ISO/DIN page layouts suggested by The Elements of Typographic Style

Background

I keep finding myself in a situation in which I need to put text on a page. This in and of itself is not noteworthy. However, I rarely find myself with the comfort of a predefined page layout. I have found that Robert Bringhurst's excellent book The Elements of Typographic Style has some helpful suggestions on where to put the margins and the textblock in chapter 8.

The unfortunate reality, however, is that this means I have to do math every time. As I tire of doing said math increasingly often – even if just to abandon the project altogether shortly after as few of my efforts come into fruition owing to a lamentable lack of discipline – I figured I would at least cut my losses of my most recent ambition and at least make available the number crunching. That way, I can rush from idea to abandonment a couple of minutes faster next time.

In this text, I am specifically looking at ISO 216, 217, which are also specified in DIN 476. The numbers here are not designed for other paper sizes. I am also assuming that this is a standard, boring text in a single column. If you have special requirements such as placing illustrations, graphs, room for extensive margin notes or reader note-taking, this may not serve you well.

Layout

Bringhurst outlines:

P = 1.414 [ √2 ]; T = 1.62 [ φ, the golden section ]. Margins: s = t = w/9 and e = f = 2s. This is a simple format for placing a golden-section textblock on an ISO page, locking the two together with margins in the proportions 1 : 2. Two possible locations for folios are shown: in the upper outside margin and (as an alternative) underneath the lower outside corner of the textblock. There is also ample room for sidenotes in the fore-edge if required. If the spine and top margins on these pages are increased to w/8, while the textblock and page are held at their original proportion, the relationship of the margins becomes e = f = φ s, another golden section.

where:

P

refers to the page proportion (h/w),

T

refers to the textblock proportion (d/m),

w

refers to the width of the page (trim-size),

h

refers to the height of the page (trim-size),

m

refers to the measure (width of the primary textblock),

d

refers to the depth (height) of the primary textblock, excluding running heads, folios and the like,

s

refers to the spine margin (back margin),

t

refers to the top margin (head margin),

e

refers to the fore-edge (front margin) and

f

refers to the foot margin.

Bringhurst also presents various other mathematically more or less complex ways of laying out the page. However, this simple suggestion has always served me well and thus this is what I will be working with. It is generally assumed that the typography is placed on a double-page as in a bound book and hence the margins are asymmetrical. If you are not binding the pages in such a way, you can also average the horizontal and vertical margins, thereby centering the text block either horizontally or vertically. However, I recommend against vertically centering the text block. On a typical computer, viewing a PDF usually means choosing between (1) not seeing all of a page or (2) having to read type that is too small to read at all. Therefore, I argue that having an asymmetric vertical layout with a shorter top margin is superior. In this case, you would pick the top/bottom margins from the tables labeled off-center and the front/back margins from the tables labeled centered for the same column type (regular or wide).

For the sake of convenience, I give both the normal layout numbers and the numbers for centering. In all cases, P and T are constant values given in the quotation above.

The numbers

All values are rounded to two decimal digits.