Typesetting, Typewriting and Hyphenation

Typesetting is the art of laying out exactly how the printed matter will look. This includes proper spacing of lines and paragraphs and ensuring that there are no orphans or widows. This was and is a very difficult task and good hand typesetters were the pride of printing companies.

Some of the practices required in the preparation of typewritten manuscripts to be typeset are incorrectly being used today. To accommodate most typewriters that had but one font, publishers set out rules to facilitate the typesetting. Two of these have become bad habits still udes in wordprocessing and should be abolished.

The first to be addressed is the use of underline for emphasis. In its time, underlining was an explicit direction to the typesetter to use italics. Second is the double space after a period. Originally the second space was used to compensate for the monotype of a typeface of the typewriter. In type, periods get kerned (nudged to the left in this case) towards the last word of a sentence. Because typewriters cannot do this, a second space was added after the period. This practice is especially disruptive when used with word processors. These programmes cannot tell if the spaces are consecutive and attribute the same size blank space for both spaces, doubling the gap and hence line appears unevenly spaced. Include only one space after a period.

The appearance of word processed documents can be improved if manual hyphenation is done. This, however, is a very tedious task that must be done only when the final version is to be printed. It is strongly suggested that the students do not undertake this but instead tolerate the visually unappealing paragraph.