Typesetting is a system, not a font choice
A beautiful text face can still produce a poor book when lines are too long, spacing is uneven, margins pinch the binding, and headings interrupt the rhythm. Judge type size, x-height, line spacing, measure, paragraph indents, and paper color together. The reader experiences their combined texture over hundreds of pages.
Build roles for body text, chapter titles, subheads, extracts, lists, notes, captions, and matter pages. A role carries meaning and repeatable behavior; a one-off manual adjustment creates hidden debt that appears during revisions and ebook conversion.
Good line breaking becomes invisible
A typesetter manages word spacing and hyphenation so paragraphs do not form distracting rivers, stacks of hyphens, or extremely loose lines. Looking at a whole paragraph produces better tradeoffs than greedily filling one line at a time. Short final lines deserve attention because they can weaken a page top or force avoidable pagination problems.
Hyphenation should follow the book's language and avoid ugly name breaks, misleading compounds, or too many consecutive hyphenated lines. Turning hyphenation off entirely often creates worse spacing; using it without exceptions creates avoidable errors.
Pages have roles and relationships
A chapter opener, ordinary body page, part title, full-page image, and intentionally blank verso should not inherit identical furniture. Page roles control running heads, folios, vertical starts, margins, and break behavior. Spreads add another layer: facing pages should feel related without being forced into artificial bottom alignment.
Recto chapter starts can create blanks, and front matter may use a different folio system. Automate these rules from structure, then proof transitions. A robust system survives a revised paragraph without requiring the author to repair dozens of individual pages.
Automation still needs proofing
Software can calculate line breaks, prohibit isolated lines, generate contents entries, and paginate a whole manuscript consistently. It cannot know that a particular name must never hyphenate, a table should be redesigned, a poem's shape is meaningful, or an apparent blank page is editorially confusing. Diagnostic rules narrow the review; they do not replace it.
Proof the rendered PDF, then proof a physical copy. Screens hide gutter behavior, paper show-through, physical scale, and some image problems. Correct the structured source and regenerate outputs so print and ebook remain synchronized.
The spine is a typesetting output
The finished page count is not an administrative afterthought. It determines the print-cover spine and affects printing cost. A type-size, margin, trim, or chapter-start change can alter dozens of pages and make an already designed cover the wrong width.
Coverfairy's preview and export use the same paginator. The page count shown for the chosen trim and theme therefore feeds the matching cover project directly instead of relying on a words-per-page estimate.
Sources: Amazon KDP: Format Your Paperback · Amazon KDP: Paperback submission guidelines · W3C: EPUB 3.3. Reviewed ; recheck current platform requirements before production.