What Makes Typesetting Academic Texts Difficult?

Issue 1
Hierarchies

In contrast to most fictional texts, academic texts are characterized by a clear organizational structure—such as the IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) structure. Such a structure requires a clear hierarchy of the accompanying hierarchical text elements: section headings, subsection headings, etc.

This entails two demands regarding the formatting: Elements of identical hierarchical level must be formatted identically. And the hierarchy has to be expressed clearly in the formatting of the elements: usually, higher-level headings are surrounded by more whitespace and are characterized by larger font sizes than lower-level headings.

Issue 2
Combining Several Alphabets

Academic texts often include characters or entire passages from non-Latin alphabets. For instance, scholars in history, philosophy, and theology often quote Greek or Hebrew texts. In the natural sciences, medicine, mathematics, and economics, it is common to label entities with Greek lettes. These are ideally set in the same typeface as the main text.

Issue 3
Formulas and Equations

Mathematics-heavy texts require the font to include nonstandard symbols. Moreover, they may make finding a suitable line spacing difficult if they include superscripts and subscripts or even nested superscripts and subscripts.

In addition, mathematical texts are frequently full of numbers and often abbreviations. This requires the digits and the upper-case letters of a font to integrate well with the lower-case letters.

Last but not least, it is common to set variables and names of functions in italics. As a consequence, the slope of the italics should not be too pronounced.

Issue 4
Figures and Tables

Academic texts often include figures and tables. These should, of course, fit well into the general layout. Their captions require special attention.

Issue 5
Joyless Reading

Most readers do not read academic literature for fun but because they are required to process the content. Hence, compared to reading fiction, reading academic texts is often a rather joyless activity—and it is often effortful because the content itself may be hard to comprehend.

Bad typography requires additional effort and makes the reading even less fun—whereas good typography will help the reader and make the reading more pleasant.