By Stephen Tiano

I logged my first experience setting type during the pre-computer age in a mandatory, ten-week high school shop class forty years ago. We took individual pieces of metal type, lead I believe—lowercase characters from a compartmentalized drawer and uppercase in a drawer above that—and set type one line at a time in a frame. We sometimes needed extra, blank pieces of metal to space out lines. Just as likely, though I do not remember doing this, would be the need to fit type by shaving tiny slices of the soft metal from either side of an individual character.

Despite—or perhaps because of—what I remember of that old class, the first thing I check after setting a page of type is word spacing. Interestingly, I believe this concern comes from all the reading I did. Word spacing that is too wide always distracts me. For years, my favorite line to describe such spacing has been, “You can drive a truck through that space.” And God forbid visible space between individual letters shows in body text!

There are two kinds of space adjustment. Tracking is the term for spacing between letters in a group of character, most often a line or paragraph of type. Then there is kerning, the space between a pair of individual characters.

When I began to set type using my first Macintosh, the early version of Aldus PageMaker—yes, boys and girls, Adobe did not invent PageMaker—did not give users very precise controls over type. PageMaker used a representation of a pasteboard, a work area that your document appeared in on the monitor screen. Users used the mouse to select items and move them around on the page on the “pasteboard”. Correct, I said “the page,” as multi-page documents were not originally possible.

When I discovered QuarkXPress—at version 3, I think—that program had moved on from a strict pasteboard metaphor, allowing users to make adjustments by typing numbers into fields on the Control Palette and in drop-down menus for precise placement of items that I could never get from moving them around with the mouse.

The greatest leap forward, though, was the precise control this gave over kerning and tracking. Admittedly, to this day, I do not kern much, because it only makes a real difference in large display type. For me, that means title pages and not much else. In all the book body text that I set, it is tracking that often becomes necessary.

Word Spacing in Quark vs. InDesign

In Quark, we can kern in increments of 1/200th of an em space. We can adjust tracking in increments of 1/20th of an em space.

When InDesign arrived on the scene, some called it “the Quark killer,” because of its advanced type engine. In large part, this was due to the two ways that the type engine composed type.

First, there is the Single Line Composer, by which InDesign adjusts spacing in letter pairs and in the whole line on just one line at a time. Then there is the Paragraph Composer, which adjusts spacing a whole paragraph at a time. What I found was that InDy’s supposedly superior type-handling abilities were far less intuitive and much more complicated.

In Quark, users select a stretch of text to apply tracking to by highlighting. This “stretch of text” can be any length: a few words, a whole line, a paragraph, a whole, or the whole document.

InDesign, on the other hand, requires a number of choices to be made before applying tracking. A decision must be made to use either the Single Line or the Paragraph Composer.

Suffice to say that it is best to check the consequence of each method when working. I realize that the flexibility of the two provided methods in InDesign often works to allow both a good and a better adjustment to a page of type. But when I began to work in InDesign, I needed to stay constantly aware of trying both Composers to see which gave the best results. For this reason, I found Quark faster and a more comfortable fit for my work.

The first real project for which I used InDesign was a book on financial planning and there were a number of tables in it . While learning InDesign through working on this project, I found my familiarity with PageMaker was helpful because the programs are similar.

I have been designing and laying out books long enough now that it was only matter of time for me to become comfortable with both pieces of software. Still, I find myself in a distinct minority these days when I say that my automatic preference—the one I tend to without thinking—is Quark , for the simple reason that I find it quicker to get my type looking the way I want.

This has been a guest article by Stephen Tiano from Tiano Design. Steve is a Book Designer, Page Compositor and Layout Artist and he has quite the passion for typography and the written word.