Re: Space Before and After?
I have always used Space After each body text paragraph style, and both
Space Before and Space After for headings, choosing the amount by eye. As a
technical person whose documents were a by-product, that was good enough.
Now I am trying to make technical writing a career, and want to do better.
Can you offer advice on how to choose good values for paragraph spacing?
Should it be based mostly on font size? Should it be greater when margins
are wider? Do particular kinds of document need special treatment?
Alan,
Breathe with me here. In. Out. Slowly. In. Out. Okay, now, in unison: IT DEPENDS.
What is the context of your question? Book design? Internal technical documents? Online help? Space before and after a paragraph is a vestige of the "block" style business letter taught in typing classes starting sometime before World War II. In typesetting, the much older convention (and still current in fields outside tech writing) is to indent paragraphs to mark them rather than to add space between them. However, technical documentation started out in typewritten form prior to the advent of desktop publishing systems and a lot of the formats we still see follow the typewriting convention.
I've done some Web work in which I used CSS to change the default HTML <p> to be an indented paragraph with no space above or below. Where the page design allowed for a wide enough column, I've even turned on justification to good effect (although the lack of a hyphenation option in CSS can be problematic, depending on the circumstances). [ASIDE: Hey, does anyone know if there is such a thing? I haven't found one.]
As for spacing heads, you're on the right track with doing it visually. To some extent the amount of space designed into a heading depends on the font, the size, and whether the heading is caps and lowercase or all caps. Further--again, going to the conventions of traditional book design--head spacing is adjustable. In a book, it is considered important (strictly a convention, not a technical requirement) to have facing pages end at the same depth, specifically the nominal page depth plus or minus one line. The way this is done when there are subheading present on the pages is to adjust the space above headings and, if that doesn't quite do the trick, to adjust it below one or more heads as well. The idea is to have all heading of the same level on a given two-page spread be as consistent with each other as possible while still holding to the depth rule.
In most tech writing contexts, the page depth thing is thrown out the window and nobody adjust spacing around heads. So you just want a rule of thumb. Okay: more space above than below, up to twice as much above as below if the heading is similar in size to the body text and in caps and lower case. For low-level heads (the first level above paragraph run-in heads) might have zero below and as little as 6 pt above. An 18 pt main heading might nominally have 12 below and 18 above. But once you pick some numbers you have to print out some sample pages, see how they look, and make adjustments.
Also keep in mind that it's a Very Good Thing if your heading can take a whole number of text lines. This helps you stay aligned with a layout grid, although it often breaks down if the heading falls at the top of a page. For example, if your text is 10/12, you want a heading, combined with the space below, to be a multiple of 12 pt and then you want the space above to be a multiple of 12 pt. Obviously, if your heading runs over to two lines, you might need to adjust the space above to accomplish this. But let's continue with the example. Maybe a number 2 head is 14/18. Well, if you have a single-line heading at that level and add 6 pt below and 12 pt above, it's now a total of 36 pt, which is a multiple of 12. A two-line heading would need 6 pt added somewhere--either above it if it's in the middle of a page or below if it's at the top, although it would be preferable to make up the 6 pt somewhere else on the page if possible. However, if you're not going to stick with a grid system, no adjustment is necessary.
Confused yet? Still breathing?
Dick
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