10 Words to paragraphs
This chapter covers
- Splitting paragraphs into lines with spacing and hyphenation
- Splitting paragraphs over pages
- Setting type before the computer age
We have learned how to design individual characters of a typeface using lines and curves and how to combine these characters into words and sentences. Now we must combine the words and sentences into paragraphs and the paragraphs into pages. This will involve choosing how to space and where to break the lines and paragraphs even if they do not fit conveniently. It is, like many things in book layout, a combination of calculation and taste.
10.1 A paragraph of text
Look at the two paragraphs from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis shown in figure 10.1. What do we notice? The left- and right-hand sides of the block of text are straight—no ragged edges. This is called full justification. We notice that some of the lines have a hyphen at the end, in the middle of a word. Looking carefully, we see that the spacing between words is not consistent from line to line. The last line of each paragraph does not go all the way to the end; the first may be indented.
Figure 10.1 Our example text from Kafka’s Metamorphosis
