About Micro-Typography and the hz-program

Desktop publishing has changed the production of books in recent years. For the first time the author has the possibilityof preparing and influencing the design of his text. A publisher will not always be happy about this, especially if the author does not want to follow the strict rules of the publishing house which it may have followed for years. But everybody should welcome this new method of collaboration between author and publisher. What the author needs is a simple set of precise instructions to avoid misunderstanding. Desktop publishing opened the art of typography to many people; many of them in the past ignored the look of a book. Many more people are interested in typefaces and have developed a feeling for the differences, even the minor differences, for example in the various Garamond designs. Type designers hope very much that they will also develop a critical eye for bad copies of alphabets, of which so many are on the market today. In this way sensitivity to the design of books will increase and we will generally get better quality. The gap between the professional typographer and the new group of Mac and PC users is shrinkingmore and more, for it is now possible by means of special typographicprograms to include the most sophisticated typographic details in a design — details used in the old days only by the masters. But not everything will be done by the programs now available. The designer still has to make the decisions to achieve his aims. I want to include a few remarks here about the major mistakes made by PC users. The first one to mention in this context is the bad habit of arranging too narrow spacing. The letters are set too close to each other and thus legibility is reduced. I can give you an example. Look at the combinations rn and cl in Futura, when you reduce the interletter spacing. This widely spread infection originates on Madison Avenue, and it will take some time until we get rid of this virus in text composition for books. In the past, typography was in the hands of professionals, compositors, and specially trained people. Today we are facing a completely different situation: alphabets are in the hands of non-professionals, of all kind of users, of office people, of young people working with the capabilities of their Macintosh or PC. These people today make decisions about which typefaces should be used. But to select an alphabet for a special purpose is no easier these days than it was in the past, when only a limited number of typefaces were available for book production. Very often a designer had to make compromises, because his printing firm had only a limited choice of faces on its Monotype or Linotype equipment. Today thousands of alphabets are available and easy to get, some of them for less than a dollar. The question may arise, do we need so many new alphabets, since it makes everything much more complicated. The word ‘new’ I want to put in quotation marks.