Despite my current post as arts and entertainment editor for the Daily Trojan, most of my experience with this paper has not been in print sections, but rather as a copy editor. There are quite a few non-print sections of the Daily Trojan — they’re actually a majority of the paper’s makeup.

However, now that I’m a print editor, I see an entirely different side to this paper. This isn’t just because of a shift in responsibility, as my fabulous co-editor Aden Max Juarez and I lead an entire section of writers; it’s because of a shift in duty.

Not many people know that the print editors lay out the pages of the newspaper for each printed edition three nights a week; not many people even know what laying out a page actually means. In fact, I’ve had several people remark to me that they didn’t even realize that it was more than a matter of copying and pasting the completed article and dragging in an image. God, I wish it were that simple.

Human beings have created some absolutely wonderful inventions in our relatively brief time on this planet — we bring each other joy and passion and love and life. We’ve also created plenty of sinister, malevolent things that make me lose faith in our sense of morality as a species. One of those dastardly inventions is Adobe InDesign, the application that Daily Trojan print editors use to lay out the printed editions of our paper.

We painstakingly place column after column of heavily edited pieces, images with captions, bylines, headlines, subheads, separation bars and, if we’re feeling a little crazy with it, cutouts. We sit for hours, cursing InDesign for its oddities and foibles, things you pick up over time like you would working with an eccentric, stubborn person.

But it doesn’t end with situating columns and images. The average human being doesn’t know the words “kerning” or “tracking,” something I think is for the best based on how close it’s brought me to insanity.

According to Adobe, kerning is “the spacing between individual letters or characters,” which “adjusts letterspacing to make type more readable” while tracking “adjusts the amount of space between the letters of an entire word in equal increments.”

I’ve worked at the Daily Trojan for five semesters now, and I had never once heard of kerning or tracking before this semester. Now that I have, it’s all I see when I look at printed text. The ends of paragraphs — or “grafs” as we call them — must span past the middle of a column for readability.

Furthermore, we can’t have “bad breaks,” or words that are too long for a single line and become hyphenated into the next line in a way that confuses the reader, as the two halves create two unrelated words. If that wasn’t enough, lines at the tops or bottoms of columns must be part of another paragraph, or else we get what are called “widows” or “orphans” — nobody really knows the difference. 

Therefore, once all the basic page design is complete, the editors must then return to the text and make sure that none of those rules are violated; however, once one problem has been fixed, a new problem starts as a result. Making sure the end of a paragraph goes beyond the middle of a column with kerning and tracking can then cause a bad break. Fixing a bad break can alter the kerning, which can create a widow. What a mess!

And no matter how small, how seemingly unserious the problem is, I can’t leave the newsroom until it’s fixed.

This sticky situation I deal with two to three times a week has completely changed my outlook on the text I read in my day-to-day life. Every magazine, every newspaper, every editorial — these are problems that, when left unfixed, leave the reader feeling perturbed, even if they don’t know why.

It’s given me a wholly new appreciation for print journalism and text everywhere, something I wouldn’t have thought possible after already loving it so much for the past two years.

When I flip through a magazine, more often than not, I find these little rules and caveats followed, whether I expect it or not. There’s a secret world to print that I never knew existed until this semester, and that most people will never know as long as they live. There are so many rules we find ubiquitous until they’re gone, things that we’re grateful for that we’ll never know.

This invisibility and ubiquity behind properly formatting printed text are not discouraging to me. It gives me hope that there are other people like me, like my fellow print editors and my managing editors, who are dedicated to secret, whispering quality, whether there’s recognition or not.

With the Daily Trojan and print journalism as a whole, there’s always more than meets the eye, and nothing at this publication is paper-thin.

“Editors’ Epilogue” is a rotating column featuring a different Daily Trojan editor in each installment writing about their personal experiences. Anna Jordan is a junior majoring in creative writing and is an arts and entertainment editor at the Daily Trojan.