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PART VI
The Rules of Typography are reprinted from the book “Digital Type Design Guide” by Sean Cavanaugh (Hayden Books). |
10. The © (copyright), ® (registered trademark), and ™ (trademark) characters almost always need to be reduced, sometimes by as much as 50%, depending on the font. The trademark symbol ™ you create by typing Option-2 on the Mac or Alt-0153 in Windows is already superscripted, and usually sized correctly for the font. In programs such as PageMaker, for instance, I still prefer to type the letters ‘T’ and ‘M’ and superscript them. I set the superscript size option to 50%. This creates a trademark slightly smaller than the trademark character.
11. Use the true ellipsis character (...) rather than periods. The ellipsis is used to denote a rhetorical pause or omission in a quotation. An ellipsis can be made up of periods, but dashes and sometimes even asterisks are used. The latter hasn’t seen widespread use since the early part of this century, but the dash is quite commonly used as an elliptical mark indicating interruption...
...or omission...
Elliptical periods, however, are the most common form of the ellipsis. In fact, when I use the term “ellipsis” I am actually referring to elliptical periods. People often create an ellipsis by typing the period three or four times, but you should use the ellipsis character, which is a standard character in most fonts, instead. You create an ellipsis by typing Option-Semicolon on the Mac or Alt-0133 in Windows. The ellipsis character looks better than three consecutive periods because it has slightly more space between each dot.
If the ellipsis comes at the end of a sentence, many grammarians insist that it should be followed by a period. But this is a grammatical rule, not a typographical one, and it’s broken quite often. It’s not a rule I follow. If you do opt to add the period, you may need to manually kern it so that it is spaced equally with the other dots in the ellipsis. In many fonts, you won’t have to worry about it, but this isn’t always the case. In some fonts, the period may appear too close to the ellipsis, in which case it should be kerned...or deleted altogether. |
The copyright symbol © you create by typing Option-G on the Mac or Alt-0169 in Windows is too large. I prefer this character to be approximately 70% the size of the surrounding text. If your body text is 12 points, for example, the copyright symbol should be set to 8.5 points. This varies from font to font, but I try to set the size of the symbol to the x-height. Unlike the trademark symbol, the copyright symbol should not be superscripted, rather it should remain on the baseline.
