Typesetting

Typesetting is the process of laying out text on a document or a screen. Together with typography, it's about how text is presented. Here I will regurgigate a number of points made a lot more eloquently by Matthew Butterick in his online book Practical Typography where he lays out some best practice rules for typesetting professional documents.

Consider the following examples:

Example ① - Nemlig akkurat død reise varm samt. Følelse omtrent pause olje behandle rundt frykte. Stadig privat enhet igjen tjeneste sikre hest arrangement direktør bred kompetanse. Samisk øvrig varsle bestille spare behov vond fjor flertall representere plan besøk fordi artikkel. Mor annen hus trygg parti økonomisk alle bestille leder. Bygg rett vanskelig forklare elske legge poeng viss stenge erfaring marked aktuell.

Example ② - Nemlig akkurat død reise varm samt. Følelse omtrent pause olje behandle rundt frykte. Stadig privat enhet igjen tjeneste sikre hest arrangement direktør bred kompetanse. Samisk øvrig varsle bestille spare behov vond fjor flertall representere plan besøk fordi artikkel. Mor annen hus trygg parti økonomisk alle bestille leder. Bygg rett vanskelig forklare elske legge poeng viss stenge erfaring marked aktuell.

Example ③ - Nemlig akkurat død reise varm samt. Følelse omtrent pause olje behandle rundt frykte. Stadig privat enhet igjen tjeneste sikre hest arrangement direktør bred kompetanse. Samisk øvrig varsle bestille spare behov vond fjor flertall representere plan besøk fordi artikkel. Mor annen hus trygg parti økonomisk alle bestille leder. Bygg rett vanskelig forklare elske legge poeng viss stenge erfaring marked aktuell.

If you're anything like me, you'll have gotten a headache reading the first two example, while the third example struck (hopefully) a happy medium. What is comfortable to read varies from person to person, but badly typeset text is annoying to read for everyone equally. Changing the default line length, line spacing, and margins are the first step to relieving everyones' headache. Therefore I'd recommend to stick to some basic rules I found to work quite well.

Line length

The most comfortable line length for (basically) anyone to read is between 50 and 100 characters (including spaces) in my opinion. Remember that the English alphabet contains 26 characters if you need a quick reference. In a word processor you can usually just use the built-in word count tool, but for web development or writing in LaTeX the alphabet trick works quite nice.

Getting the line length just right is a bit of a trial and error, and requires a bit of tweaking with the margins, padding, font size, etc.

Line spacing

As you can see in examples ① and ②, having line spacing that is too wide or too narrow can hurt legibility. Double spaced documents as is often required in academia is an absolute nightmare to read, especially when combined with a common 12pt Times New Roman font. Text with that is spaced too narrow will save space, but will also look busy and give people a headache. There are so many stimuli around us already, let's try to keep it down in your own documents and digital content.

Matthew Broderick wrote an excellent summary of line spacing and the most appropriate settings. For the CSS settings I usually use a line height of 1.42 (line-height: 1.42) or 1.6 as used on this website. But this needs a bit of tweaking for each website. For LaTeX you can adjust the default using the \linespread{} function to adjust the line spacing.

Margins

At university were told to always told that 1 inch page margins are the best choice. Perhaps they were trying to save paper, but my experience tells me they are just using far outdated guidelines. Page margins of 1 inch were fine when all documents were typeset using typewriters that used a monospaced typeface. But in the digital era with all kinds of typefaces available this rule has become wildly irrelevant. Margins should serve the readability of the text, so I usually adapt my page margins, both in print and online, to ensure I get the desired line length. This basically always means I have to increase the margins from the default.

In LaTeX I have used for example the following parameters for my PhD thesis that was sent to the printer in on A4 size with 17pt EB Garamond (\usepackage{ebgaramond}), which may seem quite large but the final printed book was on a size closer resembling an A5 size, so the font size needed to account for that. If printed on full A4 the example settings below should be adjusted also.

\setstocksize{297mm}{210mm}
\settrimmedsize{297mm}{210mm}{*}
\settrims{0mm}{0mm}
\setlrmarginsandblock{1.4in}{1.4in}{*}
\setulmarginsandblock{1.25in}{1.4in}{*}

Paragraph spacing

To allow for a bit more breathing room between paragraphs, I'd also typically recommend to add some additional space between paragraphs. Once again, academia will teach you that just using reverse indenting the first line is good enough, but it isn't. I'd typically use either 50% of the body text (CSS: margin-bottom: 0.5em, LaTeX: \setlength{\parskip}{0.5em}). You could still use the reverse indent in addition if you prefer, but using the paragraph spacing is in my opinion a far superior way to improve separation between paragraphs and aid legibility.

Text justification

This is simple, never ever use centered text unless you really know what you're doing. For most long-form printed documents you have to choose between full justification where the processor would add white space to fill out each line to fit the specified line length, or left justification, where the spacing between the words is consistent but there might be left-over space at the end of a line that might look jagged. While full justification may look satisfying, this also needs some trial-and-error with the line length ensure there are no "rivers of white" when the processor needs to add too much white space between the words. For left justifiation some of the "jaggedness" at the end of the lines may be ameliorated by turning on hyphenation (in CSS: hyphens: auto) which will fill up some of the white space at the end of lines by breaking up words. The two examples below show full justification and left justification with hyphenation turned off in both cases. The final line in the first example is also fully justified, which can be turned off in most word processors (in CSS: text-align-last: initial).

For most documents, both in print and online, I tend to stick with left justification with hyphenation turned on. It's a preference but I feel it works best most of the time, and I personally feel the "rivers of white" are more distracting than the jagged ends of lines, even though I do appreciate the clean look of a fully justified document.

Inspiration

For some more inspiration and generally good advice, it's typically good to refer to brand guidelines from large instiatutions. I can particularly recommend those the advertising standards from Transport for London or their general design standards. NASA also has a detailed guide for their more "conservative" layout where they (among other things) talk about page layout, marings, typography, and more. There are websites that collect brand design guidelines, such as The Branding Guidelines Archive. Particularly those from design offices and newer government guidelines tend to be quite intricate and detailed.