Spacing in Typeset and Modern Writing

The practice of writing and recording is researched to have dated back as far as 3400 and 3300 BC, to cuneiform written on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia. Sumerians used a reed stylus to make impressions in wet clay creating wedge-shaped marks for which they had an alphabet system. With the invention of early movable type in the second century AD by Bi Sheng from Yingshan, Hubei, China and the first printing press by Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz, Germany in 1450, a system arose for copying and distributing texts more easily. Movable type and printing heavily influenced the style and manner with which text was printed onto a substrate.

The Gutenberg Press found on Creative Commons Search. Dimensions are 768 × 1024 pixels and source is Flickr.

History of Spacing

Paul Saenger, curator of Rare Books at the Newberry Library of Chicago, claims that word separation occurred as the advantages of reading more easily and swiftly were recognized. The ancient world had no necessity for the ability to skim a piece of text or relay information in writing rather than orally. In addition, very few people were even literate. Saenger also ties the development of word separation to the conceptualization of silent reading. He writes in his book, Space Between Words The Origins of Silent Reading that, "In the West, the ability to read silently and rapidly is a result of the historical evolution of word separation that, beginning in the seventh century, changed the format of the written page, which had to be read orally and slowly in order to be comprehended. The onerous task of keeping the eyes ahead of the voice while accurately reading unseparated script, so familiar to the ancient Greeks and Romans, can be described as a kind of elaborate search pattern (6)."

Saenger states, "In Western scripts, spatial organization is a determinative element in the effect of different transcription systems on the cognititve processes required for lexical access and hence on the propensity to read orally or silently. Experiments performed on adult, English-speaking readers confirm that the total suppression or partial obfuscation of spatial boundaries between words increases the duration of the cognitive activity necessary for reading, which in turn produces physiological reactions associated with vocal and subvocal actvity (5). It takes more work to read a text that does not have appropriate spacing between each word. Scribes could aid the reader by deliberately adding more spaces between letters and words than was traditional during that time. "It was the very absence of word boundaries that made the technique of the identification and memorization of those sequences of letters representing licit syllables a fundamental aspect of ancient and early medieval pedagogy."

Spacing in Typesetting

Metal type found on Creative Commons Search. Source is Flickr and has dimensions 767 × 1024 pixels.

Line spacing describes the amount of empty space between rows of text; it is also called leading, a term that comes from the era of movable metal type that used blank strips of lead of varying thickness to replicate spacing on a substrate. Line spacing in a variety of programs and technologies can be expressed as "pixels, points or centimeters (px, pt or cm), or as a percentage of the type size (120% or 1.2). Other accepted terminology includes normal, small and big." Regardless of type size, line spacing varies depending on the typeface. "Generous line spacing helps the eye and brain to more easily decipher the character shapes, words and word groupings, which is how we read. The smaller the type size, the greater the line spacing needed, proportionally speaking, to offset the reduced readability of small settings."

Word spacing, the amount of empty space in between each individual word, is equally as important in aiding the reader in speed and comprehension of the text. "Over-tight word spacing causes words to appear to run into each other, making it more difficult for the reader to distinguish one word from the next. Conversely, word spacing that is too open – the more common occurrence – creates oversized blocks of white space between words, forcing the reader to read individual words rather than phrases or blocks of copy. This dramatically slows down the reading process, reducing reader comprehension and increasing the risk of distraction."

Fonts.com is a great place to start to learn about typography.

Kerning

Kerning is the intentional spacing between individual letters (within a word) or characters. Some designers or scribes manually modify the amount of space between characters in addition to the typical spacing dictated by a digital writing program. Kerning results in text that is not only easily legible, but also aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Companies like Nike and FedEx use kerning in their logos and mottos to cause their audience to feel or think a certain way.

The Adobe computer software has many resources pertaining to graphic design such as kerning and also information about the art and science of typsetting.

Microsoft Word Logo. Dimensions are 256 x 256 and source is Flickr.

The Modern Spacing Debate

People have since switched from typewriters and printing presses to the personal computer, cell phone, and tablets of today. These technologies have digitized text as well as writing. The rules of spacing are now easier to follow, even automated depending on the specific program. One popular one is Microsoft Word, a text processor designed by a multinational technology company. There are constantly many typographical and grammatical debates in the English world ranging from the Oxford comma controversy to possessive apostrophes for words that end with the letter s. One such debate is whether to put one or two spaces after the punctuation at the end of a sentence. This issue was further propagated by Microsoft Word's grammar and spelling check function as it started marking two spaces after the end of a sentence as incorrect.

The number of spaces one should put after the end of a sentence originates "from the era of manual typewriters, which relied on monospaced type, with each character occupying an equal amount of horizontal space." Double spacing after a sentence helped to distinguish the end of one sentence from the commencement of the next. However, new technologies with automated and standardized spacing and the ability to kern letters allows for this rule to become less necessary. For some people, it is difficult to make this change from a practice that has once been standardized for so long. This phenomenon is explored in this Smithsonian Magazine article.

Other Interesting Typographical Topics

The Differences Between Font Types

The History of Page Sizes

The History of the Paragraph

The History of Punctuation

The Intricacies of Font Sizes

Spacing in Chinese