Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents.
Typography - 3 main elements
The letter - design of the individual characters/glyphs and anatomy
The word - how these glyphs fit together
The line - combination and arrangement of words in a body or sequence.
Paragraphs
A consistent paragraph style will help cement the look and feel of your typography. Type alignment and paragraph breaks both affect the overall look of your text.
Letter Spacing: Leading
Leading refers to the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type.
Text that is set with bad leading appears cramped with ascenders and descenders almost touching. Lack of white space also impairs reading as the eye struggles to track from one line to another. For body content, leading should be slightly greater than the font pt size and increased/decreased proportionally.
Letter Spacing: Tracking
Tracking refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect the density in a line or block of copy. Readability decreases when negative tracking is applied.
Wide tracking opens up type, giving it more airy feel with white space. This can also become less legible if used in extremes.
As a rule below -40 and above +40 tracking are not advised.
Kerning and Pairs
Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between individual characters/letter forms in a proportional font, to achieve a visually pleasing result.
There are some letter pairings, often letter overhang, that may need particular attention when kerning.
Hidden Characters
These invisible characters such as returns, spaces, tabs, etc. only appear when you have "Show Hidden Characters" turned on. They indicate the structure of your body or text and show how the type is set. This can be incredibly useful for finding double spaces and unintentional line breaks.
Line Length
Efficient reading depends on a comfortable line length. This is between 40 and 75 characters, or 7-12 words.
An overly short line length causes a more extreme and ugly rag in a body of text, whilst and overly long line length decreases legibility and the eye finds it difficult to track the next line easily.
Widows and Orphans
Widows and orphans are lines or words left hanging or separate from a complete block of text. They can look awkward and should be avoided wherever possible.
This includes single (or 2 short) words left at the end of the paragraph, lines that appear alone at the top of the next column.
Use tracking and line spacing to remove any windows and orphans.
Dashes and Spaces
Never us a hyphen (-) in place of an en dash (–) (alt and hyphen) or an em dash (—) (shift and alt and hyphen).
Hyphen is for combining items. eg. free-for-all, all-renewable, or running the line.
En dash is for ranges. eg. September–December, London–Glasgow.
Em dash can be used instead of commas, parentheses, or colons, in each case to slightly differ the effect. e.g "all-renewable energy sector is years away — and always will be" (for pause and drama).
Never us a hyphen for bullet points, only use en dash or em dash.
Resource: www.thepunctuationguide.com
Grids, Raster Systeme: Josef Mulle-Brockman
Girds are considered by some, the most important and yet most invisible part of design and typography.
This is a fundamental part of the classic Swiss style and modernist typography.
The Raster Systeme presents a grid in 8-32 grid fields, which can be adaptable according to the design.
Rivers
In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are gaps in typesetting, which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spacing. The rivers are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts.
Baseline Grid
The baseline grid is a technique used in modernist typesetting. Essentially, it aligns all your text to a vertical grid where the bottom of each letter is positioned onto the grid, just like writing on lined paper.
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