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Microtypography is a range of methods for improving the
readability Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text. The concept exists in both natural language and programming languages though in different forms. In natural language, the readability of text depends on its content ( ...
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 Reading comprehension is the ability to process written text, understanding, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Reading Comprehension of spoken language, comprehension relies on two abilities that are co ...
of text, reducing the
cognitive load In cognitive psychology, cognitive load is the effort being used in the working memory. According to work conducted in the field of instructional design and pedagogy, broadly, there are three types of cognitive load: * ''Intrinsic'' cognitive load ...
of reading.


Aims


Methods

Several methods can be used. * These methods are sometimes called expansion.
Robert Bringhurst Robert Bringhurst Appointments to the Order of Canada (2013). (born 1946) is a CanadianWong (1999). poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote ''The El ...
suggests about 3% expansion or contraction of intercharacter spacing and about 2% expansion or contraction of glyphs as the largest permissible deviations. Compare the use of Kashida in Persian typography. *
Glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...
s 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 Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg ( – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and craftsman who invented the movable-type printing press. Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg's invention of the printing ...
in the 42-line bible, 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 Multiple master fonts (or MM fonts) are an extension to Adobe Systems' Type 1 PostScript fonts, now superseded by the advent of OpenType and, in particular, the introduction of OpenType Font Variations in OpenType 1.8, also called variable 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. * The
tracking Tracking may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Tracking, in computer graphics, in match moving (insertion of graphics into footage) * Tracking, composing music with music tracker software * Eye tracking, measuring the position of ...
(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%. The following methods are not usually considered part of microtypography, but are important to it. * A
hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...
ation 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, so only the protrusion elements of microtypography are likely to be useful. *
Kerning In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between Character (symbol), characters in a Typeface#Proportion, proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual le ...
helps ensure that the space between letters is appropriate before microtypography is applied.


Availability

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...
InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books ...
provides microtypography and is based on the
Hz-program Hz-program () was a proprietary software, proprietary, Software patent, 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 witho ...
developed by
Hermann Zapf Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include ...
and Peter Karow. , InDesign is available for Apple
Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
and
Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
operating systems.
Scribus Scribus () is free and open-source desktop publishing (DTP) software available for most desktop operating systems. It is designed for layout, typesetting, and preparation of files for professional-quality image-setting equipment. Scribus can a ...
provides limited microtypography in the form of glyph extensions and optical margins. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X,
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
, various
BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...
flavours, and others. The pdfTeX extension of
TeX Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...
, developed by Hàn Thế Thành, incorporates microtypography. It is available for most operating systems. , pdfTeX is not fully compatible with
XeTeX XeTeX ( or ; see also Pronouncing and writing "TeX") 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 ...
, an extension of TeX that makes it easier to use many typographic features of
OpenType 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 Corpora ...
fonts (in 2010, support for protrusion was added to it.). pdfTeX is almost fully supported (except for the adjustment of interword spacing and of kerning) with
LuaTeX LuaTeX is a TeX-based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua (programming language), Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the TeX Live distribution as a successor to pdfTeX (i ...
, yet another extension of TeX which offers all of the benefits of XeTeX (and some others). For
LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...
, the microtype package provides an interface to the pdfTeX microtypographic extensions;
ConTeXt In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a ''focal event'', in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event ...
, 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 Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
troff troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff (software), roff. Whil ...
, supports protrusion, kerning and tracking. The
word-processing A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...
packages
OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...
Writer and
Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...
do not, , support microtypography. They allow pair kerning and have limited support for ligaturing, but automatic ligaturing is not available.
GNU TeXmacs GNU TeXmacs is a scientific word processor and typesetting component of the GNU Project. It originated as a variant of GNU Emacs with TeX functionalities, though it shares no code with those programs, while using TeX fonts. It is written and maint ...
supports microtypography features such as expansion, protrusion, kerning and tracking. Robin Williams suggests methods for achieving protrusion with word processors and
desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online co ...
packages that do not make it directly available.


References

* * {{Typography terms Typography