie
EditorialDesign_klein.pdf