Figures, dashes and the characters nobody checks

The small marks that make work look amateur

Type is mostly letters, and the things that give away an untrained setting are mostly not letters.

Quotes

' and " are typewriter marks. Real typography uses ' ' and " ", and in some languages „ " or « ».

Turn on smart quotes and then check the exceptions, because smart-quote logic guesses from context and guesses wrong on an elided year ('09 needs a right single quote, not a left one) and on a measurement (5' 6" needs the straight primes ′ and ″, which are different characters again).

Where: InDesign ▸ Preferences ▸ Type ▸ Use Typographer’s Quotes. Inkscape has none; type them directly or paste. On Linux and with a compose key set, compose " < gives ".

Dashes

Three different characters for three different jobs:

• Hyphen - joins words and breaks them at line ends. well-made.
• En dash – (the width of an n) spans a range and joins equal things. 1998–2004, Delhi–Mumbai. Alt+Shift+- in InDesign, U+2013.
• Em dash — (the width of an m) breaks a sentence. She paused — then agreed. Alt+Shift+Ctrl+-, U+2014.

Using a hyphen for a date range is the single most common typographic error in print, and it is one keystroke to fix.

Figures

Most OpenType text faces carry more than one set of numerals:

• Lining figures: all the height of a capital. Correct in tables, in all-caps settings, and on a form.
• Oldstyle (text) figures: with ascenders and descenders, like lowercase. Correct in running prose, where lining figures shout.
• Tabular: every figure the same width, so columns line up. Essential in a price list, a timetable, any set of numbers stacked vertically.
• Proportional: each figure its natural width. Better in a sentence.

A price list set in proportional figures will not align, no matter how many tabs you add, because the 1 is narrower than the 8. Switch to tabular figures and the problem disappears. InDesign: Character panel menu ▸ OpenType ▸ Tabular Lining. In CSS it is font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums. Inkscape exposes OpenType features in the Text and Font dialog’s Features tab in 1.x.

Currency and the rupee sign

₹ is U+20B9, adopted in 2010. Fonts released before then do not have it, and fonts released after do not all have it. When it is missing you get a box, or worse, a silent fallback to a different typeface for that one character, so the price is set in Arial while the rest of the line is set in your display face.

Check before you commit to a face. Set ₹1,29,999 and look at it. Note also the Indian digit grouping: two, two, three from the right, not three-three-three. 12,34,567 not 1,234,567. No software does this automatically; you type it.

The missing-glyph fallback, which hides itself

When a font lacks a character, applications do one of two things and only one of them is honest.

• Show .notdef: the empty or crossed box. Obvious, easy to fix.
• Silently substitute another font for that character. The text looks fine at a glance and one character is in the wrong typeface.

InDesign highlights substituted glyphs in pink if Preferences ▸ Composition ▸ Highlight Substituted Glyphs is on. Turn it on. In other applications, the check is pdffonts on the exported PDF: if a font you did not choose is listed, something substituted.

Ligatures, and when to switch them off

fi, fl, ffi are drawn as single glyphs so the f hood does not collide with the dot of the i. Leave them on for body text.

Switch them off when you are tracking a word heavily (a ligature does not separate, so a tracked-out FLAT keeps its fl welded together) and check them in a script or display face, where discretionary ligatures can be applied automatically and produce something you did not intend in a client’s name.

The five-second check

Before any file goes out: search the text for a straight apostrophe, search for a hyphen with spaces around it, and set one line of figures to see whether they align. Three searches, and they catch most of what an experienced eye would notice immediately.