January 7, 2009
Typesetting Tips
Not all of us are born designers, and when you are not, you have to learn it either the hard way (through getting blasted by clients), or you get some tips from people who have done it before.
We have come a long way in this field, through lots of knocking of heads and being blasted by clients. At that point in time, you might be thinking &^%$^@, but it is through comments and feedbacks that we all improve.
Some tips that we can offer here:
Tip 1: If possible, avoid trucations of words. For example, if the word is too long and it gets trucated to the next line, making it look like this “cele-bration”, it is difficult to read. Try to put everything in 1 line. You can change the kerning, or justify the sentence to make the spacing appropriate.
Tip 2: Spacing in between sentences should be appropriate for reading purposes. Some languages, unlike English alphabets, have squiggles on the characters. The spacing in between the sentences should take into account these squiggles, and not have them stick to any lines above and below it. One such example is the thai wordings.
Tip 3: It is always good to have look alike fonts for the copy that you are doing, so that the design looks similar, be it for Chinese, for English or for Japanese. Below is an example of what it looks like. The sizes should also stay the same, unless there is not enough space or too much blank spaces to contain the characters, which might happen sometimes.
Tip 4: There must be consistency throughout the copy, in terms of font sizes, kerning and leading. If you find that along the way, your font sizes have to change because of the spacing issue, the changes must be applied to the layout that you have done at the beginning.
Tip 5: When typesetting, sometimes a couple of words may drop to the next line to end the paragraph. It would be good then, to either have the couple of words squeezed into the line before that, or to increase the kerning so that more words are added to that last line. This example is illustrated below.
These are some of the tips that can help you in your layout, but always remember, no matter whether you are a translator or a typesetter, we should always seek to improve ourselves. Let us know if you have some more tips to add to this list.
