Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

A few decades ago, you would have used a typewriter to compose most formal communications. For letters, internal memos, reports, and other routine materials, your typewritten manuscript would then serve as the end product. However, if you meant for the work to be published, whether it be for a newspaper, a journal article, a nice handout, or even a sign, that manuscript would be sent to a professional typesetter who would do all kinds of things to your words and letters to make them look right.

Today there are still typesetters working for newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, but computers, word processing software, high quality office printers, and the internet mean that most of our "published" output goes straight to the public without passing through a typesetter's hands. You are your own typesetter! Word processing software makes much of it easy, but you're still hampered by two big problems: the keyboard and the people who taught you how to use it.

Despite all of our technical advantages, the computer keyboard still has basically the same keys as an old manual typewriter. Even worse, to this day most typing instructors teach practices that go back to when people were just typing manuscripts, and some of the rules for manuscript production are very different from the centuries-old practices of typesetting.

This page points out some of the trickier aspects of typesetting, things which you can't do with just a typewriter keyboard, or which actually contravene the "rules" of typing you may have been taught.

For those who learned "old school" typing, there's one habit you absolutely need to unlearn: typing two spaces after a period. In modern typography there's only one space after a period. Same with colons. In fact, in standard typography there is absolutely no place where you put two spaces next to each other! Using this rule will make your content look like regular printing and not a typed letter.

There's actually a long history of debate over preference for single-spacing, double-spacing, and more exotic variants such as triple-spacing and "fat spaces." If you're interested in it, it's all over the internet. But as of the 21st century, all style manuals and publication manuals are unanimous in requiring single-spacing for professional or academic work.

Oddly enough, in most web publishing platforms you wouldn't even have to worry about multiple spaces. By the rules of HTML any number of consecutive spaces is rendered as a single space by the browser. But the LibGuides Rich-Text Editor tries to be "friendly", and will convert extra spaces into non-breaking spaces, a space that's treated like a letter; two words separated by a non-breaking space will be treated as a single word and will always appear on the same line (thus "non-breaking"). This can cause problems when you accidentally type two spaces, especially if you later delete one, since you may delete the regular space producing lines that look like this one. When that happens, check the html code and look for the the code   and replace it with a regular space.

Also watch out for spaces at the end of paragraphs. They're normally invisible, but can throw off the automatic formatting of paragraphs.

Your keyboard has exactly one type of "dash" character, the hyphen, located both to the right of number 0 and in the upper right of the number pad. But in type-setting there are four different characters to use: the hyphen, the minus sign, and two kinds of dashes. For complete rules on which to use where, consult the Chicago Manual of Style, sections 6.75–6.91. Here are some quick notes on usage, along with how to produce them in both html and Word documents. (Note that Word will often automatically convert your hyphens into the appropriate dashes if it thinks it knows what you're doing.)

The hyphen usually appears inside compound words: - . It's the character on your keyboard, so easy to type!

The n-dash is a dash the width of a letter n: – . It's mostly used for ranges of things where it has the meaning of "to". For example, volumes 1–4. To type an n-dash in Word, hit the Ctrl key and the hyphen key in the number pad. To type an n-dash in html, go into the html code (or click on Source in the LibGuides Rich Text Editor) and type – 

The m-dash is a dash the width of a letter m: — . It's an actual punctuation mark, usually used as an alternative to commas, parentheses, or colons. To type an m-dash in Word, hit the Ctrl and Alt keys and the hyphen key in the number pad. To type an m-dash in html, go into the html code (the Plain-Text Editor in LibGuides) and type —

The minus sign is slightly longer than a hyphen, and is higher than both hyphens and dashes: − . It's used in mathematics. To type a minus sign in Word, go to Insert | Symbol | More Symbols | Mathematical Operators. To type a minus sign in html, go into the html code (the Plain-Text Editor in LibGuides) and type −

Smart quotes are the ones that look different depending on whether they're opening or closing the quotation. Dumb quotes are the ones that look the same on either side. (The two types are sometimes call curly and straight quotes, though the actual appearance depends on the font.) There are single and double quote versions of both. And in one of the few cases where typesetters use the same character for two things, the right single quote is the same as the apostrophe.

Chicago's advice on smart versus dumb quotes is simple: if you feel confident in using smart quotes, go ahead and use them. But if you don't, stick with dumb quotes, which is all you can type on your keyboard. Whichever you choose, be consistent. Few things look sloppier than a mix of smart and dumb quotes. Caveat: Avoid smart apostrophes when citing titles, since they're not always understood by search engines if the user copies and pastes them.

Microsoft Word actually does a fairly good job of automatically converting dumb to smart quotes, so if you're composing in Word you should be fine. (Though beware when pasting from Word to LibGuides. The special Paste from Word and the Remove Formatting tool will keep your smart quotes while stripping out other junk.) But if you're composing directly in LibGuides, you'll need to do them "manually" in the html code using the codes below.

Much like double spaces, double carriage returns are also a no-no. In web pages, paragraph spacing is handled by the style sheets, while in Word it's controlled by the paragraph features. One thing to watch out for in LibGuides: when you're editing, it's really easy to leave an empty paragraph at the end of a box, since you can't actually see it while editing. But it's there, and will show up, leaving a big white space at the bottom of the box. If you spot that, just go into the box, put your cursor after the last period and hit delete a few times to wipe out anything after it.

As the box on dashes mentions, the minus character is different from the hyphen on your keyboard. Similarly, the multiplication symbol is not the same as the letter x; the prime and double prime symbols are not the same as single or double quotes (smart or dumb); and the fraction slash (sometimes also used as the symbol for division) is not the same as the punctuation slash—and there are pre-defined characters for many common fractions.

Basically, if you're going to use mathematical expressions, geographic coordinates, chemical symbols, or other technical materials in your LibGuide, do a quick Google search on "math html" (or similar), read up on it, and be prepared to manually code much of it in the Plain-Text Editor.

The three trademark symbols (®, ™, and ℠) can't be typed on a keyboard. But I'm not going to tell you how to use them because there is no need for you to ever use them.

There is no legal requirement to use trademark symbols with trademarked names. However, there are legal repercussions for using the wrong one. Most academic and journalistic style guides (including the one we use) discourage their use. So unless we're contractually obligated to use a trademark symbol (I know of no examples), don't use them.