Shop talk - errors in typesetting - Look of the Book - Column

Rick Tharp, the estimable Los Gatos designer, calls my attention to the graphically incorrect pasteup of a "Recycled" symbol on the back cover of the seventh edition of "The Design of Advertising."

A leaflet sent along by Tharp explains that when the symbol was first distributed, the American Paper Institute (API) included incorrect instructions. (The instructions apparently were later corrected.)

The nearby art shows, first, the way the symbol is displayed on "The Design of Advertising" back cover, then, how it should be displayed. Can you detect the difference? (The right display has the top arrow bending behind itself. The other two arrows in the unit bend toward the front.)

One can only hope that this symbol miscue will not set back the environmental cause or result in decreased book sales.

With every editor and writer acting as a typesetter these days, and with newsletters and other publications so easy to duplicate and circulate, the publishing world is awash in bad typography. Some of the mistakes made can be traced to necessary production shortcuts and economies of reproduction, but two of the aberrations, seen even in slick-paper publications, could easily be rectified.

One concerns the use of generic quote marks, quote marks that, no matter the typeface, run straight up and down and stay the same at the beginning of a quotation and at the end. They also stand in as ditto marks. In recent versions of Microsoft Word and other word processing programs, all a "typesetter" has to do to convert quote marks to real quote marks is to click on the "Smart quotes" option before typing. Presto! Computer technology arranges for the marks to turn in or out depending upon where they fall in the sentences. You see the difference in the Times Roman examples just under the "Recycled" symbols art.

The second error involves the dash. In ordinary typing, we used to hit a hyphen twice or maybe once and put space on either side. A surprising number of newsletters and other organizational publications are still showing hyphens as dashes.

In recent versions of Microsoft Word, you can hit a combination of three keys to get a real dash (an em dash). Hit two of the keys and you get an en dash. (An em dash is the width of a capital "M"; an en dash is the width of a capital "N.") Another block of Times Roman copy in the accompanying art demonstrates this.

When you use a dash, you should butt it against the word that proceeds it and the word that follows. This holds true for headline type as well. Nor should a headline dash be any wider than the width of a capital "M," a rule often ignored, possibly to accommodate the "hed count."

Have you noticed how popular the small, underlined "o" is in all-caps headlines these days? For instance, it's what gives the titling for the U.S. television show "Northern Exposure" its character. Of course, introducing occasional lowercase letters in all-caps headlines is nothing new. In such cases, the lowercase letters (without underlines) are specially designed to fit the space and cuddle up to the capital letters. The style evolves from designers' belief that some lowercase letters are more interesting visually (more complicated) than their capital counterparts.

Nor need such display type be custom designed. Some readily available typefaces come to us with lowercase letters standing in for some of the caps. "SUBTLE," set in Photo-Lettering's Dave Davison Epanoul Biform 3, serves as an example.

Roy Paul Nelson's latest book, "The Cartoonist," a novel, is available from Seven Gables Press, P.O. Box 5964, Eugene, OR 97405.

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