Typography
for Lawyers
2nd edition
Summary of key rules
Start
- foreword by Bryan A. Garner
- introduction
- how to use this book
- acknowledgments
- about Matthew Butterick
- legal
Please pay for this book
Why typography matters
- what is typography?
- who is typography for?
- why does typography matter?
- what is good typography?
- where do the rules come from?
Drowning the “Crystal Goblet”
Type composition
- straight and curly quotes
- one space between sentences
- paragraph and section marks
- hyphens and dashes
- ampersands
- signature lines
- trademark & copyright symbols
- ellipses
- apostrophes
- accented characters
- foot and inch marks
- white-space characters
- word spaces
- nonbreaking spaces
- tabs and tab stops
- hard line breaks
- carriage returns
- hard page breaks
- optional hyphens
- math symbols
- ligatures
Em sizing
Text formatting
- underlining
- goofy fonts
- monospaced fonts
- system fonts
- bold or italic
- all caps
- point size
- headings
- letterspacing
- kerning
- color
- alternate figures
- ordinals
- web & email addresses
- emails
- small caps
- hierarchical headings
- OpenType features
- mixing fonts
What’s the best font?
Font recommendations
- font basics
- Equity
- Valkyrie
- Century Supra
- Concourse
- Hermes Maia
- Heliotrope
- Triplicate
- Advocate
- Arial alternatives
- Helvetica alternatives
- Times New Roman alternatives
- A brief history of Times New Roman
- Courier alternatives
- Palatino alternatives
- Baskerville alternatives
- Georgia alternatives
- Verdana alternatives
- Gill Sans alternatives
- Cambria alternatives
- Calibri alternatives
The copyright status of fonts
Page layout
- centered text
- justified text
- first-line indents
- space between paragraphs
- line spacing
- line length
- page margins
- watermarks
- body text
- hyphenation
- block quotations
- bulleted and numbered lists
- tables
- rules & borders
- widow and orphan control
- space above & below
- page break before
- keep lines together
- keep with next paragraph
- columns
- footnotes
- line numbers
- Bates numbering
- paragraph & character styles
- maxims of page layout
Should I push my luck with typography?
Screen-reading considerations
Sample documents
- caption pages
- motions
- research memos
- letterhead
- business cards
- résumés
- grids of numbers
- presentations
- contracts
- court opinions
Afterword
Appendix
- typewriter habits
- how to interpret court rules
- printers and paper
- how to make a PDF
- how to embed fonts in a Word document
- bibliography
- common accented characters
- Concourse Index
- contact
Also by Matthew Butterick
- MB Type (fonts used in this book)
Practical Typography (like this book, but for nonlawyers)Beautiful Racket (book about making programming languages)- Pollen (software used to make this book)
- Typography-discussion forum (hosted by me, open to all)
- Chron (= my blog, roughly)
MB XS mailing list
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