XPress has always been known for its typographic accuracy, the ability to create your own kerning tables and adjust in thousandths of a point. Unfortunately a lot of people do not utilise this power either because they do not have the knowledge of the program or the inclination to do it. As a result there is a lot of bad typography produced in XPress and there is a tendency to blame the program or the platform rather than a lack of skills from the operator.
There are no hard and fast rules to typography, as in any creative endeavour, and any rules that existed are completely abandoned in ‘modern’ type. The setting of type is really in the eye of the beholder and what satisfies one person will annoy another. Some like loose setting, some like it tight. Some like it justified, others like it range left and very ragged while others prefer it cogent. The important thing is to make it legible. Different areas of typesetting require different approaches. Editorial design will require more attention to copy fitting while advertising requires more attention to kerning in headlines. And, of course, each typeface has its own idiosyncrasies which also varies from foundry to foundry (or do we call them software houses now?).
In previous XPhiles I have covered Preferences and Style Sheets as the basis of good working practices with type. Setting the Hyphenation and Justification Preferences is vital to achieving good ‘colour’ in your setting. XPress’s defaults are far from perfect and it really is a good idea to create different tables for different jobs and different fonts.
Take hyphenation, for example. XPress’s 
default is unlimited hyphens, whereas most
typographers agree that the most should be
three and some even say that two is really
the maximum. Yet while I was working in
Italy they were quite happy to have five
hyphens in a row, even breaking people’s
names (mind you they hyphenate when
writing by hand!). Personally I prefer to
have auto hyphenation switched off. It does
mean checking the whole document manually
and inserting discretionary hyphens (Ô£ø-minus) where necessary, and tracking individual lines (in or out) so that everything fits nicely. It is a lot of work, but pride of craftsmanship is its own reward.
It’s not all sweat though because Quark has a free XTension called TypeTricks (available for their web site www.quark.com) that will check your document for loose justification, hyphens (manual and automatic) plus widows and orphans. Although it does not correct them it will find them for you so you can correct them as you see fit. The other tricks it can do is create fractions and kern word space (as opposed to the usual letter space).
 
On the subject of kerning…
Theoretically when you buy a font it should have all the kerning pairs included. The larger, more reputable foundries (Adobe, Monotype, Berthold, Agfa, Bitstream etc) go to great lengths to make sure this is done to a very high standard and this is reflected in the price. Producing perfect kerning pairs can take longer than the actual drawing of the characters. XPress includes a Kerning and Tracking Editor that allows you to set customised kerning pairs for fonts used in XPress.
One of our clients insists on using OCR-B for setting the documentation of one of its services. This is a monospaced font designed to be read by a scanner (like the numbers on the bottom of your cheques). In body copy it is easy enough to get away with tracking it in tight, but on headlines and sub heads it needs personalised attention, or setting the kerning pairs in the Kerning Editor (or doing it in Fontographer and creating a ‘new’ font). With the first option you only need to include a copy of the Kerning Table rather than the modified font (which is illegal anyway).
 
Another free XTension that I have mentioned before is indispensable when sending your work out to repro (especially if you haven’t invested in a preflight program). Meadows Font Collector will collect the fonts used in a document into a folder with the job. It will also embed fonts into XPress EPS files, which makes it ideal for publications that refuse to take fonts. This can be downloaded from http://www.meadowsinfo.com
ALAP (a lowly apprentice production http://www.alap.com) produces FingerType, an XTension that allows you to interactively kern type by actually pushing the letters closer together. I’m not convinced about the advantage of working like this, as the standard method works just fine.
There are even some XTensions for creating 3D type directly in XPress but I would personally use a dedicated program and leave XPress to do what it does best – set type and create repro ready documents.
There is one feature of XPress 4 that will turn type into a graphic element. Under the Style menu is Text to Box, which does exactly that, it converts a selected line of text to a picture or text box into which copy or a graphic can be inserted. Used with discretion it can produce a useful design element but it can easily overused.
Due to time and space constraints this is just a brief look at some of the ways of working with type in XPress. Remember if you have any specific queries please e-mail me at
