faigenphoto1Here’s something that came up several times in my sessions at the Conference in Scottsdale. It made for an interesting exercise in typographic one-upmanship, but also brought out some useful points. The answers that follow take the general form of the famous baseball question How many ways are there to get to first base? (According to my son who is an umpire there are eight. Not counting earthquakes.)

So, OK. The question is: How many ways are there to shorten the typeset length of any arbitrary bunch of copy, whether it is a ten-thousand page division or a single paragraph? One time or another, we all have to face this issue but some legal publishing people (you know who you are!) have to face this every day with revisions to existing court cases. Evidently, changing page breaks in a court document is an indictable offense for which the punishment is actually having to read the document in question. A cruel fate, to be sure!

Here is my list, annotated. I hope that others will be able to add to the list from experience or sheerly malicious imagination. I welcome all masochists.

1. USE TRACKING. Set in the Font Variant spec in minus thousandths of an em. Turned on and off in the IF spec or with the macro. Effective, but can get ugly. (Sort of like Arnold Schwartzenegger.)

2. REDUCE VARIABLE SPACEBAND MINIMUMS. Do this in the H&J spec. It’s way more subtle than number 1 above, but the results won’t be as dramatic. Might pick up a line her and there. Really works well over gazillions of pages.

3. TURN ON PAIR KERNING. If you’re not doing this already, I don’t even want to talk to you.

4. REDUCE CHARACTER SET WIDTH. Works, but distorts characters like a funhouse mirror. It’s nice to look thinner, but this isn’t the healthiest way to do it. Eat more vegetables instead.

5. REDUCE LEADING. You can do this in tiny increments and no one will notice. Except that guy in the cubicle on the corner who has nothing better to do with his time.

6. REDUCE PRELEAD. Yes, but isn’t this sort of the same as Number 5?

7. REDUCE POINT SIZE. A little goes a long way and please remember that I’m not the only one who needs new bifocals.

8. MAKE BLOCK WIDTHS WIDER (OR GUTTERS NARROWER). This is not always an option, and again you’ll have to sneak it by the corner cubicle guy.

9. ALLOW MORE CONSECUTIVE HYPHEN-

ATED LINES.

10. MAKE BLOCK DEPTHS DEEPER. Or start them higher up. You might pick up a few lines over a bunch of pages, and nobody reads the last few lines of a page anyway.

11. USE LIGATURES. Not that useful because they are probably turned on and it would take about 700 billion pages to see much of a difference.

12. USE LESS RESTRICTIVE WIDOW CONTROL VALUES. Oh yeah, baby, now you’re talkin’!

13. JIGGER THE PT SPEC. Only works if you are using VJ and you can figure out how to work the damn thing.

14. INCREASE PAGE SIZE. No fair.

15. TAKE OUT A BUNCH OF WORDS. Really no fair, but don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.

16. TRANSLATE INTO SPANISH, SHOW TO EDITOR, AND SAY SOMETHING LIKE “GEEZ, I BET THIS WOULD RUN 25% SHORTER IF WE DID IT IN ENGLISH!” (Arabic works even better for this little scam.)

Well, there’s my list. I’m sure I forgot some possibilities, and I ignored “printing on a Moebius strip,” although the possibilities are interesting. Please let me know if you can think of any more.

Josh Faigen

www.typeczar.com