Typesetting in the context of "Line length"

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.

Typography is also the work of graphic designers, art directors, manga artists, comic book artists, and, now, anyone who arranges words, letters, numbers, and symbols for publication, display, or distribution, from clerical workers and newsletter writers to anyone self-publishing materials. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Personal computers opened up typography to new generations of previously unrelated designers and lay users. As the capability to create typography has become ubiquitous, the application of principles and best practices developed over generations of skilled workers and professionals has diminished.

In letterpress printing and typesetting, a composing stick is a tray-like tool used to assemble pieces of metal type into words and lines, which are then transferred to a galley before being locked into a forme and printed. Many composing sticks have one adjustable end, allowing the length of the lines and consequent width of the page or column to be set, with spaces and quadrats of different sizes being used to make up the exact width. Early composing sticks often had a fixed measure, as did many used in setting type for newspapers, which were fixed to the width of a standard column, when newspapers were still composed by hand.

The compositor takes the pieces of type from the boxes (compartments) of the type case and places them in the composing stick, working from left to right and placing the letters upside-down with the nick to the top.

In physical typesetting, a sort or type is a block with a typographic character etched on it, used—when lined up with others—to print text. In movable-type printing, the sort or type is cast from a matrix mold and assembled by hand with other sorts bearing additional characters into lines of type to make up a form, from which a page is printed.

In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.

The high-level page layout involves deciding on the overall arrangement of text and images, and possibly on the size or shape of the medium. These decisions require intelligence, sentience, and creativity on the part of the designer, and they are informed by culture, psychology, and what the document authors and editors wish to communicate and emphasize. Low-level pagination and typesetting are more mechanical processes. Given certain parameters such as boundaries of text areas, the typeface, and font size, justification preference can be done in a straightforward way. Until desktop publishing became dominant, these processes were still done by people, but in modern publishing, they are almost always automated. The result might be published as-is (as for a residential phone book interior) or it might be adjusted by a graphic designer (as for a highly polished, expensive publication).

In typography, leading (/ˈlɛdɪŋ/ LED-ing) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.

In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to increase the vertical distance between them. The thickness of the strip is called leading and is equal to the difference between the size of the type and the distance from one baseline to the next. For instance, given a type size of 10 points and a distance between baselines of 12 points, the leading would be 2 points. This combination of type size and distance between baselines is described as "10 on 12 pt", which may appear in a book's colophon as "Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Times Roman", or similar.

In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface, defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design.For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts "Roman" (or "regular"), "bold" and "italic"; each of these exists in a variety of sizes. In traditional printing, fonts were physically created using metal or wood type, with a font for each size.

In the digital description of fonts (computer fonts), the terms font and typeface are often used interchangeably. For example, when used in computers, each style is stored in a separate digital font file. Most are scalable fonts, so all sizes of a style are encompassed in one font.

In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or as a dinkus (section divider). Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.

In the computer industry, a dingbat font or pi font is a computer font that has symbols and shapes located at the code points normally designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century operating systems. Modern computer fonts containing dingbats are based on Unicode encoding, which has unique code points for dingbats.

A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. A book-length style guide is often called a style manual or a manual of style. A short style guide, typically ranging from several to several dozen pages, is often called a style sheet. The standards documented in a style guide are applicable for either general use, or prescribed use in an individual publication, particular organization, or specific field.

A style guide establishes standard style requirements to improve communication by ensuring consistency within and across documents. They may require certain best practices in writing style, usage, language composition, visual composition, orthography, and typography by setting standards of usage in areas such as punctuation, capitalization, citing sources, formatting of numbers and dates, table appearance and other areas. For academic and technical documents, a guide may also enforce best practices in ethics (such as authorship, research ethics, and disclosure) and compliance (technical and regulatory). For translations, a style guide may even be used to enforce consistent grammar, tone, and localization decisions such as units of measure.