typography

guidelines

• Set font size to a minimum of 16px
• Set paragraph widths to ~45–80 characters

For apostrophes, both the typewriter (') and punctuation (’) variants are valid. Although personally, I prefer the latter purely for style reasons. Similarly for quotation marks, I prefer curly (“”) over straight ("").

Side note: did you know <q> elements automatically set quotation marks according to the parent element’s language?

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

somewhat obscure symbols

Let’s make the web prettier again with these non–widely-used typographical symbols and elements. Doesn’t this page look eesome with all of these symbols—like an old countryside manor or a dusty grimoire?

• Dinkuses are used to divide text or sections, or for completely ornamental reasons. These can take the form of increased whitespace but symbols like three spaced asterisks or bullets in a row (∗ ∗ ∗), asterisms (⁂), or fleurons (❦) may be used as well. In HTML, the <hr> (horizontal rule) tag represents a thematic break and could be used as a dinkus.
• The numero sign (№) can be used to abbreviate the word “number(s),” e.g. № 42.
• Commonly used by lawyers, the section sign (§) is used to reference sections of a document like Article § A.

ligatures

I love ligatures. Wikipedia has a list of English words that may be spelled with a ligature—færie, œuvre, etc.

Ꜳ ꜳ Æ æ Ꜵ ꜵ Ꜷ ꜷ Ꜹ ꜹ Ꜽ ꜽ Œ œ Ꝏ ꝏ Ꝡ ꝡ

dashes

There’s also the two-em dash (⸺) and the three-em dash (⸻).

spaces

Spacing between italicised and non-italicised texts may be narrow in certain cases—usually when the italicised ends with a tall minuscule or majuscule—and can be remedied with either a thin space   or hair space  

Hair space could also be used in variables with subscript and superscript elements.

Use non-breaking spaces   between numbers and units to prevent or between words where potential line breaks could be awkward.

numbers

Speaking of numbers, in paragraphs:

• Use word forms of integers zero to nine
• Integers above nine may be written in either numeral or word form, e.g. 42 or forty-two
• Integers twenty-one to ninety-nine that aren’t multiples of ten are hyphenated
• Sentences shouldn’t start with a numeral

Rules for singular and plural nouns:

• Nouns following an unsigned digit 1 are singular, e.g. 1 cat
• Nouns following simple fractions are singular, e.g. 1/2 teaspoon
• Nouns following mixed numbers are plural, e.g. 2 1/2 teaspoons
• Nouns following other decimal numbers are plural, e.g. 0 cats, -1 degrees, 0.4 grams, 30 days

formats

Copyright notices should contain the word “copyright” expressed in its symbol, word, or abbreviated form, the year of first publication or a range of years (often from first publication to the present year), and the owner’s name. For sound recordings, use the phonogram symbol ℗ instead of ©. The order matters not.

© 2024 A. N. Other
Copyright 2000–2024 A. N. Other
Copr. 2024 A. N. Other

abbreviations

Abbreviations are shortened forms of words or phrases.

Acronyms are just the preferred term for abbreviations pronounced as a word while letters in initialisms are pronounced individually. Numeronyms are acronyms with numbers, e.g. a11y and i18n.

Rules regarding the inclusion of periods and rules regarding plural forms of abbreviations vary and are debated, e.g. 1 g, 5 g, two GIFs.

resources and rabbit holes

• Links § Typography
• Address formats in different countries
• Wikipedia’s Manual of Style, especially § Formatting