Category: Read

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.