Print Typography: The Details That Make the Difference

Professional Typesetting Is Not Default Settings

The gap between the output of someone who knows typography and someone who's using default software settings is visible in print even when the same typeface and size are used. The difference is in the decisions that defaults never make correctly: the handling of specific characters, the management of optical margins, the treatment of special cases.

These are the details that make professionally set print type look authoritative and amateur type look assembled.

Hanging Punctuation

Quotation marks, hyphens, and other punctuation at the beginnings of lines optically interrupt the left margin alignment when set inside the text block. Hanging punctuation — allowing these characters to extend slightly into the margin — creates a visually cleaner text edge.

InDesign supports optical margin alignment. It should be turned on for any text block where the left margin needs to feel visually even. This is standard in book and high-quality editorial typography and rarely done in casual print work.

Ligatures

Ligatures are combined letterforms for character pairs that would otherwise collide or create awkward spacing — fi, fl, ff, ffi, ffl being the most common. OpenType typefaces include ligatures that InDesign and other professional applications can apply automatically.

Standard ligatures should be enabled for all body text in print work. Discretionary ligatures — more stylistic combinations — should be evaluated on a typeface-by-typeface basis and used where they look right.

Hyphenation and Justification

Fully justified text in print requires careful hyphenation and justification settings to avoid rivers — rivers of white space that run vertically through text blocks — and loose lines that look gapped.

InDesign's paragraph composer evaluates multiple lines together for better overall spacing than the single-line composer. For high-quality book and editorial work, I always use the paragraph composer and review all justified text for rivers and awkward word spacing.

Widows and Orphans

A widow is a single line of text left alone at the top of a column or page; an orphan is a single word or short line at the end of a paragraph. Both interrupt reading flow and signal careless typesetting.

Professional print typography eliminates both — through tracking adjustments, reflow decisions, or minor copy editing. InDesign can flag widows and orphans; addressing them is manual work but standard in professional print production.

The Em Dash and Spacing

Em dashes in American typographic convention are set closed — no space on either side. En dashes are used for ranges (pages 12–15) and sometimes with thin spaces in European convention. Hyphens are for hyphenated words only, not for dashes.

Consistently correct dash usage is one of the clearest markers of professional typesetting. Incorrect dash use — using hyphens as dashes, for instance — is immediately visible to trained eyes.