and here’s another one: never have columns longer than 60-70 characters including spaces, since they become difficult to read

that is a must

Does anyone know how to convert registration black to true black in a pdf?

This seems obvious, but I bet 90% of people just type in all caps, which looks terrible in 90% of cases.

Seriously, though, about the multiple box thing…

Once had a designer that used separate boxes for every element of a price pop in a catalog (one for the $, another for the dollar amount, another for the cents, yet another for the decimal!) so she could scale and style each one independently. (truth be told, she was a much better typesetter than I could ever hope to be.) OK, worked for her styling, but I was then tasked with making a style library out of them – one that could be applied to running type. Imagine all the kerning, tracking, baseline shifting – not to mention different font weights! – and putting all of that into a style sheet so someone else could apply it quickly.

right now I get designers who use a combination of subheds inline with running text as well as outside in their own frames, all on the same page. Invariably, someone says, “hey, this space doesn’t match that space – why?”

and yes, lists – use them. We just did a story with 125 products, numbered. Getting the formatting right was tricky (numbered product name, then description, then nutritional info were all separate ‘graphs, different sizes and leading, which I had to make into one to get the numbering to work) but there was no way I was going to number 125 items across 10 pages manually, then renumber them when the order changed. The designer balked (mainly because she likes to soft-return down the side of a column (!) to get better rags, and those were my nested style delimiters) but it worked in the end.

(and I now have one more reason to add to my growing list of why I need CS3 now – replacing the tab in the list with an em-space – thanks Anne-Marie)

now if I could only add “thou shalt not use soft-returns in running type” to the list of floggable offenses – that and all of the type set to “body copy”, no matter how it’s styled, styled with character styles, then locally formatted.

Peter wrote: “Do not manually adust tracking (or even kerning) to copyfit a story and say ‘Hey, nobody’s gonna notice…’ ”

How am I meant to get copy to fit without adjusting tracking?

I’m “typesetting” various bits of texts I’ve copied and pasted from the internet into my fake magazine page layouts. Every bit of text I deal with needs tracking here and there to make it “bottom out”/fit the available space.

What do the Pros do to make text fit a given space if they’re not tracking?

Reading a novel in the garden the other day, I noticed one of the paragraphs om a page had been set with slightly larger word spacing to keep the text justified
- I didn’t mind and very much doubt any non-designer/type person would even have noticed but is this unprofessional?