The Donald and Kim J Break the World



While The Donald and Kim J trade insults bringing forward the world's end I have been learning about Typesetting.

Actual footage of me

During a talk this week, the guest speaker spoke (what are the chances?) about the role of typesetting within the publishing industry and it piqued my curiosity. Somehow I have read thousands of books and never noticed that both margins line up. It's a fine art of manipulating spaces between letters and words in order to create a body of text that is fully justified.

After looking at my latest piece of flash fiction sellotaped to the wall, I immediately realised how hideous the right margin looked. When I typed the work up on my typewriter I just ended each line before I ran out of space.

"Flush left" - Amateur

Initially I thought I would just play it by ear and try to manually line up the right margin as I typed. Before I even began I realised that would have been incredibly frustrating and involve loads of ugly hyphenated words. Instead I did what I do best: make a spreadsheet:

Isn't it beautiful?

I settled on a width of 59 characters which left me with two eleven-character-wide equal margins. All that was left to do was to arrange the characters into equal rows. Now I have to admit I did change a few words, partly because they were better suited to the piece but also on occasion it helped everything fit better. Strangely enough, I found the whole exercise very useful to evaluate the strength of my writing. I've never scrutinised my work so closely before, I was focusing on every single word and, though it was tiring and at times tedious, it forced me to consider the merits of each word, and how it fit into the sentence literally and structurally. Definitely an activity I would recommend for a Friday night.

The result left me quite content and ready for a deep sleep:

"Justified" - That's more like it

Ahhhhhh. Though the world is almost certainly doomed, when they both inevitably push the red button, I'll rest easily knowing the typographic alignment is perfect on just one of my stories.

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