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Technical documents are often set in sans-serif. There are a couple of reasons why this is preferred over its serif counterpart: Serif typefaces are usually designed to be as transparent to the reader as possible. In a novel, reading should be a fluid activity, and the typeface must not call attention to itself. Technical documents are often filled with ...

Technical documents will have a deeply nested, hierarchical structure, and also make use of footnotes, different types of emphasis, cross-referencing, pull outs and side bars of one sort of another and captions. The main distinguishing feature of technical documents tends to be complex structure. For headings, you can use any reasonably legible font; this ...

Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style is a through and wonderful reference for things like this. It's long but very valuable. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294176315&sr=8-1 A lot of designers recommend a standard grid of lines so that a line+padding will always ...

I have the answer for French typography (and one of the nobiliary particles you quote is French, so…): the spaces preceding and following nobiliary particles should be regular spaces (the canonical reference being the Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l'Imprimerie Nationale). I don't know if it holds in other languages, including English, but it ...

"The Complete Manual of Typography" by James Felici has sections on French, Spanish and Italian typographic conventions. They probably cover most of the important points. There is also a good discussion of the differences between American and British conventions. The book is available as a PDF from Amazon and the publisher.

For German and English typesetting, there is 'Zweisprachige Mikrotypografie' by Amelie Solbrig available for free. It's an introduction to typesetting and a compilation of German and English typesetting rules. It also comprises interviews with industry practitioners. For a student, it beats the shamelessly overpriced 'Detailtypografie' by Forssman & de ...

If you can properly embed the fonts, then yes, you could just create the PDF directly from Word. InDesign is a much more robust page layout product, and offers a designer a much broader set of typographic and page layout tools with plenty of fine-tuning, but if you're find with the Word version, then technically, you can just convert that to the PDF you ...

I'm no expert, but my experience with Lorum Ipsum is that my intended audience (usually product stakeholders and developers) finds it distracting. You want them to focus on layout, spacing, and typographic stuff, but instead they keep trying to figure out how to translate or decode it. I've had better luck using the first few paragraphs of Moby Dick. ...

Just by looking at the final page layout? I don't think there's really any easy way to tell in most cases regardless of the type of publication. I think that if a layout engine has been refined to produce good layouts and a human has cleaned up the results (i.e., Xtags with QuarkXpress), then it would be all but impossible to tell. Science and math ...

This is going to be somewhat dependent: on the parts of the world you are targeting what parts of a name you need to include (middle names/initials?) any other abbreviations that might be needed (Mrs, Dr, PhD, MSc?) characters used in names, unless of course you're using a monospaced font I don't think there's any substitute for sample test data from ...

That's a very big question. Let me tackle the fundamental issue. Basic definition Diacritics are marks that essentially change the character to which they are applied. Common examples are ñ, ü, and ê. Greek is full of them. The history Many of these marks are the result of evolutionary alphabet development. Ü, for instance, is really a digraph (two ...

I love LaTeX. That said, I've had great success using InDesign for professional quality typesetting with minimal effort. This is especially the case when I'm working with others since -- as you've noticed -- designers with LaTeX skills are approaching unicorn territory. If you've never used InDesign before it might not immediately qualify for your criteria ...

For technical documents (or any other type) I have found the 'So You Need A Typeface' document to be very useful. It started out as a little bit of a joke around here, but it's actually incredibly useful. I've got a blown-up copy of it hanging on my wall. Link 1 Link 2

This history is not for you its for others who also somewhere want to know about lorem ipsum incase From Wikipedia: Lorem Ipsum commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered. Even ...

A visual search in dafont's or Font Squirrel's sans-serif section one will probably give you better results. Fontscape has a section with long descenders, but they are paid fonts. These are some of the ones I found, they look very similar, but I'm sure you can find lots more if you do a search. Elegant Light: Thin Lines and Curves ...

As it often goes with these things, the answer will be subjective. Here are some thoughts, though: I think I tend to go without a space unless I'm worried about things flowing to multiple lines. Perhaps context could help you decide. Maybe 'Download/Print PDF' carries a connotation of 'Download PDF and Print PDF' while 'Download / Print PDF' says 'Download ...

Augh! No, no, no, no, no. No spaces. Kerning is the correct answer. Adding spaces introduces the possibility for error, bad breaks, and misinterpretation. When two items which must be connected are separated by artificial spaces, you are breaking the required connections. If it bothers you visually that much, change the slash to "and" (Download and Print) ...

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking, but it sounds like you want to be able to retain the text of the book in a format that is flexible, and have some (relative) longevity to it. Based on that, you're going to want to try and find the most basic and universal file format you can that will give you the features you need. .doc/x is a fine format, ...

[Late edit, because I just realized none of us answered one of the key questions: "Why do we use it?"] Lorem ipsum and its alternatives are used for two reasons. The first is visual: we want to set up the text styles but don't have the real text available yet, or we want to show the client (or the art director) a mock-up. The second is practical: dummy text ...

I remember struggling with this in CS3. I think the same fix will still apply in CS5. So here's what to do... First you create the type as you did in your example. You should see 3 small stripes outside of your circle. ( 2 with a small square on it, and 1 without the square) These are just indicators for where the text starts and ends grab the ...

"Letterfit" is a general term meaning "the adjustment of spacing between characters in a piece of text." It is an umbrella word that encompasses two related but different processes, plus a third that is (as far as I'm aware) peculiar to Adobe's applications. The first is kerning, which is the adjustment of the space between individual character pairs. A ...

If you see optically aligned fully justified columns of text it's highly likely they've been set in InDesign. Quark can do it as well nowadays but they didn't for much longer than InDesign. Multi-line composer is something Quark still hasn't got. Not that I would know. So narrow columns (like in newspapers) of text seem to have less rivers of wordspacing. ...

Yes, there are methods to do this. It's not used with the typography though (speaking in general). It's related to steganography and the common method is to use yellow ink to print a pattern of dots which can be recognized as a serial number or other ID depending on purpose. It is printed in a small size typically close to an edge. As yellow is hard to ...

In German language the rule is very simple: If the footnote or endnote refers to a single word, the footnote sign must directly follow the word. So your note [1] and [2] refers only to the words "amet" and "aliqua". If the footnote or endnote refers to a complete sentence the footnote sign must directly follow the punctuation of the sentence. So your note ...

I would say it depends on what the ellipsis is replacing. Version 1 original: However, there might be other reasons for such varied evidence. One study has even found strong evidence of conflicts of interest emerging in some cases, which has sometimes led to reversals of convictions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate on whether that is ...

Left aligned text, two right angle tabs. [tab]Page title[tab]page number (there's a right angle tab at the right edge of the text area. It's somewhat hard to see in the image) Another option is to set the text as a table with two columns and then align the columns as needed. It's customary for many layout applications to use right-aligned text with a ...

There could be circumstances when you want to do this, for a special vector mask, maybe, but they are rare. This is one of those legacy features, like the Type Mask tools, that's long since been superseded by better ways to do things. It might help to understand what hinting is. Back in the very early days of laser printers and Adobe Postscript, it was John ...

As discussed here, it depends on the client. Some get so caught up in the content (change this headline! I don't like this photo! We don't do charts that way!) that they can't see the design they're supposed to be giving feedback about. Others want real examples so they can judge the layout more accurately. In addition to Lorem Ipsum, I often put placeholder ...

This seems to be refreshingly clear and simple. The note reference characters go after the punctuation mark, unless it's a spacing punctuation mark like a dash. Seems to be pretty universally agreed. Here's what the esteemed Chicago Manual Of Style (subscription required, so, second-hand quote, from 14th ed. 1993, Clause 15.8, p. 494) says about the matter: ...