Chapter 4: Elemental of Typography

1) Kerning

• In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual letter forms, while tracking (letter-spacing) adjusts spacing uniformly over a range of characters. In a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of characters all have a visually similar area.

2) Tracking

In typography, letter-spacing, also called tracking, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of text. Letter-spacing can be confused with kerning.

3) Leading

Leading is a typography term that describes the distance between each line of text. It is pronounced ledding (like "sledding" without the "s"). The name comes from a time when typesetting was done by hand and pieces of lead were used to separate the lines.

4) Alignment

In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell, or tab. The type alignment setting is sometimes referred to as text alignment, text justification, or type justification. The edge of a page or column is known as a margin, and a gap between columns is known as a gutter.

5) Ligatures

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In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t (spelling et, from the Latin for "and") were combined.

6) Hyphenation

Hyphenation is the automated process of breaking words between lines to create more consistency across a text block.

7)  Rag

In typography, “rag” refers to the irregular or uneven vertical margin of a block of type. Usually it’s the right margin that’s ragged (as in the flush left/rag right setting), but either or both margins can be ragged.

8) Widows and Orphans

• A widow is a very short line – usually one word, or the end of a hyphenated word – at the end of a paragraph or column. A widow is considered poor typography because it leaves too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page. This interrupts the reader’s eye and diminishes readability. Fix them by reworking the rag or editing the copy.

• an orphan is a single word, part of a word or very short line, except it appears at the beginning of a column or a page. This results in poor horizontal alignment at the top of the column or page.

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