But­t­er­ick’s Prac­ti­cal Typography

Typography in ten minutes

Summary of key rules

Start

• introduction
• how to use this book
• acknowledgments
• about Matthew Butterick
• legal

Please pay for this book

• how to pay for this book
• why you should pay
• MB fonts

Why typography matters

• what is typography?
• who is typography for?
• why does typography matter?
• what is good typography?
• where do the rules come from?

Type composition

• straight and curly quotes
• one space between sentences
• question marks and exclamation points
• emoticons & emoji
• semicolons and colons
• paragraph and section marks
• parentheses, brackets, and braces
• hyphens and dashes
• ampersands
• signature lines
• trademark & copyright symbols
• ellipses
• apostrophes
• accented characters
• foot and inch marks
• white-space characters
• word spaces
• nonbreaking spaces
• tabs and tab stops
• hard line breaks
• carriage returns
• hard page breaks
• optional hyphens
• math symbols
• ligatures

Text formatting

• underlining
• goofy fonts
• monospaced fonts
• bold or italic
• all caps
• point size
• headings
• letterspacing
• kerning
• color
• alternate figures
• ordinals
• web & email addresses
• emails
• small caps
• hierarchical headings
• OpenType features
• mixing fonts
• metrics vs. optical spacing

Font recommendations

• font basics
• Equity
• Valkyrie
• Century Supra
• Concourse
• Hermes Maia
• Heliotrope
• Triplicate
• Advocate
• system fonts
• free fonts
• Charter
• Helvetica & Arial alternatives
• Times New Roman alternatives
• Courier alternatives
• Palatino alternatives
• Baskerville alternatives
• Century Schoolbook alternatives
• Georgia alternatives
• Verdana alternatives
• Gill Sans alternatives
• Cambria alternatives
• Calibri alternatives
• Minion alternatives
• bad fonts

Page layout

• centered text
• justified text
• first-line indents
• space between paragraphs
• line spacing
• line length
• page margins
• body text
• hyphenation
• block quotations
• bulleted and numbered lists
• tables
• rules & borders
• widow and orphan control
• space above & below
• page break before
• keep lines together
• keep with next paragraph
• columns
• grids
• paragraph & character styles
• maxims of page layout

Sample documents

• research papers
• letterhead
• business cards
• résumés
• grids of numbers
• presentations
• websites

Afterword

Appendix

• typewriter habits
• printers and paper
• how to make a PDF
• how to embed fonts in a Word document
• identifying fonts
• em sizing
• bibliography
• screen-reading considerations
• responsive web design
• how to work with a designer
• the copyright status of fonts
• how this book was made
• typographic humor
• common accented characters
• Concourse Index
• contact

Commentary

• Why there’s no e-book or PDF
• The economics of a web-based book: year one
• Why Racket? Why Lisp?
• The billionaire’s typewriter
• The infinite-pixel screen
• Effluents influence affluence
• Vote with your wallet, not your ad blocker
• Drowning the “Crystal Goblet”
• To pay or not to pay
• The scorpion express: thoughts on variable fonts
• Are two spaces better than one?
• Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no
• Typography 2020: a special listicle for America
• The cowardice of Brave
• Oscars 2020: best-picture typography
• Typography 2024: for America! for America’s best
• MB lectures & articles

Also by Matthew Butterick

• MB Type (fonts used in this book)
• Typography for Lawyers (paperback)
• Beautiful Racket (book about making programming languages)
• Pollen (software used to make this book)
• Chron (= my blog, roughly)
• Extinction-level capitalism

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