This is the third of a 10-part series of the Ten Keys to Seamless Typesetting. Kerning is a necessary part of the typesetting process. Whereas in the past this could have meant filing the edge of a sort to fit two characters closer together, today the process is much faster. To a large extent, kerning is pre-programmed into a professional font, but not every letter combination is necessarily taken care of and even if it is, not necessarily to the liking of the typesetter.

So there was a recent post on InDesign Secrets on how to find Ḥanuka in a document since it is spelt in so many different ways. One of the challenges of typesetting multilingual texts is that often special characters such as the Ḥ in the title above can be used. Not only is the ḥ common, but also ẓ, ṣ, ṭ, ḍ and even ḳ! The video below demonstrates how to create a custom ḥ in the correct font using the IndyFont Pro script. If you have a manuscript that has special typograp

When the manuscript is complete and there are no more corrections, the next stage is the final one of “balancing” the book. This is the process whereby the recto and verso (the right- and left-hand pages in a left-to-right book) of each spread are adjusted to be the same length. The exception is the last page of a chapter, and also when a new section head starts on the recto. This is accomplished by three methods: Shorten or lengthen the spread by up to a line (ensuring that

A widow is the last line of a paragraph at the top of a page. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph at bottom of a page.

The change of typeface has improved the situation overall, but it hasn’t addressed the biggest problem – spacing. In picture 3 we have taken

For quite some time, I would fiddle with the values until they were just so, but I decided that there must be a better way of doing this. I

In the below video I demonstrate how to achieve this in InDesign as well as quickly showing another favorite typesetting trick of mine of ho

Assigning styles aren’t necessary – it just can make the process for the author, editor and typesetter more efficent. However, as long as th

About ten days ago I was working on a project and was very frustrated. In InDesign the only way to make footnotes renumber at each chapter i