This article is excerpted and abridged from the ebook of the same title, later updated and expanded into the paperback Perfect Pages: Self Publishing with Microsoft Word. To compare typeset samples from Word and other programs, see A Typesetting Gallery at www.aaronshep.com/publishing/samples.html.—Aaron
Can a program like QuarkXPress, Adobe PageMaker, or Adobe InDesign produce better type than Microsoft Word? Certainly, when users know what they’re doing. But most often, they don’t.
According to research cited by James Felici in his The Complete Manual of Typography, 90% of the users of page layout programs never change the default settings—and as Felici points out, these settings are never much good as they are. For instance, InDesign’s main typographic advantage over Word is its automatic letterspacing feature—which in InDesign is turned off by default!
Word too has features most often ignored—and this, I believe, is what gives the program such a bad name for typography. Yes, if you simply open a new Word document and type away, your type will look awful. But if you know what you need, and if you delve deeply enough into the program, you can produce type that only a trained eye could distinguish from the very best possible from InDesign or Quark.
With Adobe Acrobat to help with final output, Word can now take its place in the ranks of viable publishing tools. So, here are a few tips for producing type that no book reviewer will scoff at. (Descriptions of commands and features were checked on several versions of Word for PC and Mac. If your version differs, refer to Word’s Help function.)
Study up. Get a copy of The Complete Manual of Typography and actually read it. (Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style—the title most often recommended by typesetting aficionados—is simply not for beginners and does not always represent standard practice.)
Learn to use styles. Word’s Style feature enables you to group character, paragraph, and other attributes to apply collectively to selected text. After that, a change in the style definition will automatically change all text governed by that style. While not easy to set up, styles can save you great amounts of time while formatting a book, help ensure consistency, and allow you to experiment quickly and easily with format variations. And styles can be stored in a template for convenient reuse in later books.
Change your font. Word’s default font—or more accurately, typeface—is Times New Roman, and many users never switch to another. But this narrow face, designed for newspaper columns, was never meant for books. Instead, set your body text in a serif face of more generous width—a face like Palatino, Garamond, Baskerville, Century Schoolbook, or Georgia.
Change your font size. Word’s default font size is 10 points, but that’s too small for almost any book other than a mass market paperback. For comfortable reading, longer lines of text should be matched with larger font sizes. One rule of thumb says the optimum number of characters per line is around 40, and the maximum, around 70. For the page sizes of typical trade books, you’ll probably want to keep your body text type between 11 and 13 points.
Control linespacing. Your needs may not be met by Word’s standard linespacing choices—“single,” “1.5,” and “double.” For more control, choose “Paragraph” from the Format menu, then for “Line spacing” select “At least” or “Exactly” and a point measurement. For normal book text, a good point measurement would be 2 to 4 points more than the font size—for instance, 14 to 16 points for 12-point type.
Use typographic characters. One of the surest signs of the amateur—and unfortunately a sign seen more and more often—is the use of typewriter characters in place of typographic ones. Chief among the culprits are “straight” quotes and apostrophes (", '). Only typographic or “curly” quotes and apostrophes (“, ”, ‘, ’) should appear in a book.
In Word, these can be inserted with special key combinations, or with the “Symbol” command on the Insert menu—but the simplest way is to make sure that Word’s “smart quotes” options are selected. Find these by choosing “AutoCorrect” from the Tools menu and clicking on the “AutoFormat” and “AutoFormat As You Type” tabs. With these options on, the straight characters you type are curled automatically, while characters already in the document can be curled with the “AutoFormat” command on the Format menu.
Hyphens ( - ), single or paired, should never take the place of true dashes ( — ), or “em dashes,” as they’re properly called. These too you can insert with the “Symbol” command, or with AutoFormat features, or with a special key combination.
Note that some versions of Word for the Mac improperly refuse to break a line after an em dash when it should fall at the end of the line—so you may sometimes need to insert a manual line break.
Take charge of your options. The Options or Preferences dialog box offers a number of choices for customizing print, especially on the “Compatibility” tab. If your file or its template was created in an earlier version of the program or in another program entirely, Word may already have selected a number of this tab’s options for you so the document’s layout won’t change. In general, when preparing a document for print, your best and safest course is to clear all these options. This lets your current version of Word operate as designed.
As one exception, you might want to select “Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows,” an option that some Word experts swear by. But this works right only on a PC.
If you’re on a Mac, you’ll probably want to click the “Print” tab also and select “Fractional widths.”
Use adjusted hyphenation. For justified lines with good spacing, you’ll need to turn on hyphenation. To find this setting, choose “Hyphenation” from the Tools menu, or else “Language” and then “Hyphenation.” For fewer and better hyphenated words, change the settings in the Hyphenation dialog box so that the hyphenation zone is half an inch, and the limit on consecutive hyphens is two.
Use selective automatic kerning. Kerning is the moving of individual letters closer or farther apart to make the spacing look more even. Word does have automatic kerning you can turn on, but it’s fairly primitive, and its effect on justified text is not always an improvement. (It can also slow down your computer.) But it works all right when applied where it’s most needed—to larger text in single lines, such as titles and headings.
Turn it on for your selected lines by choosing “Font” from the Format menu and clicking on the “Character Spacing” tab. Better yet, add it to specific styles.
Resolve spacing problems manually. At this writing, both Quark and PageMaker justify text basically the same way Word does—a line at a time. InDesign’s big claim to fame is that it justifies text a paragraph at a time, looking back at previous lines in the paragraph for solutions to any spacing problems that come up.
The big secret, though, is that you can do that manually yourself, even with a lowly word processor. Your two basic tools in this are manual line breaks—breaks that force the start of a new line but not a new paragraph—and optional hyphens—hyphens that tell the program where to split a word but are used by the program only if the split is needed. (To see them on screen while you work, select “Show All” from the View menu.)
For instance, say you find a line with words spread much too far apart. Look closer to the beginning of that paragraph for lines that have wordspacing tighter than average and that end with a short word or with a single syllable of a hyphenated word. If you find one, try inserting a line break to shift the final letters to the next line. With luck, this will shuffle the paragraph in a way that gets rid of your problem without creating a new one.
Avoid widows and orphans. An orphan is a paragraph’s first line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page, especially with a blank line or a heading above it. A widow is a paragraph’s last line that appears by itself at the top of a page. Both are considered undesirable.
Word avoids most widows and orphans by default. To make sure this option is turned on, place your cursor in normal body text, select “Paragraph” from the Format menu, and click the “Line and Page Breaks” tab. If it’s off, you can turn it on here after going back and selecting all text in the document. Better yet, add it to your body text styles.
With these tips and guidelines, you can create type from Microsoft Word that will match or surpass the output of 90% of the users of Quark, PageMaker, or InDesign. And if you ever do move to one of those programs, you’ll be that much ahead in knowing how to get the most from it.
