Hi everyone!

My question: What’s the correct spacing for dates like "c. 1748" in English typography?

I’m talking about British English, Akzidenz Grotesk font, InDesign, and "c" is italicized. The editor suggests no spacing at all, which looks odd to me (but I’m German, so what do I know) and gives me trouble with the large amount of space around Akzidenz Grotesk’s figure "1" (that is, "c.1077" and "c.908" look wildly different in spacing when set without any space at all).

Thanks for letting me know about your take on this.

I need to move all glyphs 8 points to the right for improved spacing.
Is there any easy way of doing this across the whole font at once, without having to move each one individually?

How's the letter spacing on this E? (I'm a newbie.)
Thanks.

I licensed a font the other day, a recently released family of 10 weights * 2 styles * text + display version. I was a bit suspicious of the whole thing, as there didn't seem to be a PDF specimen available anywhere. But the introductory offer was a nice one, and the font seemed perfect for my purposes.

What I got was a font that, as expected, does have its qualities in some respects, but is kerned so horribly that it's pretty much useless for the application it was design for -- it's meant to be a ›legible‹ sans for body text.

Hello,

I have an image credit with the copyright symbol.
I'm not sure if a normal space either side of the copyright symbol is correct, or if the the space should be; hair, sixth, thin, quarter etc.

The credit is as below:

[Artist name], [Title of Work], [Year].
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist.

I assume the correct thing to do is to have a normal space either side of the symbol.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe

Well, technically number spacing. I'm working on a project that involves the design of a very post-modern elevator panel, which, as you can see, has been set in Gotham (with counters filled) on a diagonal grid. Within each cell, the idea is that the letters are right-aligned and intersect with the bottom edge:

The problem is the 1/4/7 column. Every other number has a relatively even, boxy shape that was easy to center. But my original plan was to align the right edge of 1, 4, 7 with each other vertically, then raise them to the same vertical height as the midpoint of the other numbers in their respective rows. My thinking is illustrated here:

Alright so I'm quite new to the font design world but I'm working on a geometric sans (ala Avant Garde, Futura, and the like). I've got most of my glyphs made up and now comes the fun and hard part: spacing and kerning. I'm mostly interested in workflow, since a lot of you are quite experienced I figured I'd try to gleam some information from the veterans. Do you start by setting all your glyphs' side bearings to 0 and work out from there? Do you set all your glyphs to a certain width and bring them in or out? What's the best method?

Thanks so much for any help.

I am looking for an authoritative, informed opinion on the subject of proper spacing before and after the slash/solidus/slant character in professional typesetting.

I need advice on spacing in English, French, and Spanish languages. Opinions are fine, and I have one myself. I am hoping for some professional, scholarly information that goes beyond personal opinion.

Thank you!

I have 2 fonts that work together overlapped. One with letters and no dots, other with dots.
I have a problem I can't solve.
Only when I use a text box, the dots font is not matching, the linebase is different.
This happen in Photoshop and Illustrator. Works ok on InDesign.
I have the same metric values in both fonts, also the TrueType specific ones. I tried in OTF and TTf, nothing works.

Now is the weirdest thing I ever seen.
If I draw a box with the caps height in the letter «d» the font will match the line spacing. Only happen with «d» glyph. The dot font have only dots and little square inside the caps height and baseline space.

I also tried filling all the character set with my letters. It works always, excepting when i put the centered dot in «d» glyph.

I'm working on a new project for a conference based in Windsor, UK. I'm experimenting with faces like Hoefler Black but I'm struggling with the spacing and kerning between the first two characters of the word Windsor. I'd like tight kerning on the whole word but as you can see with the basic example image (above), the upper case w seems disjointed from the remainder of the word causing an imbalance (to my eyes at least!).
Any input, help and advice from all you Typophiles would be appreciated.

weemac

I've got four words here that could use some critique!

Kerning isn't one of my super-powers, and certainly isn't something I do on a daily basis.
So, I'd love to get some hints and pointers on the kerning in the text below, because things are starting to look all the same...
Particulary the "TSUTV"-part is hard to balance evenly against the rest, and the loose tracking doesn't really make it easier.
Did I just mess it up? Be harsh. It's alright.

Thanks in advance

Simon

Ps. It says "Property Development" in swedish, in case you wanted to know. Ds.

Kerning:

Good evening,

I'm finally working on my first typeface! Yay. It's a conservative, old-style text serif and it will look like this. It'll be an open source project that I work on in my free time.

Since I have no typographic education whatsoever (I'm an engineering freshman straight out of highschool with a type addiction), I need some help: how do I space letters horizontally? I just finished the lowercase letters and I already spend most of my time changing side bearings and kernings instead of drawing letters. That is annoying and frustrating. It's a constant shifting of letters back and forth, and I never seem to get the spacing quite even.

I've noticed that some fonts contain the following spacing characters (presented with various encodings for them) and some don't:

1) I am wondering why some fonts have them and some fonts don't.
2) I'd like to know what the deciding factors might be for either including them or not including them.
3) Is there a script for Fontlab or another tool that will add these automatically?

Is there a 'correct' way to include spaces before and after items in a list (such as bullets)?

I am working on a document that has a space of 12pt after each paragraph. I like the visual break this provides. Should I have a 12pt space after each item in the list? Sometimes this looks too much.

I'm working to a 12pt baseline grid so it seems that the space should either be 12pt to match my grid, or nothing.

Any tips/design examples?

Thanks in advance!

Hello Typophiles

I'm in the final stages of completing a university book project that I'm entering into the ISTD student awards. I made a post a few months back regarding the format of references and I'm back now to ask your collective advice over their spacing.

I've been using Book Typography - A Designer's Manual, as I always do for book projects, and have followed its guidance on the spacing of references. However, I'm not sure the hard and fast rules are working here. If you look at the attached screen-grab, You can see how the standard width of spacing I've used looks OK, in my opinion, for the reference at the end of the paragraph. But with the ones located in the midst of the text, especially after the quote in italics, they look inconsistently spaced.

Dear Typophiles,

It was with much pleasure that I discovered this website and the wonderful enthusiastic discussions that typographers have here!

As a designer in her first year of professional work, I've encountered a question that has gone unanswered for some time.

Having read books by great designers (Vignelli, Bringhurst etc.) as well as this forum I became enthusiastic about the use of baseline grids in my work. This technique had not been taught at university and once I began to practice using the baseline grid in my personal work I found that I could hardly do without it.

A typographic emptiness equal in width to the point size. Used to indent paragraphs.

Indices : spacing

See letter spacing.