What is Advanced Typeset?
Advanced Typeset composes your entire book in each interior style, several different ways in each, measures every result, and shows you the best each style reached. Four pages of your own book, side by side, with the numbers under them.
It is on the findings panel, under Set it for me. It takes a few minutes, because it really does set the whole book each time — there is no shortcut and no estimate involved.
Why it exists
How a book paginates is not predictable from the settings. A change far too small to see — a margin a fiftieth of an inch wider — moves one character on some lines, and one character compounds over thousands of lines until the whole book falls differently. Sometimes that is worth six pages that now end level; sometimes it costs you three.
Nothing about the typography tells you in advance which it will be. The only way to know is to set the book and count, and that is all this does. On a real manuscript the default settings often sit at a locally poor spot, with something better a hair in either direction.
What it tries
Within each style, it composes your book across:
- The chapter opener drop — how far down the page a chapter begins. Costs you nothing and moves everything after it.
- A small margin nudge — a percent or two either way. Much smaller than one step of the Margins setting, and not visible as a design change.
It measures every combination and keeps the best one for that style. What it keeps is the one that leaves you the shortest list of things to fix — pages that end short, paragraphs set wide, and channels of white that are not already inside one of those paragraphs.
What it never touches
Your words, your trim size, your Page fill setting, your scene ornament, your chapter numbering, your front and back matter — and it does not change anything at all until you press Use this. Everything you have already set stays set; the search runs on top of your settings, not instead of them.
Compact is left out unless you are already using it. Choosing Compact is a decision to make a different kind of book — denser, cheaper to print — and it will always score well on page count for exactly that reason. Suggesting it to someone who did not ask for it would be answering a question they did not put.
Reading the results
Press See results for the comparison. It is a grid, in style order, and it is deliberately not ranked. There is no winner, because the thing being decided — what your book should look like — is not something a number can settle.
Each card gives you:
- A real page of your book, set in that style. Click it to see it full size.
- Total pages — which is print cost, and spine width.
- Pages that end short — pages in the middle of a chapter that stop above the bottom margin. A chapter's last page is meant to end early and is not counted.
- Pages with rivers — pale channels of white running down a page. See What is Page fill, and what is a river of white?
- Paragraphs set wide — paragraphs whose every line carries stretched word spaces, which reads as a gray patch on the page. The search counts these too, and they are part of what decides the margin it picks for each style. See Why is a paragraph set with wide word spaces?
- Details — hover it for the technical figures: typeface, opener face, size, leading, line length, characters a line, lines a page, margins, chapter drop. These are read off the book that was actually composed, not from a table, so they are what your book would really be.
Under each card is the setting that won for that style — "chapter openers 5 lines down", or "this style as it comes".
Trying one, and keeping it
Use this sets your book that way and re-typesets it — the real book, not a preview. Try as many as you like; each one replaces the last.
On the style you are already using, the button reads Use these settings, because the look does not change — only the drop and the margin the search found for it. A card is marked in use only when the book already matches it exactly, settings and all.
The findings panel then asks whether to keep it or put back what you had. Putting it back returns the style, the chapter drop and the margin to exactly what you arrived with — not to the row you tried before this one — and it leaves alone anything else you changed in Settings in the meantime.
Judge the picture first and the numbers second. A style that scores two pages better and looks wrong for your book is the wrong answer, and you are the only one who can say which is which.
What happens to it afterward
Once a row is applied it is your book's own setting, and it stays through anything you do in Settings. Change your running heads, your drop caps, your page numbers, press Apply — the chapter drop and the margin from Advanced Typeset are still there.
Two of them are visible: the style and the chapter opener drop appear in Settings as ordinary values, and changing them yourself simply wins.
The margin nudge has no control of its own, because it is a fraction of a step of the Margins setting and there is nothing sensible to call it. It rides on top of whatever Margins you have chosen — so if you switch to Generous, you get Generous. Moving that control is the one thing that clears the nudge, which is what you would want: you have just decided the margins yourself.