Typesetting tricks archive
Out of context: Reply #8
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- gramme0
Nice idea about baseline grids, Rand.
I personally use baseline grids when setting fair amounts of text, particularly with multiple columns that benefit from everything being locked up and lined up.
I've recently started using negatively kerned blank space to optically align large headlines with smaller text, as well as aligning and mortising drop caps. This is an old but somewhat arcane trick that I picked up from Robert Bringhurst. When setting ragged headlines + text & ragged paragraphs with dropped caps, this is far more accurate than using the Story dialog (I really find Story to be helpful only when justifying blocks of text).
To optically align, set a thin or hair space before the first letter, and then negatively kern—you can go all the way to –1,000. To mortise drop caps (optically align text to the right side of a dropped cap), do the same thing. This creates lovely dropped caps without awkward chunks of white space. Particularly useful for letters like A, F, L, T, W, and Y.
- i relish the day i figured out that negative kerning trick.baseline_shift
- Yeah. Before, I was doing it the hard way, with separate text boxes.gramme
- You can also achieve balance and alignment with the Optical Margin Alignment set to the larger type's pt size.monospaced
- yeah been using that for ages too its a good unjimzy
- I was gonna say, I'm sure I read something about this recentlyrascuache