This column is about desktop publishing (DTP) and the arts and crafts associated with it. Try this little quiz, and count one point for each correct answer:
    l. Which part of a character is most significant for recognition: the right or left?
    2. What is the range of type sizes considered most legible?
    3. What's the optimum word length per line for readability?
    4. Which is more legible for a body of text: serif or sans serif typefaces'?
    5. Does text in all uppercase speed up or slow down reading'?
    6. Which numbers are best for legibility: Old Style or Modern Roman`?
    7. What's the optimum type size for newspaper headlines?
    8. Do paragraph indents affect reading speed? If so, how?
    9. Does justification affect legibility? If so, how?
    10. Which is better: two smaller columns of text across a page or one large column?
    11. Which is faster to read: large text or small text?
    12. What's the optimum stroke thickness of a character?
    13. What's an uncial?
    14. What's the difference between the ascent (or ascender) line and the capline?
    15. What is a counter'?
    16. Indicate whether the following typefaces are serif or sans serif:
    a. Bodoni
    b. Times Roman
    c. Univers
    d. Zapf Book e. Futura
    (Count one-half point for each correct choice.)
    17. An em space is:
    a. the size of a capital M.
    b. a square unit of measurement, each side equal to the point size of the font.
    c. one-quarter inch.
    d. a measurement that relates the height of a font to the width of the first character in the paragraph.
    18. Point size is measured from:
    a. the descent line to the ascent line.
    b. the baseline to the capline.
    c. the baseline to the x-height.
    d. the ascent line to the baseline.
    19. There are:
    a. 32 picas to an inch, six points to a pica.
    b. 12 points to an inch, picas vary according to typeface.
    c. 12 points to a pica, six picas to an inch.
    d. one pica = .125 inch, points vary according to typeface.
    20. A ligature is:
    a. the spring device that holds metal type in place.
    b. the rocker arm assembly used to press the plate onto the page for printing.
    c. two or more characters designed as a distinct unit.
    d. a device to separate lines of type to make them more legible.
    Answers: 1. The right. The upper half is also more significant than the lower half.
    2. Nine to 12 points, depending on the x-height. Generally, the smallest type size used is six point, although classified ads often use 5½ point.
    3. Ten to 12 words, or 18 to 24 picas.
    4. Serif. The serifs "lead" the eye forward. Sans serif fonts are best for headlines.
    5. Uppercase slows down reading speed roughly 13 %, from 5.38 words per second to 4.74.
    6. Old Style, with differing descenders, also called "unaligned" numbers because they don't all lie on the baseline.
    7. Fourteen to 30 points.
    8. Yes: indentations of two to three ears increase reading speed by making it easier for the eye to locate the start.
    9. No significant difference. Unjustified ("rag right") text is preferred because its easier to correct and uses fewer hyphens.
    10. Two. One column of 32 picas takes longer to read than two columns of 17 picas each.
    11. Smaller. Larger text increases the number of fixations and forces the reader to perceive words in sections, rather than as a whole. Too small makes it hard to read, however.
    12. Eighteen percent of the character height or width.
    13. A modification of uppercase (capital) letters in which the sharp corners, vertices and edges are replaced with curves. This was developed because the style was more suited to writing on soft material, such as papyrus.
    14. In many fonts, ascenders actually reach above the height of the capital letters, hence the capline-the maximum extent of the uppercase characters-is usually lower than the ascent line.
    15. A counter is the fully or partially enclosed part of a character. The lines surrounding the counter are called the bowls.
    16. a: serif, b: serif, c: sans serif, d: serif, e: sans serif
    17. b. It was called an "em" space (or a "mutton" or "em quad") because the "M" fit in it. But it is not equal in size to a capital I'M!,
    18. a. Point size is a vertical measurement of the body of a typeface.
    19. c. There are 72 points to an inch. Okay, now what's agate? (Hint: It has to do with classified ads.)
    20. c. Studies show ligatures also improve reading speed and legibility.
    How did you do?
    20+: You're a knowledgeable typographer, typesetter or graphic artist, probably already a professional in your field.
    16-19: You have sufficient knowledge of typography to use DTP programs successfully, and you've obviously studied and applied yourself. You probably understand design concepts too.
    10-15: You're an amateur-unpolished but with potential to be good at DTP You need to study more. Stick to user-group newsletters until you can better your score.
    6-10: You're either young or inexperienced, maybe both, and don't have enough skills to do very well at DTP. Avoid publishing anything on your own and never design fonts. Study, study, study.
    0-5: You write in crayon but can't stay within the lines. You probably can't write legibly and you certainly can't use DTP within a mile of efficiency, let alone pleasantness. Stick to sheepherding or something less taxing.
    Having the tool doesn't mean you have the talent. I have the usual plethora of power tools in my basement: saws, hammers, screwdrivers, planes. Although I can use them all reasonably well, I'm not a carpenter.
    Desktop publishing is the same. It's a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides the ability for end users to design, create and print a lot of their own documents. This breaks the chains that have tied many companies to the traditional printers, especially in the area of forms production, where a considerable amount of DTP effort takes place.
    Look at these figures, taken from a recent IBM press release:
    * The Fortune 1,000 companies spend six to ten percent of their revenue on publishing.
    * Forms represent 33% of all business documents.
    * Between 20% and 30% of forms are thrown out due to regulation changes or obsolescence.
    * Form-creation time takes an average of six weeks from design to production.
    That makes you think, doesn't it? Forms seem, from the outside, like accountancy: dull, meticulous, drab. But look around you: We find forms even in our homes. Business and government run on forms, people think in terms of forms, you fill in forms to do almost everything. Forms production is a big business and an enormous source of revenue. It's also a major target of software publishers at the moment, who are beginning to realize that even a small share in the market means big bucks.


    Add to forms such publications as newsletters, corporate reports, books, magazines, catalogues, brochures, menus and flyers. DTP offers not only the capability to design, but also escape from expensive paste-up and layout charges. And if limited quantities are required, these documents can even be printed internally at considerable savings and without the associated storage costs. It is certainly tempting to get into DTP, and many companies are doing so. Given the cost savings, it's no wonder.
    If nothing else, think of the trees DTP saves!
    The other side of the coin is the ease with which one can produce an incredibly ugly, badly designed, crowded, opaque and unreadable document. All the basic rules of design get ignored. And it shows.
    Some rare human beings may have natural skill. They are diamonds in the rough, intuitively piecing together the text and graphic elements onto the page to create flawless, award-worthy design. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the other amateurs who attempt it merely make a mess of things.


    Design sense is usually a virtue acquired through training, not one obtained from reading a D'I'P manual. In publishing of any sort, it is inextricably linked with typography-a discipline, a craft that requires dedication, study and commitment. Without study, can you tell how many points of leading would be optimal in a 19-pica-wide body of text with ten-point type? Without study, how the heck will you even know what a pica is? Or leading? Or the size of a point?
    Along with DTP come the dreaded font editors, subtle termites that chew into the marrow of the art. It seems so easy to design a font. All it takes is a little bit of artistic talent, then you draw a few lines and make it look pretty, right? Wrong. Back as early as 1525, Albrecht Dürer published his On the Just Shaping of Letters, a technical treatise on the design of characters. It's a pretty tough little book; complex and demanding even by today's standards. Modern font design is even more so, despite the availability of tools such as the Calamus Font Editor (which is, stupidly enough, a desk accessory, proving once again that the Europeans don't always think things through before they publish ...).
    Current ST font editors make you construct a font one character at a time. That's a great approach for an adventure game; for typography, however, it's unsound. You need to construct characters in relation to other characters, to see not only the individual constructions but the eff'ects of all of them together, how they look as words, sentences and paragraphs.
    I sat looking over someone's shoulder recently and watched him design a font of his own for a manual he's working on. I asked him if it was going to be serif or sans serif. "Serif," tie answered smartly.
    "What kind of serif'? A cove serif'? Or a square serif? How about a square cove serif? Thin-line serif? Exaggerated serif? Slab serif'? Wedge serif? Triangle serif? Bracketed serif?"
    "Huh?" he replied. "I think I'll make it sans serif instead."
    "Will that be a square-normal-end sans serif? Or a square perpendicular end? Or a flared end? Maybe a rounded end?"
    He huffed and puffed, but didn't answer.
    "Will you use a standard midline, a constant midline or maybe a high standard midline with a pointed apex? Straight, bowed or concave arms? Horizontal, wedge or vertical openings? Gradual strokes with diagonal stress'? Abrupt with vertical stress? Old Style, modern or condensed proportion? What's the relationship between stroke width and character height? Between descender and x-height? What about aligned numbers? Tapered or straight terminals?"
    "Listen," he snarled, "I'm only working on the kerning lines right now. I'll deal with the details later."
    "Do you know," I asked innocently, "what the term kern meant originally?"
    He threw me out.
    My unnamed friend suffers from the "instant expert" syndrome. He assumes that once you've got the software, you're an expert at the craft, that somehow all you need to know is the technical end of things and the rest will take care of itself. I worry that he's working on a font, but I lay awake at nights knowing that he's doing a manual!
    Type design is a craft several centuries old. How can anyone expect to get involved in it without at least reading the basics'? It's not merely a matter of creating a few goodlooking characters. Sure, you can open any book of type and plagiarize like crazy (ignoring for the moment the copyright issue, since typefaces are mostly copyright and can't be copied). But how can you be sure the font is properly proportioned? If the thickness of the stroke improves or limits legibility?
    But type is only a microcosm, the atoms ol'the DT'P universe. What about the macrocosm: designing publications like books, magazines, even menus. Where will the design knowledge come froth? Certainly not from the DTP programs themselves. Calamus, for example, is the best program of the lot but hasn't a whit of design direction in the docs (nor a bibliography or index).
    Okay, so what's the point of all of this? Simply that owning the tool doesn't make you an adept with it. Neither does, by the way, knowing the commands. That only makes you technically able to run the program. There's no osmosis by which you'll absorb the necessary skills by merely learning to manipulate the command structure.
    This fallacy is often reinforced by the software itself, which too often proves to be written by programmers who themselves lack the requisite typographic or typesetting skills. Here's a small test to illustrate my point: Try to replicate Dürer's alphabet using any current ST font editor. The font editors want to box everything into nice, neat frames with absolute limits. But Dürer (among others) wasn't designing for a computer, so he lets lots of strokes, tails and terminals escape the frame. If you start building the character set with A, you run into trouble when you reach Q, which has an unusually long tail-as long as other characters are wide.
    The user quite often falls into these programs, unaware of the depth and complexity involved. It's like quicksand, trying to make a whole font conform to one character's outlines. The only source of direction is to be found in the manual. Oops, another problem.
    MichTron's font editor doesn't even give you enough information to be able to use the program fully, let alone understand even the rudiments of type design. ISD's Calamus Font Editor suffers equally from fuzzy-albeit better-docs, which, among other ills, perpetuate the erroneous belief that the em-quad is the size of a capital "M." Necessary bibliographies of source references are notably missing from both programs, leaving me to assume that programmers without any background in the art created both programs. That's much like having a shoe salesman design airplanes.
    The answer" I heartily recommend that you leave the DTP design work (including font construction) to those with the training, or that you go out and get the training yourself before you continue. There are many books on design and typography available. If you're doing this work without having read some of the more popular titles, then you're stumbling about in the dark. It doesn't get easier until you start reading.


    Ian Chadwick is a Canadian freelance writer who also does volunteer work at the Toronto Humane Society. He and his wife share their small house with dogs, cats, ferrets and, at odd times, a time-traveling stenonychosaurus.