Typesetting
Typesetting is "architecture in two dimensions."
If text and its fonts are the materials of the building, then typesetting is the drawings of the building. Before discussing typesetting, we need to clarify some basic concepts, especially the system of dimensional units commonly used in typesetting.
Font size
Font size is the standard measurement for characters' size. The international universal unit of font size is the point.
The point (opens in a new tab) is usually abbreviated as pt, it's the smallest unit of measure in typesetting. In fact, the size of the point has varied throughout the history of printing. Since the 18th century, the point's size has varied from 0.18 to 0.4 mm. Following the advent of desktop publishing (opens in a new tab) in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing (opens in a new tab) has largely supplanted the letterpress printing (opens in a new tab) and gradually established the DTP point as the facto standard.
The DTP point is defined as 1/72 of an inch (opens in a new tab).
Most fonts will make the best effects when set to 10-12 pt. In other words, both the strokes and structure of characters themselves and the spacing between letters will present relatively good visual effects in such size. The larger the font size, the looser the text appears, so you need to manually decrease the letter spacing; on the other hand, the smaller the font size, the more compact the text appears, so you need to manually increase the letter spacing.
| pt | mm | cm | pica | inch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.3528 | 0.03528 | 1/12 | 1/72 |
Leading
Leading or line-spacing refers to the distance between the baselines of two consecutive lines.
The ideal leading is at least 120% of the text's font size, generally 1.2-1.5 times are recommended. Different fonts have different x-height, in principle, the larger the x-height of the font applied, the larger the leading should be, conversely, the smaller the x-height, the smaller the leading.
Page layout
Layout is the outline of typesetting, it's like the head-rope of a fishing net, once the head-rope is raised up, all the meshes spread naturally. In addition to general typesetting rules for font size and leading, there are some unique requirements in resume layout design. In principle, it's best to control the resume in one page.
- Making the language clear and concise
- Adjusting the font size and leading within a reasonable range
- Keeping page margins in 10-25 mm and making the left and right margins symmetrical
- Using lists rather than parallel sentences to list information
- Using flush left alignment, taking caution to use justified alignment as justified alignment may cause problems in hyphenation and letter-spacing because the lengths of words are different