Free Lynda.com Video: How to Set Perfect Text
Unless your home office is somewhere on the fourth moon of Yavin, I’m betting you’ve heard of Before & After magazine. Since 1990, Before & After has been helping graphic designers (and folks like me who pretend to be designers) to create cool work that engages and communicates effectively to viewers. The publisher and creative director of Before & After is John McWade, who also happens to be the author of a number of Lynda.com courses, including Before & After: How to Set Perfect Text.
In the free video below, John shows how to tweak InDesign’s hyphenation and justification preferences to create justified type with smooth, even letter- and word-spacing that’s easy on the eyes. He also shows how to cope with really narrow columns, as well as why and how to set hanging punctuation to create stronger margins with the Story panel. If you set type on a regular basis, you cannot, ahem, justify skipping this free video!
How to set perfectly justified type
For Lynda.com members, if you are currently signed in to your account, you can also check out these videos from the series.
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Understanding type sizes, line lengths, and line spacing
How to set perfect drop caps
Indents, spacing, fractions, and footnotes
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Absolutely marvelous. His mention of the Gutenberg Bible illustrates a point I try to make with ebook fans. It was one of the first moveable type books ever published and it is absolutely gorgeous. I know. I saw a copy in the Library of Congress.
Yet here we are perhaps fifteen years into the digital book era and ebooks, particularly those on Kindles (as John notes), look awful. The excuse has been that readers should determine how the book they’re reading looks. Really? I’ve been reading for over 60 years and the only time I’ve felt an urge to ‘have it my way’ is when the person who laid out a book did an awful job. I no more want to format a book I’m reading, than I want to determine a book’s outcome. The former should be done by skilled layout people. The latter by the author. I simply want to enjoy their labor.
The chief failure of digital books has been the failure to incorporate enough resources into ebooks standards to do that well. Epub wants graphics to come inline where they were placed. Even in the late 1980s, Framemaker was allowing those doing the layout to specify that a graphic was, for instance, to be placed on the top-right of the next page. Framemaker did that because it served the tech manual market where documents might run to thousands of pages, pages that were constantly being edited. (Boeing used it for aircraft technical manuals than ran to thousands of pages.) Text had to reflow well every time changes were made. Reflowable epub should be powerful enough to work the same.
As John noted, InDesign’s paragraph-level justification and optical margin features are great. But why haven’t they been incorporated into ebook readers to deal with the issues small screens and reflowing margins create? If the app worked a page or two ahead, it wouldn’t even delay page turning. Maybe Adobe should sell the rights to that composer engine to Apple for incorporation into iBooks.
Recently, there’s been a spat of ‘Blame the Big Five’ in some circles because ebook sales have actually dropped. I put the blame elsewhere. There’s a general blame that the host of issues digital books have created—such as whether users own or are merely renting an ebook—haven’t been solved by any retailer. That leaves customers unhappy. There’s also a more specific blame that Amazon, which owns two-thirds of that market, shows little interest in making any ebook look attractive or of allowing formatting that makes the creation of complex ebooks even possible. Amazon has the same attitude toward ebooks as MacDonalds has toward food. They see them as something to be quickly consumed and then discarded. Now that the mystique of digital books has worn off, readers are noticing that and turning back to print.
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One final suggestion. On my budget, I can’t justify a full Lynda membership. It offers a rich feast, but it’s training I don’t have time for. I’m left feeling like I’m expected to pay gourmet restaurant prices when my schedule only permits fast-food. I’d be more that willing to pay for a specific slice of that training, either based on the app (InDesign) or the source (InDesign Secret staff). That’d allow me to watch the other videos above. Any chance of seeing that in the near future?
I have to agree on Inkling’s final suggestion. I feel the same when it comes to Lynda. Too pricey for the little amount of time that I have for training. I, too, would appreciate a program-based fee.
It’s so good listening to John McWade presenting and explaining the good and bad about typography. I’ve been teaching for years to students and ti takes time for them to get the message. Thank you for sharing this, I will pass it along to them so they can enjoy this and to help them to understand better how to set type.
One thing though I would like to point out about fractions and, this where maybe would appreciate M. McWade’s opinion: should a ”dash” be used between two numbers preceding a fraction like 8′-6 1/4” for example?