1. Fine Tune & Tweak your Type

2. Hyphenation
Hyphenated words are a necessary evil in much typesetting. They allow for a better looking, tighter rag and help achieve a more natural block of justified type that needs less stretching and squeezing of the spaces. They also allow you to fit more words in a line. It is generally considered acceptable to have two lines in a row ending in a hyphenated word-but no more.
Some designers dislike hyphenation and avoid it entirely by turning it off in the preferences. Improvements can be made by manual breaks as well.

3. Hung Punctuation/Optical Margin
In a block of copy that is aligned flush left or justified, certain punctuation marks, such as an apostrophe or quotation mark, occurring at the beginning of a line can make it appear as if that line is indented slightly, creating visually uneven alignment. The same is true when these punctuation marks as well as others, such as a period, comma, or asterisk, appear at the end of a line in copy that is justified or flush right.

4. Hung Punctuation/Optical Margin
To remedy this, many designers extend the punctuated line into the margin a bit to make the line look optically aligned. This is traditionally called hung punctuation.
(see examples on pg. 153)
This sophisticated technique is one of the secrets to creating professional typography.

7. Visual Alignment-Horizontal
Your computer aligns characters (including punctuation, figures, and symbols) by the edge of the character plus its side bearing, which is the blank space assigned to it in a font so it doesn’t crash into adjacent characters. When a line of centered type begins or ends with certain characters containing a lot of negative space, that line can appear to be off-center. When this occurs, shift the offending line slightly to the right or left, until it visually or optically aligns.

10. Visual Alignment-Vertical
In cases where all cap lines of type are combined with lines of mostly lowercase, the lines will appear to have varying line spacing while they are all actually the same, due to the fact that the all-cap lines take up more “headroom” than the lowercase lines. To remedy this and to create the appearance of even line spacing, you will need to adjust the spacing between each line as necessary to give the appearance of the lines being equidistant from each other. What matters most is that the type appears to have even line spacing.

12. Rags
When setting type with a ragged margin (flush left or flush right), become aware of the shape that the ragged line endings are making. A good rag goes in and out in small increments.

14. Breaking for Sense
When setting display type that is more than one line, close attention should be paid to the line breaks.
Breaking for sense means breaking a line where one would logically pause when reading it aloud. This can include keeping adjectives together with their nouns, breaking after punctuation, keeping proper names or hyphenated words on one line, etc.
Avoid hyphenations completely!

16. Tracking
Tracking is the global addition or reduction of the overall letter spacing in a selected block of text. Fonts are spaced and kerned to look their best at certain point-size ranges. If your type size is much smaller than this range, that is, if you’re setting a typeface that is intended for display, at small point sizes, you will want to open the tracking to improve the readability, as the letters will probably get too close and tight, and even begin to touch. Many older fonts are spaced extremely tightly and often need adjustment.

18. Baseline Shift
Baseline Shift is a feature that shifts a character or group of characters up (positive numbers) or down (negative numbers) relative to the baseline, in tiny increments.
• Optically position symbols, such as register, copyright, and trademarks.
• Adjust the position of bullets, dashes, ornaments, and other font-based graphics.

21. Kerning
Kerning is the addition or reduction of space between two specific characters. Fonts are kerned and spaced to look their best at a particular point size range: some are intended for text, others for display-but this doesn’t mean you can’t “cross the line,” so to speak, with some typefaces. At larger point sizes, special relationships change, and a well-kerned font might still need tweaking at certain sizes.

22. Kerning Guidelines Some important guidelines:
Straight to straight: the most open of the three
Straight to round (or, round to straight): slightly tighter spacing than straight to straight
Round to round: slightly tighter spacing than straight to round. Don’t jam them together!

23. Kerning Guidelines
• “Like” letterforms should have “like” spacing. A de and op, for instance, are both straight to rounds and should look similar.
• Serifs of straight-sided characters should not touch.
• Serifs of diagonal strokes can overlap a bit, but if and how much is a question of taste.
• Strive for visually even negative space between all characters.
• Consistency is critical! Check work carefully.

24. kerning

25. Type on a Curve Setting type on a curve is a task most designer’s
encounter at one time or another. Placing type on
a curved baseline alters the relationship between
characters in unpredictable ways, in that it inserts
an inverted triangle of space between all of the
characters. If the overall spacing of the type
becomes too open when placed on the curve then
reduce the tracking as necessary until the desired
spacing and readability are achieved.

27. Word Spacing The amount of space between words is called word
spacing. A good preliminary guideline for word
spacing in text is that it should approximate the
width of the lowercase n or o. This is because word
spacing should be in proportion to the overall width
of the type design, that is, the word spacing of a
condensed face should be narrower and an
expanded design wider. The word spacing for
display type should be slightly narrower than for text.