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October 2, 2005
Typography
Typography is a relatively recent interest of mine. Despite producing documents of varying sizes for many years, type was a means to an end. Now I know why, I didn't have the right tools at my disposal. Without formal training in traditional typesetting I didn't know what I was missing.
InDesign and OpenType changed all that. I now have easy access to designed small caps, beautiful swash characters, fractions, amongst many OpenType features. If you are wondering what I am talking about, have a look at the Glyphs palette under the Type menu in InDesign. Choose one of the many OpenType Pro fonts that comes with the Creative Suite 2, then scroll through the many glyphs that make up a typical OpenType font.
The Adobe web site of course has a number of interesting type topics. It was only recently that I discovered the ampersand is a designed E and T representing the latin 'et' meaning 'and'. For an excellent overview of type go to Thomas Phinney's "A Brief History of Type".
InDesign will set beautiful type, if we let it! My typical workflow is to start with my body font and column width, flow in some dummy text, then work the justification and hyphenation settings until I am happy with the overall look of the text. The Adobe Paragraph Composer does an excellent job with line endings. My aim is to minimise any manual work I have to do to paragraphs.
Using this method I have managed to get away with leaving hyphenation on in corporate documents – no mean feat when most corporate clients are led to believe hyphenation is evil.
Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 of course also support OpenType. Russell Brown has an excellent tutorial on his site.
So if you have not discovered OpenType yet, hopefully I have wet your appetite!
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