Page and margin size

The size and aspect ratio of the book are a profound design decision. If this choice is within your remit — i.e., if the page size isn’t presented as a fait accompli by the client or publisher — here are some things to consider to make sure your choice best suits the content and the reader.

A quick glance at any bookshelf confirms that the majority of books are tall (portrait) in orientation. With a continuous text flow, a primary text frame is a good choice — not essential, but it allows you to later apply a different master page to a document page and have the text continue to flow properly.

We chose a page size of 6 × 9 inches — a popular size for trade paperbacks — and a page with a 2:3 aspect ratio, proportions that minds far greater than ours have long considered ideal for a book page.

To determine the size of the margins, on the master page spread, we adapted the page canon identified by Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) in his studies of medieval manuscripts. Divide the page into 9 rows and 9 columns. Assign one-ninth of the width to the inside margin, two-ninths to the outside margin, one-ninth to the top, and two-ninths to the bottom. The resulting type area has the same proportions as the page. The only problem is that the margins are so big that — to the modern eye — they look extravagant. To strike a balance, we decreased the size of the bottom and outside margins. The result allows for an extra line and a slightly wider column measure but still provides a pleasing frame around the type area and sufficient space for the reader’s fingers and thumb to hold the book. Crucially, the type area is wide enough for between 55–70 characters per line, meaning that, with the right settings, we can achieve well-justified type.

Clean up the text

Before formatting the text, remove unwanted spaces, extra returns, trailing white space, and any other unwanted characters. Use predefined GREP queries in the Find/Change dialog box. Also cross-check the document with the manuscript for any instances of text that should be italicized and apply an italic character style. Because character styles are relative, they will adjust to whatever paragraph style is later applied.

Choose the type

Following the printer’s maxim “when in doubt, set it in Caslon,” Nigel’s initial choice was Carol Twombly’s revival, Adobe Caslon Pro, not just because it’s beautiful but also because it has a wide range of OpenType features like real small caps, oldstyle numerals, and contextual alternates. But we were feeling crazy and reckless and, enticed by the thrill of the new, opted instead for Tribute, an interpretation of Renaissance type samples by Frank Heine. Tribute brims with personality (check out that lowercase g!) and has a swashbuckling swagger.

The book follows a simple format: chapter number, chapter title, first paragraph, and then body text. Repeat, repeat, repeat for 34 chapters. There are some passages to be indented, and of course the table of contents, the front matter, and the captions, but for the most part the formatting is repetitious. So we started by applying the “body” style to everything, then the Chapter Number style, which includes a Keep Option forcing the chapters to begin on a new page.

The text is soon transformed from an amorphous mass into a structured, readable document. As is often the case with such projects, it takes 5% of the time to get the content mostly in place, and the other 95% to finish the job. But finessing the details makes all the difference.

Compose the text

Our primary objective with the body text was to achieve a good type color or density — avoiding big and varying gaps between the words.

Hyphenation helps, but we changed InDesign’s default H&J (hyphenation and justification) settings, because . . . well, because they suck. Our custom settings ensure that only words with a minimum of seven characters are hyphenated, that there are no two-letter stubs, and no laddering is caused by consecutive hyphens. Plus, we don’t want to see hyphenation in the last word of a paragraph or a when a word breaks across a page or column.

Word Spaces

Default justification settings, no hyphenation, no Optical Margin Alignment. Note the variation in the size of word spaces (indicated by the red shapes).

Combined with the Hyphenation settings, the Justification settings reduce the permissible variation in the size of the word spacing. This is offset by a small variation in the letter spacing: just +/–2%, and a variation — just 98–102% — in the glyph scaling (the horizontal scale of the letters). Changing the proportions of letterforms can make purists twitchy, but at 12 pt (our chosen type size) this is virtually imperceptible. It’s a small price to pay for such an overall improvement.

Enabling Optical Margin Alignment in the Story panel (Type > Story) further strengthens the sharpness of the right edge, pushing punctuation and hyphens at the end of the line beyond the right edge of the frame.

To alert us to any spacing problems, we turned on the Show H&J Violations in the Composition settings of the Preferences dialog box. Keep in mind that H&J Violations does not show bad spacing, per se, but rather highlights where InDesign is unable to honor the settings you’re requesting.

Next, we added GREP styles to the body paragraph style to prevent short last lines. Our reasoning is more nuanced than simply saying “Don’t end a paragraph with a single word.” The point of zapping short last lines (or “runts”) is to avoid trapped white space between the last line of one paragraph and the first line indent of the next. If the paragraph ends with a single long word, significantly wider than the first line indent of the following paragraph, it’s not a problem. And if it ain’t a problem, don’t fix it.

We addressed widows and orphans manually with a delicate application of negative tracking to the text. Our Kerning/Tracking preference was set to 1⁄1000 em in Units & Increments. The Composition preference Custom Tracking/Kerning let us spot at a glance where tracking was applied. When fixing widows or orphans, keep in mind that the fix may lie in a paragraph that comes earlier in the text. Everything you do at this point will have a ripple effect. That can be bad, or it can be good.

With all of these measures to prevent composition problems, use a light touch. We can’t fix everything — not because we’re settling for less than excellence, but because every fix has potentially negative consequences, and we should first do no harm. For that reason, we’re less bothered by widows that straddle a facing page, choosing instead to target those that occur over a page turn.

Adding page numbers and running heads to the master page

So that the left and right page numbers mirror each other, set up your paragraph style to use Align Away from Spine as the alignment type.

For the running-header, define a text variable (Type > Text Variables > Define), tell it to grab the Chapter Title paragraph style, and then insert that variable in the running header text frame. This won’t work if some of the chapter titles are too long, because text variables don’t wrap across multiple lines. Use a character style text variable instead: Create a separate character style and, in each chapter title, manually apply it to the text you want to appear in the running head.

Styling the chapter opening pages

The chapter opening pages requires their own treatment — no running header, and a bigger top margin, to provide a visual pause between chapters. The obvious solution is a second master page, but the problem — and anyone experienced with long documents will have run into this — is that if the text reflows, you’ll end up with a chapter opening master page applied to a document page and vice versa.

We prefer to stick with a single master page and to incorporate both the larger margin and “no-header” into the Chapter Number paragraph style. This can be achieved through a trick using Paragraph Rules that are part of the Paragraph Style Options. We applied both a Rule Above and a Rule Below to the Chapter Number paragraph style — the first, with a Color set to None, to move the chapter number a specified distance down from the top margin; the second, with Color set to Paper, to “white out” the header. The text can now flow freely, and you don’t need to worry about what master page goes where. Just make sure the “white out” never gets set to overprint.

This leaves us with chapter opening pages that are no longer numbered. To address this, we anchored a text frame containing a page number marker. Get it right once, create an object style to capture the anchored object settings, apply the style to the object, and then copy the object to all the other chapter openers.

The benefit of this approach is that no matter how the text flows, the chapter opening pages will always look right because the formats are baked into the paragraph style.

Creating the front matter

To have the page numbering start with the first chapter, define part one as a new section. This means having two numbering styles in the document: to avoid confusion, distinguish the two by defining the numbering style of the front matter as roman numerals.

Table of contents

To generate the TOC choose Layout > Table of Contents, and select which paragraph styles to include and what styles to apply to the entries. It takes some back and forth to get it exactly how you want it. Once the settings are correct, be sure to capture them in a TOC style. We generated a second table of contents to create the list of illustrations.

Workflow steps

The order of these steps is more or less how they are presented, but of course, in reality, nothing is ever quite so linear. No matter how methodical you are, there will always something that you miss first time around, and this means going back and forth, experimenting with different settings, finding that certain approaches don’t work, and adopting others. Stay flexible and open to new techniques, use a light touch when fixing “problems,” approach the tasks globally through the use of styles, while at the same time keeping an eagle eye out for exceptions, anomalies, and anything else that requires individual attention. If we’ve done a good job, the reader will experience the story almost effortlessly. Like the stage hands during a theatre production, we’re essential, but meant to be invisible. The words should flow off the page, into the minds of the audience, and no one will even notice us, the designers. Our job is to disappear.