A stu­dent asked in an email: Can you tell me about any par­tic­u­lar typo­graphic rules or details?

I hate those big ques­tions. Any par­tic­u­lar rules? Hun­dreds! All writ­ten down in my books. One par­tic­u­lar one quickly: Text is usu­ally set too tightly and with too big a word­space. One of the lega­cies of Quark Xpress. Always set the opti­mum word­space (under H&J) to 80% or less in unjus­ti­fied set­ting. And increase track­ing by at least 2 units (that’ll be 10 in InDe­sign) for sizes under 12 pt. If that makes the copy run too long, sim­ply decrease the size by 0.1 or 0.2 pt. That actu­ally increases space between lines (aka lead­ing) and by giv­ing the type a lit­tle more room to breathe, makes
a more leg­i­ble even though it’s a lit­tle smaller.

Don’t open track­ing for my new type­face, FF Unit, as i have designed it to be gen­er­ous at small sizes.