The Art of Typesetting (from the archives)

For “So You Want to Publish a Book?” (2020), I interviewed Meredith Pangrace, who is responsible for most of the typesetting of Belt’s beautiful books. Here’s an excerpt:

“This is so boring!” she kept saying to me as I asked her questions. But I was fascinated—and relieved—to finally better understand the actions she takes after we send her a manuscript and before she sends us a PDF first-round mock-up back.

We talked about what she loves about designing books (the decisions she makes about the look of a page): "With print, a designer has complete control. With the web, the design will look different depending on monitor size, browser, if it’s mobile or not. The designer can only control the experience for the reader to certain extent. With print, we can do more. It’s a beautiful thing to create a well-designed page, to open a book and have the words and spaces work together. I get a creative satisfaction with working with less, with black and white letters on a page.

And we discussed what she loves about typesetting (implementing those decisions): “It is very meditative. It’s more mathematical than creative. Or, a different sort of creativity, to get the letters and paragraphs to line up, a chapter to start where you want it. It is very structured, which is satisfying. It feels very productive.”

So how does she go about designing and typesetting a manuscript?

“Before I touch the doc I have to know how many pages it is, the trim size, and if we are using a template (more on that below). Then I set up the document in InDesign. I have to make a lot of choices at the beginning—about the size of the margins, which font to use, font size, what spacing to have, what the paragraph indents will be, and how we will start each chapter. I also have to decide on running heads and where the page numbers will go. The front matter I save until later. 

Then I take four to five pages of the doc and dump it into the file I have set up with all of the above, and print it out, to see how it looks. There is such a disconnect between what a document looks like on screen and how it looks on a printed page, you really have to print it out to understand.

Margins are really important. If you are doing a self-published book that will be uploaded to Lightning Spark or CreateSpace, they will reject the file if you don’t have proper margins. Also, the margins of the left and right side of the spread (recto/verso) are different, because of the gutter. The inner margin has to be wider than the outer one. You cannot just think about single pages when designing and typesetting; you always have to think about it as a spread, two pages facing each other. Editors often forget this! (Editor’s note: she is correct.)

I have to set up the template—the set of decisions I have made about margins, paragraphs, chapter style, etc— extremely carefully. After I have reviewed those first four to five pages, and like it, and am sure I have all the settings correct, I flow the whole manuscript in. If I’ve done it correctly, it will create left and right pages for the entire document.

Then I go through every single page. I decide how to style chapter headings. I decide if we want drop caps. Do we want chapters to always start on the left side? Or right? Do subsections always start on a new page? Each book is different. I go through the manuscript looking for widows—one word on one line—and any bad breaks. For instance, you usually don’t want to start a new paragraph with the last line on a page.

Its like magic; it’s like doing puzzles. I can hit one key and make everything change. I use kerning to make tiny changes that few would notice but make the page look better—for instance, to make a paragraph not bleed over to the next page, I might change the kerning. Or to keep the length of a book to a signature. Sometimes, the proofreader will notice, and tell me I’ve tracked things too tightly.

You can never be sure that formatting will come through in the transition between, say, a Word doc to InDesign, although chances are better if you are working with an editor who sets up style sheets properly before sending the manuscript to me. I have to check everything. Sometimes italics don’t make it through the transition. Sometimes a block quote will mistakenly go on for thirty pages, and I have to go back and change everything. Section breaks often don’t come through; also, apostrophes and quotation marks have to be checked carefully. Tabs and blank spaces have to be checked manually.

Sometimes writers put in commands that I have undo one by one. If she uses a tab at the beginning of the paragraph, I have to do an entire search and replace. I use an overall method of measurement, not a tab key. If they put a return after paragraphs, I do a “find and replace” but still check every one manually.

I ask her about typesetting poetry. This is her response:

“ With poetry, I cannot set up the same template. I have to physically do every page. I need to figure out what the poet wanted to convey when she put in spaces. If the left indent is supposed to align with something above, I need to figure out exactly what that would be. I need to know if the poet wants the poem to look a certain way on a page. Tabs and blank spaces don’t always translate properly when fonts change. Also, what if the poem is too long to fit on the page given the trim size we have chosen? Some poets write to the size of a Word doc window. What if a poem that is one page on a Word doc has to be two pages in the book? Where can I break it off and have the author be happy?”

What’s her advice to authors?

“Learn how to use emdashes! And get rid of hard returns between paragraphs.”

This is an excerpt from So You Want to Publish a Book? (now on sale!)

Coming soon: my course on how to write a nonfiction book proposal. Starts August 7! As someone from the previous course tweeted the other day: “It’s really great.” ;)