The American Society for Indexing held its 2025 Virtual Conference, “Spring into Action,” on Friday, April 25, 2025, and Saturday, April 26, 2025. Sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In one of the sessions on Friday, An Introduction to the Book Design Process, presenter Anna Aridome gave an overview of the book design process to provide a background for the indexing professional.
She discussed parts of the book, printer specifications, spreads, and typography. She defined leading, the spacing between vertical lines. She discussed special formatting for e-readers and how it differs from print books. She also explained typographic units of measure such as points and picas, specifying that one pica equals 12 points, and how to convert from picas and inches to points.
She gave special typographic specifications for indexes, such as columns, hyphenation, typeface size, leading, use of italics, and indents. She said that indexes use a smaller font size than the text in the book, one or two points smaller.
In the next blog posting, I will discuss another Friday session from the ASI 2025 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.