Thread by @wilte

Robert Bringhurst - The Elements of Typographic Style (v3.1, 2005) goodreads.com/book/show/4473…

One em is a distance equal to the type size.

Half an em is called an en.

A quarter of an em is typically about the same as, or slightly more than, the set-width of the letter t.

If the text is justified, a reasonable minimum word space is a fifth of an em (M/5), and M/4 is a good average to aim for.

Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfac tory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size.

The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal.

Shorter lines may compose perfectly well with sufficient luck and patience, but in the long run, justified lines averaging less than 38 or 40 characters will lead to white acne or pig bristles: a rash of erratic and splotchy word spaces or an epidemic of hyphenation.

Use a single word space between sentences.

Hitting the spacebar twice after every period: Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

Kerning - altering the space between selected pairs of letters

Too little kerning is preferable to too much and inconsistent kerning is worse than none.

Numbers often need more kerning than letters do.

In fonts from the Netherlands, unusually tight kerning is common in the sequence ij

Block paragraphs open flush left and are separated vertically from their neighbors by extra lead, usually a white line.

Block paragraphs can be useful in short documents of other kinds. In longer sequences, they may seem soulless and uninviting.

2.4.1 At hyphenated line-ends, leave at least two characters behind and take at least three forward

2.4.2 Avoid leaving the stub-end of a hyphenated word, or any word shorter than four letters, as the last line of a paragraph

Avoid more than three consecutive hyphenated lines

2.4.7 Avoid beginning more than two consecutive lines with the same word.

2.4.8 Never begin a page with the last line of a multi-line paragraph.

2.4.11 Abandon any and all rules of hyphenation and pagination that fail to serve the needs of the text

Rules for translating roman into italic cannot be stated clearly because no such rules exist. The 2 kinds of letterform have different genealogies, like apples and bananas. Common heritage and share an evolutionary source, yet neither one is a direct modification of the other.

4.4 Tables & Lists

4.4.2 Avoid overpunctuating lists.
Dot leaders (lines of dots leading the eye from one word or number to another) are rarely beneficial in tables.

4.4.3 Set lists and columns of figures to align flush right or on the decimal.

5.4.2 Position quotation marks consistently in relation to the rest of the punctuation.

When quotation marks are not kerned, it makes no typographic difference whether they follow commas and periods or precede them.

French typefaces

Both interpret letterforms in terms of Bézier splines (that is to say, they rely on algebraic techniques developed by Paul de Casteljau and Pierre Bézier in France in the 1960s and 1970s) - but PostScript splines are cubic while True Types are quadratic.

Good justification is calculated paragraph by paragraph instead of line by line. And the best computer justification now relies on microscopic adjustments to the space between an the letters as well as the space between the words.

“There is no such thing as the perfect font.” (p.200)

# octothorp (eight fields) is another name for the numeral sign