👓 Butterick’s Practical Typography

Read Typewriter habits by Matthew But­t­er­ick (Butterick’s Practical Typography)

I’ve claimed through­out this book that many bad ty­pog­ra­phy habits have been im­posed upon us by the type­writer. Here, I’ve col­lected them in one list.

  1. Straight quotes rather than curly quotes (see straight and curly quotes).
  2. Two spaces rather than one space be­tween sen­tences.
  3. Mul­ti­ple hy­phens in­stead of dashes (see hy­phens and dashes).
  4. Al­pha­betic ap­prox­i­ma­tions of trade­mark and copy­right sym­bols.
  5. el­lipses made with three pe­ri­ods rather than an el­lip­sis character.
  6. Non-curly apos­tro­phes.
  7. Pre­tend­ing that ac­cented char­ac­ters don’t exist.
  8. Us­ing mul­ti­ple word spaces in a row (for in­stance, to make a first-line in­dent.)
  9. Us­ing tabs and tab stops in­stead of ta­bles.
  10. Us­ing car­riage re­turns to in­sert ver­ti­cal space.
  11. Us­ing al­pha­bet char­ac­ters as sub­sti­tutes for real math sym­bols.
  12. Mak­ing rules and bor­ders out of re­peated characters.
  13. Ig­nor­ing lig­a­tures.
  14. un­der­lin­ing anything.
  15. Be­liev­ing that mono­spaced fonts are nice to read.
  16. Abus­ing all caps.
  17. Think­ing that the best point size for body text is 12.
  18. Ig­nor­ing kern­ing.
  19. Ig­nor­ing let­terspac­ing.
  20. Too much cen­tered text.
  21. Only us­ing sin­gle or dou­ble line spac­ing.
  22. Only us­ing the line length per­mit­ted by one-inch page mar­gins.

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *