Microtypography

Last updated October 15, 2024

Microtypography is a range of methods for improving the readability and appearance of text, especially justified text. The methods reduce the appearance of large interword spaces and create edges to the text that appear more even. Microtypography methods can also increase reading comprehension of text, reducing the cognitive load of reading.

Aims

Micro-typography is the art of enhancing the appearance and readability of a document while exhibiting a minimum degree of visual obtrusion. It is concerned with what happens between or at the margins of characters, words or lines. Whereas the macro-typographical aspects of a document (i.e., its layout) are clearly visible even to the untrained eye, micro-typographical refinements should ideally not even be recognisable. That is, you may think that a document looks beautiful, but you might not be able to tell exactly why: good micro-typographic practice tries to reduce all potential irritations that might disturb a reader.
— R Schlicht, The microtype package: Subliminal refinements towards typographical perfection, v2.7, 2017^[1]

Methods

Several methods can be used.

These methods are sometimes called expansion. Robert Bringhurst suggests about 3% expansion or contraction of intercharacter spacing and about 2% expansion or contraction of glyphs as the largest permissible deviations.^[2] Compare the use of Kashida in Persian typography.
Glyphs that are small (such as a period) or round (such as the letter "o") at the end of a line can be extended beyond the end of the line to create a more even line at the edge of the text. This is called protrusion, margin kerning, or hanging punctuation .
Multiple different versions of the same glyph with different widths may be used. This method was used by Gutenberg in the 42-line bible,^[3] but is less easy now because few fonts come with multiple versions of the same glyph. It is not practical with narrow variants of a font or with different weights of a font because the glyphs look too different from each other to create good effect. It is possible with some multiple master fonts.
The interline space can be adjusted in a similar way to the interword space to create text blocks of identical height or to avoid widows and orphans. However, this practice (sometimes called vertical justification) is frowned upon in quality typography, as it destroys the fabric of the text.^[2]
The tracking (interletter, as opposed to interword, space) can be increased or decreased.
The width of glyphs can be increased or decreased.
The width of the word spaces can be increased or decreased. Word spacing can be adjusted uniformly across a block of text or variably with different sized spaces used between different words. The variable adjustment method is often called syntactic cueing, phrase-based formatting, or chunking when expansions or contractions are varied to group multiple words into units of meaning such as phrases or clauses. Chunking words by visually grouping them through word spacing or other white space improves reading comprehension, speed, and verbal fluency 10–40%.^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]

The following methods are not usually considered part of microtypography, but are important to it.

A hyphenation method that can break words at an appropriate point if necessary.
Justification of text. If the text is not justified, the word spacing is fixed and so only the protrusion elements of microtypography are likely to be useful.
Kerning helps ensure that the space between letters is appropriate before microtypography is applied.

Availability

Adobe Indesign provides microtypography and is based on the Hz program developed by Hermann Zapf and Peter Karow. As of August 2007^[update], InDesign is available for Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Scribus provides limited microtypography in the form of glyph extensions and optical margins.^{[ citation needed ]} It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, various BSD flavours, and others.^[9]

The pdfTeX extension of TeX, developed by Hàn Thế Thành, incorporates microtypography. It is available for most operating systems. As of June 2022^[update], pdfTeX is not fully compatible with XeTeX, an extension of TeX that makes it easier to use many typographic features of OpenType fonts (in 2010, support for protrusion was added to it.^[10]). pdfTeX is almost fully supported (except for the adjustment of interword spacing and of kerning) with LuaTeX, yet another extension of TeX which offers all of the benefits of XeTeX (and some others).^[11] For LaTeX, the microtype package provides an interface to the pdfTeX microtypographic extensions; ConTeXt, another typesetting system based on TeX, offers both microtypographical features such as expansion and protrusion (a.k.a. hanging punctuation) and OpenType support through LuaTeX.

Heirloom troff, an OpenType-compatible (and open-source) version of UNIX troff, supports protrusion, kerning and tracking.^[12]

The word-processing packages OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Office Word do not, as of August 2015^[update], support microtypography. They allow pair kerning and have limited support for ligaturing, but automatic ligaturing is not available.^{[ citation needed ]}

GNU TeXmacs support microtypography features such as expansion, protrusion, kerning and tracking.

Robin Williams suggests methods for achieving protrusion with word processors and desktop publishing packages that do not make it directly available.^[13]

Related Research Articles

TeX, stylized within the system as $T e X$ , is a typesetting program which was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor Donald Knuth and first released in 1978. The term now refers to the system of extensions – which includes software programs called TeX engines, sets of TeX macros, and packages which provide extra typesetting functionality – built around the original TeX language. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.

In writing, a space is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables and other written or printed glyphs (characters). Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emphasis (typography)</span> Typographical distinction

In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.

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 letterforms 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. The term "keming" is sometimes used informally to refer to poor kerning.

In typography, leading is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨ﬁ⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨ﬆ⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.

XeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license.

Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) is Apple Inc.'s computer technology for advanced font rendering, supporting internationalization and complex features for typographers, a successor to Apple's little-used QuickDraw GX font technology of the mid-1990s.

Letter spacing, character spacing or tracking is an optically consistent typographical adjustment to the space between letters to change the visual density of a line or block of text. Letter spacing is distinct from kerning, which adjusts the spacing of particular pairs of adjacent characters such as "7." which would appear to be badly spaced if left unadjusted, and leading, the spacing between lines.

Kashida or Kasheeda, also known as Tatweel or Tatwīl, is a type of justification in the Arabic language and in some descendant cursive scripts. In contrast to white-space justification, which increases the length of a line of text by expanding spaces between words or individual letters, kasheeda creates justification by elongating characters at certain points. Kasheeda justification can be combined with white-space justification.

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.

In typography, line length is the width of a block of typeset text, usually measured in units of length like inches or points or in characters per line. A block of text or paragraph has a maximum line length that fits a determined design. If the lines are too short then the text becomes disjointed; if they are too long, the content loses rhythm as the reader searches for the start of each line.

Sentence spacing concerns how spaces are inserted between sentences in typeset text and is a matter of typographical convention. Since the introduction of movable-type printing in Europe, various sentence spacing conventions have been used in languages with a Latin alphabet. These include a normal word space, a single enlarged space, and two full spaces.

A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet. Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters. This article lists some widely used Unicode fonts that support a comparatively large number and broad range of Unicode characters.

Hz-program was a proprietary, patented typographic composition computer program, created by German typeface designer Hermann Zapf. The goal of this program was: "To produce the perfect grey type area without the rivers and holes of too-wide word spacing."

Legibility is the ease with which a reader can decode symbols. In addition to written language, it can also refer to behaviour or architecture, for example. From the perspective of communication research, it can be described as a measure of the permeability of a communication channel. A large number of known factors can affect legibility.

The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, when Jiří Zlatuška and Phil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas with Donald Knuth at Stanford University. Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.

The history of sentence spacing is the evolution of sentence spacing conventions from the introduction of movable type in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg to the present day.

References

↑ "Macros" (PDF). mirrors.ctan.org.
1 2 Bringhurst, Robert (2008), The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, ISBN 978-0-88179-206-5
↑ Zapf, Hermann (2007), Alphabet Stories, Linotype GmbH, ISBN 978-3-9810319-6-6
↑ Anglin, J. M.; Miller, G. A. (1968). "The role of phrase structure in the recall of meaningful verbal material". Psychonomic Science. 10 (10): 343–344. doi: 10.3758/bf03331552 .
↑ Frase, L. T.; Schwartz, B. J. (1978). "Typographical cues that facilitate comprehension". Journal of Educational Psychology. 71 (2): 197–206. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.71.2.197.
↑ North, A. J.; Jenkins, L. B. (1951). "Reading speed and comprehension as a function of typography". Journal of Applied Psychology. 35 (4): 225–228. doi:10.1037/h0063094. PMID 14861125.
↑ Magloire, J. G. (2002). "Eye movements by good and poor readers during reading of regular and phrase-segmented texts". Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.
↑ LaVasseur, V. M.; Macaruso, P.; Palumbo, L. C.; Shankweiler, D. (2006). "Syntactically cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers". Applied Psycholinguistics. 27 (3): 423–445. doi:10.1017/S0142716406060346. S2CID 145220711.
↑ "Download - Scribus Wiki". wiki.scribus.net.
↑ code commit named "merged microtype branch to trunk"
↑ The microtype package manual
↑ "Info" (PDF). heirloom.sourceforge.net.
↑ Williams, Robin (2006), The Non-designer's Type Book, Peachpit Press, ISBN 0-321-30336-9

Hochuli, Jost (2008), Detail in Typography, Hyphen Press, ISBN 978-0-907259-34-3, reprint, originally published 1987{{citation}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
Forssman, Friedrich; De Jong, Ralf (2004), Detailtypografie. Typographic etiquette, Hermann Schmidt Verlag, ISBN 978-3-87439-642-4

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[1] "Macros" (PDF). mirrors.ctan.org.

[Bringhurst-2] 1 2 Bringhurst, Robert (2008), The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, ISBN 978-0-88179-206-5

[3] Zapf, Hermann (2007), Alphabet Stories, Linotype GmbH, ISBN 978-3-9810319-6-6

[methods1-4] Anglin, J. M.; Miller, G. A. (1968). "The role of phrase structure in the recall of meaningful verbal material". Psychonomic Science. 10 (10): 343–344. doi: 10.3758/bf03331552 .

[methods2-5] Frase, L. T.; Schwartz, B. J. (1978). "Typographical cues that facilitate comprehension". Journal of Educational Psychology. 71 (2): 197–206. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.71.2.197.

[methods3-6] North, A. J.; Jenkins, L. B. (1951). "Reading speed and comprehension as a function of typography". Journal of Applied Psychology. 35 (4): 225–228. doi:10.1037/h0063094. PMID 14861125.

[methods4-7] Magloire, J. G. (2002). "Eye movements by good and poor readers during reading of regular and phrase-segmented texts". Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.

[methods5-8] LaVasseur, V. M.; Macaruso, P.; Palumbo, L. C.; Shankweiler, D. (2006). "Syntactically cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers". Applied Psycholinguistics. 27 (3): 423–445. doi:10.1017/S0142716406060346. S2CID 145220711.

[9] "Download - Scribus Wiki". wiki.scribus.net.

[10] t named "merged microtype branch to trunk"

[11] The microtype package manual

[12] "Info" (PDF). heirloom.sourceforge.net.

[13] Williams, Robin (2006), The Non-designer's Type Book, Peachpit Press, ISBN 0-321-30336-9

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