👓 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.

Straight quotes rather than curly quotes (see straight and curly quotes).

Two spaces rather than one space between sentences.

Multiple hyphens instead of dashes (see hyphens and dashes).

Alphabetic approximations of trademark and copyright symbols.

ellipses made with three periods rather than an ellipsis character.

Non-curly apostrophes.

Pretending that accented characters don’t exist.

Using multiple word spaces in a row (for instance, to make a first-line indent.)

Using tabs and tab stops instead of tables.

Using carriage returns to insert vertical space.

Using alphabet characters as substitutes for real math symbols.

Making rules and borders out of repeated characters.

Ignoring ligatures.

underlining anything.

Believing that monospaced fonts are nice to read.

Abusing all caps.

Thinking that the best point size for body text is 12.

Ignoring kerning.

Ignoring letterspacing.

Too much centered text.

Only using single or double line spacing.

Only using the line length permitted by one-inch page margins.