When I tell peo­ple I write about ty­pog­ra­phy, they of­ten say, “Oh, you mean fonts?”

Yes and no. Sure, fonts are an im­por­tant part of ty­pog­ra­phy. But there’s much more to ty­pog­ra­phy than fonts.

Sim­i­larly, there’s more to text for­mat­ting than pick­ing a font. For­mat­ting in­cludes every­thing that af­fects the ap­pear­ance of the words on the page—not just fonts, but also point size, bold and italic styling, and letterspacing.

In this chap­ter, there aren’t as many bright lines be­tween cor­rect and in­cor­rect habits as in the last chap­ter. You won’t be able to get by on rote ap­pli­ca­tion of rules. You’ll need to start mak­ing ty­po­graphic judg­ments of your own.

(And if you’re look­ing for the good fonts, they’re in the next chap­ter—font rec­om­men­da­tions.)