Guides › Typography

Book typography

The small rules that show whether a book was typeset or just exported from Word. Each page explains one, with examples and, where there’s a character to type, the keys for Windows, Mac and Linux.

• Hyphen, en dash, em dashWhich dash goes where, and how American and British books space them.
• Widows and orphansSingle lines at the top or bottom of a page, and how typesetters get rid of them.

For quotation marks in short texts there is the quote and dash fixer. The German pages cover more: Typografie fürs eigene Buch. Kernsetzer, the app, follows these rules by itself when it sets your book, in American style for English. Sign up for the beta.