Workshop report: how we taught our typesetting to measure

The manuscript is finished: months of writing, revising, beta readers. And then comes the question many authors never saw coming: how does this become a book? Which margins, which typeface, how long should a line be? Why does the printer reject the PDF? Why does the page look fine in Word and somehow wrong on paper?

Typesetting is a craft of its own, and most people publishing their first book stand in front of it like a wall. That would be bearable if so little depended on it. But how a book looks decides whether it is taken seriously: in the sample chapter, in Amazon’s “Look inside”, in a bookseller’s hands. Uneven type, overlong lines or a misplaced page number make a book look self-published before anyone has read the first sentence. Most readers could not say what bothers them. But they notice.

The usual ways out are expensive. Professional layout software quickly costs hundreds of euros – the German writing program Papyrus alone is €349 – and handing the job to a professional typesetter costs hundreds, for demanding books a thousand euros or more. For a first book whose success is still open, that is a lot of money.

Hermes 3000 turns your manuscript into a print-ready PDF for Amazon KDP and BoD, with no extra software and no surcharge. Over the past weeks we reworked this typesetting thoroughly, prompted by an experienced typesetter who sent our output back with a list of twenty points. They became twenty-four changes. This workshop report tells what we learned – above all one thing: in typesetting you must not assume. You have to measure.

Why measure?

Our typesetting runs in a browser engine: the book is described as HTML with print CSS, and Chromium sets it into a PDF. That has big advantages – real fonts, real hyphenation, any trim size. But it has a catch: what the CSS says is a request, not a guarantee. Whether a line really sits on the grid, whether the page number is where you expect it, whether a rule applies at all – only the finished PDF tells.

So we built a measurement for every question: a tool that reads rendered pages and reports deviations in points and millimetres. Almost every improvement in this report starts with a measured value that did not match our assumption.

Lines that back each other: register

In a well-set book the lines on the front of a page sit exactly over those on the back. Hold the page against the light and no line shows between two others. Typesetters call this register, and it is why a good book looks calm.

For that, everything has to sit on one baseline grid: headings, spacing, images, blank lines – every distance a whole multiple of the line height.

Our grid was calculated cleanly. Still, the measurement drifted, almost to the limit: 0.78 pt against a tolerance of 0.8. We only found the cause once we knew what to look for: Chromium lays out a page in pixels. A grid of 20.3 pixels rounds every line by up to half a pixel. Deterministically, so front and back round alike – but enough to make every other inaccuracy visible.

The fix: the grid is snapped to whole pixels. The leading moves by at most 0.3 pt, and since then two of our four styles measure 0.00 pt deviation.

How many characters belong in a line

A line of 45 characters makes the eye jump too often; a line of 90 loses it on the way back to the start of the next. For books, the reading band is 50 to 70 characters per line. We had set 55 to 75; our typesetter corrected us.

More important than the band is that we now measure it instead of estimating. How many characters fit depends on the typeface, the type size and the width of the text block. Hermes reads the character widths straight from the font file and uses the margins actually used in the PDF. The dialog therefore shows something like “≈ 62 characters, 31 lines” for exactly your trim size, and outside the band it suggests the type size that brings you back in.

Our thriller style used to fall short on every format – 43 characters on the small 12 × 19 cm novel format. Today all four styles sit inside the band:

Quotation marks – tidy first, then set

Hardly any manuscript arrives with consistent quotation marks. Straight ones from the writing program, curly ones from autocorrect, a set of guillemets from a template in between, and a stray one from another language. Correcting each one individually would have printed a half-corrected book.

So Hermes works the other way round: every quotation mark is first reduced to a neutral form and then set again, consistently, in the chosen style. For German books that is now »this«, as is customary in German book typesetting.

The subtlety that cost us most: the single mark that closes nothing. Half a quote, or an apostrophe? We chose the apostrophe – Charles’ eyes, the ’90s, rock ’n’ roll appear in novels far more often than nested quotations.

Loose lines, holes and hyphen ladders

Justified text distributes a line’s white space across the word gaps. Usually that goes unnoticed. Sometimes not: a line tears open, or four lines in a row end in a hyphen and form a hyphen ladder.

To find these, Hermes lays out the whole book once at the full print width and measures every single line: how wide the word gaps are, which line ends hyphenated, how many lines a paragraph takes. This works thanks to a property of Chromium’s line breaking: it works line by line from the start, so the first lines of a paragraph don’t depend on what follows. That makes every ladder precisely locatable.

Our own hyphenation. Hermes can now place hyphenation points itself instead of leaving them to the browser. Measured on a real novel, the quality is a draw: 9.6 versus 10 percent loose lines, one hole fewer, the same page count. The gain is control. The names of your characters and places from the Story Atlas are never broken – the browser really did set “Su-sans”. And a single hyphen can be withdrawn to break a ladder.

The most instructive failure. Our first attempt to resolve hyphen ladders made all corrections at once and checked afterwards. The result on a real novel: five ladders gone, three new holes – and each hole sat in exactly the line where a ladder had ended. A word that no longer breaks makes its line longer, and the line tears open.

Since then every correction is checked individually and kept only if it creates no new hole. On that novel, one of five remained. That sounds like little, but it is more honest than five that make the book worse.

What we rejected. Modern browsers offer a setting called “text-wrap: pretty” that promises nicer paragraphs. Measured in justified text, it trades hyphens for gaps: 19 percent loose lines instead of around ten. So we don’t use it.

The page number that sat too low

Here the measurement taught us better. Running heads and page numbers live in the page margins, in boxes of their own. Such a box fills the whole margin, and without further instruction its text drops to the outer edge. The result: the page number sat 16.2 millimetres below the text, the running head only 6 millimetres above it. Every page looked bottom-heavy, and the gap between the last line and the page number looked like a mistake.

Now both hang from the text block: the running head 7.0 millimetres above, the page number 6.4 millimetres below. And it has three positions to choose from – bottom centre, bottom outside, top outside.

We deliberately did not change the uneven gap between the last line of text and the page number. It is intended: a paragraph that cannot leave three lines at the foot of a page moves entirely to the next one. Pages therefore end two, three or four whole lines early, never anywhere in between. That is correct typesetting, not an inaccuracy.

Poems and letters

In a poem, the line break is the content. That is exactly what used to get lost: a poem set as a quotation block in the manuscript arrived as prose, re-wrapped to the full measure.

Verse and letters are now forms of their own. Every line stays a line, a blank line becomes a stanza break, set flush left, without justification and without hyphenation. If a verse line is too long, it wraps with a hanging indent so it still reads as one line. A short poem is not torn across a page break. And the stanza gap is one whole grid line, so this page stays in register too.

The typesetting report: what a typesetter would say

All these measurements only help if they are made understandable. The typesetting report translates them into what a typesetter would say while leafing through – with a grade, the figures behind it and exactly one next step.

Three decisions went into it:

• Loose lines are a figure, not a fault. A few percent of slightly stretched lines are part of justified text. Only real holes count as findings.
• Findings are grouped. A difficult manuscript produced 28 individual findings, 24 of them nearly identical. Now each kind gets one line with the total and three examples – and one suggestion, ordered by effect. A measure that is too narrow causes dozens of findings at once; rewriting one sentence fixes exactly one.
• The grade is calibrated, not invented. We measured six real manuscripts. They ranged from 5 to 44 percent loose lines, and the three hardest were non-fiction books full of program code and long compound words. When a book contains a lot of such code, the report honestly says the material is hard to set – not that the book is badly set.

See the whole book before it goes to print

Finally, the question every author asks before uploading: is my book right? Not just a chapter opening, but the whole thing – front matter, imprint, table of contents, do chapters start on the right, what does the last page look like?

The book view (“Leaf through the book”) shows exactly that, spread by spread, as the PDF goes to the printer. Page 1 stands alone on the right, as in a bound book. Our old preview showed it on the left – the one place it cannot be in a real book.

What is still open

Not everything is done, and we don’t want to promise anything we haven’t measured:

• Footnotes at the foot of the page don’t exist; Hermes sets notes as endnotes at the end of each chapter. Our typesetter considered that sufficient.
• Leading and line length can be set independently. A longer line really needs more leading; Hermes doesn’t suggest that yet.
• Verse is measured but hasn’t yet run through a real poetry manuscript.

Try it yourself

You’ll find everything in your book under Downloads → Professional Typesetting. The three checks – chapter-opening preview, book view and typesetting report – sit side by side under “Check the typesetting”. Hermes 3000 is free up to 50 standard pages: Try it now.