Chapter 3 of ELEMENTS OF TYPOGRAPHY

The early typographers used to set a book in a single font, that is one type face in one size. Though they did accent their typography with hand drawn illustrations or lettering. But even with one size, the books still ended up having a beautiful texture and feel. Then within the next 400 years, there weren't much changes, though they did develop different sizes for set type.
There ended up being a set standard scare, measured in points : 6 7 8 9  10 11 12 14 16 18 24 36 48 60 72, these are the standard, some folks stick to using them some don't, but the successful ones are those who carefully choose their own scale without going overboard. The same goes with using tilting figures, full caps and small caps in the other circumstances.

With reference to numerals (figures)  as we can see in this blog (tilting figures:12345678910 , these are stretched 'bell letters' instead of being text figures or hanging figures (which are the numerals that actually fall below the base line in a very attractive manner).. Some type faces are set without text figures, and are still useful, but the hanging numerals should be part of any typographer's vocabulary.

For abbreviations and acronyms in the midst of normal text, use spaced small caps. Since this blog's typographic abilities are lacking, an example of small caps with space hangs above the last paragraph. But again, using them everywhere is not a good rule to follow, these belong in a typographer's tool belt. Good practice is to use small caps with a type face with a small x-height, while with faces with a larger x-height it is good to use full caps (not always , but it must be considered)

Small caps, are not just shrunken full caps, they are designed for the type face, just like every other aspect (hopefully) There is another rule with small and full caps as well. For acronyms that we pronounce every letter, such as TV or HBO or GI tract, small caps should be used, which for acronyms like MASS or ASCII or FORTRAN where we pronounce them as words, full caps should be used. Typography, again, is based on human speech and reading patterns, and we should always keep this in mind. A good point is made by referring to laser and radar in this way, is that instead of small caps we refer to our way of pronunciation by setting them in lowercase, making them a word in themselves instead of an acronym.

Use ligatures as it is required by the font, don't force them, let them occur naturally. The use is ligatures is similar to helping an old lady get something off the top shelf, she is reaching, shes almost there, but can't quite reach it, just help them bridge the cap by giving her that can of soup.They are there to help out, to make space, to help the flow. But again, used with some care and concern.


The use of italics and sloped romans. Italics are actually meant to be cursive in nature, adding flow to the body of text, everything moves from left to right in a sort of liquid type flow, transitive as handwriting. While romans are upright, as this typeface I am using currently. Most italics created recently have been sloped romans and not true italics at all.

When using bold, leave the punctuation alone, its the words that need to be targeted not the comma. With italics, italicize the punctuation as well. With small caps, it doesn't really  matter, because there is less disturbance.