Get the body text right be­fore you worry about the rest of the document.

The four most im­por­tant ty­po­graphic con­sid­er­a­tions for body text are point size, line spac­ing, line length, and font (see font rec­om­men­da­tions).

Point size should be 10–12 points in printed doc­u­ments.

Line spac­ing should be 120–145% of the point size.

The av­er­age line length should be 45–90 char­ac­ters.

Page mar­gins should be larger than one inch on 8.5″ × 11″ paper.

Avoid goofy fonts and mono­spaced fonts.

Avoid sys­tem fonts if you can.

Use curly quo­ta­tion marks, not straight ones (see straight and curly quotes).

Use bold or italic as lit­tle as pos­si­ble, and not together.

Never un­der­line.

All caps are fine for less than one line of text.

Use cen­tered text sparingly.

Put only one space be­tween sen­tences.

Don’t use mul­ti­ple word spaces or other white-space char­ac­ters in a row.

Use 5–12% ex­tra let­terspac­ing with all caps and small caps.

Kern­ing should al­ways be on.

Use first-line in­dents that are one to four times the point size of the text, or use 4–10 points of space be­tween para­graphs. Don’t use both.

Al­ways use hy­phen­ation with jus­ti­fied text.

hy­phens and dashes are dif­fer­ent characters.

Use proper trade­mark and copy­right sym­bols—not al­pha­betic approximations.

Put a non­break­ing space af­ter para­graph and sec­tion marks.

Use a se­quence of un­der­scores to make a sig­na­ture line.

Apos­tro­phes point downward.