The Practice of Typography: Correct Composition
The second volume of De Vinne's four-part Practice of Typography, first published in 1901; this copy is the 1904 second edition.
What it is
The second volume of De Vinne's four-part Practice of Typography, first published in 1901; this copy is the 1904 second edition. De Vinne, head of the De Vinne Press in New York, starts from a gap: English has no academy to settle spelling, and dictionaries disagree on more than sixteen hundred words, so every printing house writes its own style-card. The book collects the rules careful printers share. Its eighteen chapters cover spelling, abbreviations, compound words, figures and numerals, italic, capitals, word division, spacing, quotation-marks, a long chapter on punctuation, proof-reading, preparing copy, and a history of misprints back to the fifteenth century. It works through examples: when to set 8 ft. 11 in. as figures and when as words, and why the spaces between words must vary in width to look even. An appendix lists the variant spellings of seven dictionaries in parallel columns.
Why read it now
Read it as one of the first full style guides for American printers, five years before the first Chicago Manual of Style, and as an argument that consistency is part of how readers judge quality. De Vinne's claim that readers notice blemishes in type faster than lapses in writing still holds: processing-fluency research finds that text which is easier to read is more often judged true. His core rule, choose one style and keep it through the whole work, is how brand guidelines and editorial style sheets work today. His advice on uneven spacing, white space around headings and paragraph indents transfers directly to screen layout. His proof-reading routine, at least two house readings by different readers with written instructions before the first galley, is a workable QA process for any campaign. What has dated: hand-set metal type, the compounding rules for words like to-day, and the preference for spelling out numbers in running text, which web copy now reverses. Use: before a bilingual campaign ships, write a one-page style sheet for numbers, names, capitals and punctuation in both languages and give it to every writer and designer.
Passages worth keeping
Not every reader assumes to be a critic of style in literature, but the reader of to-day is more or less a critic of style in type-setting.
ليس كل قارئ ناقدًا للأدب، لكن قارئ اليوم ينتبه إلى أخطاء التنضيد والإخراج ويحكم بها على الكتاب.
It is better to give slight offence by an apparently pedantic precision in one paragraph than to give greater offence by varying the style in different paragraphs to the confusion of the reader.
الالتزام بأسلوب واحد في كل الفقرات، حتى لو بدا متشددًا، أهون من تغيير الأسلوب بين فقرة وأخرى فيرتبك القارئ.
To make spacing seem even, the spaces between words must not be of the same width.
لكي تبدو المسافات بين الكلمات متساوية للعين، يجب أن يختلف قياسها الفعلي بحسب شكل الحروف المتجاورة.
White space is required to make printing comprehensible.
الفراغ الأبيض ليس زيادة في الصفحة، فهو ما يجعل المطبوع مفهومًا.
All that the printer asks of the author is that he shall spell uniformly and put his capitals, points, and other peculiarities of style in their proper places, so that there can be no misunderstanding about his intent.
المطبعة لا تطلب من الكاتب إلا الثبات في إملائه وترقيمه وحروفه الكبيرة، حتى لا يلتبس مقصده.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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