(Lack of) Paragraph Separation

It has always surprised me how many technical authors do not clearly define their paragraphs which make their work hard to read. There are two standards for paragraph identification: 1. Indent the first line of every paragraph and 2. Use no indentation and separate two paragraphs by a blank line.

The most common typesetting mistake I see is the use of a layout program's default H&J settings. The results are less hideous in InDesign than in Quark, but they can still be quite nasty, depending on the design and the typeface.

Whenever I install InDesign on a new computer, I set my default H&Js as follows:

80 95 150
-3 0 +3
-2 0 +2

and then I tweak it from there for each design. (For example, the Fedra font family, which is the house font at my day job, requires *very* tight character spacing but looser word spacing.) The defaults are much too gappy for my taste.

Authors should not even try to format their text themselves, but just provide space-separated paragraphs (unless they are competent to use a decent markup system like XML or LaTeX). Unfortunately, 25 years of wordprocessing has misled them into believing that making it look pretty means that it is also correct, and that Instant Textual Gratification[tm] is the goal of every author.

Among other errors:

* spaces before periods, commas, colons, semicolons, question marks and exclamation marks
* illiteracy
* inconsistency
* ignorance of structure (eg a level 3 header directly after a level 1 header "because I prefer smaller type" :-)
* incompetence (footnotes and xrefs/bibrefs which don't match up or which are plain wrong)

But authors also criticise us for formatting the stuff wrongly...