The Typography Rules That Make a Book Look Professionally Made
A professionally set book follows rules most readers can't name: no single line of a paragraph stranded at the top or bottom of a page, justified text with hyphenation so the word spacing stays even, no rivers of white space running down the page, and running heads, page numbers and chapter openings in the same place every time. A Word export breaks most of these, which is why a self-formatted book can feel off without the reader knowing why.
Readers canât usually tell you why one book feels more professional than another, but they notice it on every page. Most of the time itâs the typesetting. Here are the rules that make the difference, and none of them are about being fancy.
Widows and orphans
A widow is the last line of a paragraph left on its own at the top of a page. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph left on its own at the bottom, with the rest of the paragraph overleaf. Both look like a mistake, even to people whoâve never heard the words. Matthew Butterickâs Practical Typography has a good explanation.
A typesetter avoids them by moving a line over to the next page or pulling one back, so at least two lines of a paragraph always sit together. Word has a setting for it, but itâs easy to lose, and a lot of Word-made books are full of stranded lines.
Justification and hyphenation
Most novels are justified, which means both edges of the text are straight. That only looks good if the words can be hyphenated. Without hyphenation, the software has to stretch the spaces between words to fill each line, and you get big gaps that make a paragraph look full of holes.
A proper hyphenation dictionary breaks long words in the right places, so the spacing stays even. Thatâs the biggest single reason justified Word text looks home-made and justified book text doesnât. Thereâs a whole post on justified or ragged right if youâre deciding.
Rivers
When the gaps between words happen to line up down several lines, they make a white channel through the paragraph, called a river. Your eye follows it instead of the words, and once youâve seen one youâll keep seeing it. Hyphenation and a limit on how far a space can stretch are what stop them.
The things that stay in the same place
The rest is consistency. The space between lines is the same all the way through. The running heads and page numbers sit in the same place on every page, and theyâre left off the pages that shouldnât have them. Every chapter starts the same distance down the page. The first paragraph of each chapter isnât indented, and neither is the first one after a scene break. How the chapter opens is its own post: drop caps and small caps. If any of these change from page to page, the book feels restless, even if the reader canât say why.
How Galley does it
Galleyâs print PDF does all of this the way a typesetter would. It keeps at least two lines of a paragraph together across a page break, hyphenates by your bookâs language when the text is justified, never lets a space stretch far enough to open a river (it sets the line slightly ragged instead), and never hyphenates more than two lines in a row. Running heads, page numbers and chapter openings are placed by the book design, so theyâre the same on every page.
You donât need to learn any of it to get it right, and you see it while you write, not only at export. The book design docs cover the settings. For the vocabulary, anatomy of a book page names every part of the page, and dashes, hyphens and ellipses covers the three marks that cause most trouble in a manuscript.
More on design
- Drop Caps and Small Caps: How a Chapter Opens in a Printed NovelThe ways a novel's chapter can open: no indent, a drop cap, the first words in small capitals, and the conventions that make each one look right.
- Writing Software for Novelists Who Don't Write in EnglishHow to write and typeset a book in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Greek or Vietnamese, which typeface each script gets, and what still needs building.
- The Best Fonts for a Novel Interior, and the Licence You NeedWhich typefaces novels are actually set in, the free open-licensed revivals of them, and why a font you own on your computer may not be licensed for your book.