May I start this article by saying that I’m not one hundred per cent sure what the difference is between a typeface and a font. I believe typeface refers to a type family (such as Helvetica), whereas a font is a specific member of one (such as Helvetica 45 Italic). Anyway, it’s not that important — it’s something designers will debate endlessly, when they’re not boring you rigid with the specs of their new MacBooks.

What can’t I use the fonts I get with my PC?

The answer is, you can, but there are a couple of serious drawbacks with doing this:

1. They’re not really very nice. Do you really want your publications to look like the MS Word documents produced by your boss’s secretary?
2. The pre-installed Windows fonts don’t come in families, which you’re really going to need for long publications

Let me expand more on my second point. If you’re typesetting a long publication, you’ll want your chapter headings in a large, heavy font, your subheadings slightly smaller and lighter, culminating in your body copy, which will be the lightest and smallest of all. Now, Windows’ Times New Roman and Arial fonts don’t give you this option. Worse still, you can’t really hit the bold button on the Quark control panel, because it doesn’t give you a true bold font. (I made this mistake early on and got a bit of a shock when the proofs came back from the printers.) Although confusingly, at least on a PC, hitting the italic button gives you the true italic face.

Which fonts to buy

Now, of course, I can’t give you any advice on this. It’s going to depend on a few things.

• If you’re taking over from an external designer, then it’s pretty easy as you’re just reproducing a standard template
• Your organisation may have corporate guidelines on this kind of thing. My organisation’s design guide recommends Helvetica, Frutiger, Garamond and Times. I do bend the rules a little bit (there are several variants of these) but I do follow the spirit of the guidelines
• If your organisation does not have design guidelines, then it’s probably time to get a professional designer in, to design some templates and draw up some design rules for you to follow

TrueType, PostScript or OpenType?

This a slightly baffling subject, but if you’re on a PC, you’ll want to buy TrueType fonts and if you’re on a Mac, you’ll want to buy PostScript. These types of fonts aren’t generally compatible with each other. If you’re swapping files with an external designer, you’ll obviously want to ensure you’re using compatible fonts. If you’re working alone and sending PDFs to a printer, then it doesn’t matter as long as you’ve embedded them correctly in the PDF.

OpenType fonts are a fairly recent development and are compatible across platforms (they’re also the most expensive). So, in theory, Mac Quark users and PC Quark users could swap files, although you might well have to buy one set of fonts for yourself and one set for your designer. I genuinely don’t know how painless (or painful) this is — QuarkXPress for PC and Mac are a lot more compatible than they used to be, but you’d have to ask someone who regularly does it.

Where to buy fonts

Fonts are available from companies such as Adobe, Linotype and ITC. When I was buying them, many searches tended to end up at fonts.com, who seem to be the biggest font distributor on the internet. Fonts certainly aren’t cheap — if you’re buying for a design studio it’s more cost-effective, as the licenses allow you to install them on several machines. If you’re a one-man band like me, you’ll just have to take a deep breath and put your hand in your pocket.

Columns are used to improve page composition and readability and also mean you get more text on a page. However, if they’re too wide or too narrow, you’ll only succeed in reducing reading speed (which is why you’ll hardly ever see a column spanning the width of an A4 page in a typeset book, although it seems to be quite normal for Word publications produced in offices). The author was insisting the publication should be A4, with one very wide column.

Now there aren’t any exact rules on this, but some searching on some typography websites suggest a reasonable rule of thumb was not to exceed 60 characters or 12 words in a column.

In these examples of single column layouts on an A4 page, both pages follow these general rules — page 1 of the PDF is set in 12pt Frutiger and page 2 in 10pt Frutiger.

Page 1 looks fairly okay, although 12pt seems slightly large for this particular typeface, for what is essentially a reference book. Page 2 has a lot of unnecessary white space on either side and it would make sense to make the book smaller if you wanted to use this point size.

We eventually compromised on 11pt Frutiger over two columns, which you can see here. The Quark master page I set up for this project is essentially the same as the one I showed how to set up in this article.

It was interesting to see that turning on Quark’s automatic hyphenation made little difference to the total number of pages, although you would probably have to use hyphenation if you wanted fully justified columns. If you were typesetting very narrow, newspaper-style columns then it would be essential.