Typewriter characters are bigger than printed characters. Ergo, typewritten documents use bigger sheets of paper than books. Ergo, when you put traditional text fonts on typewriter-size paper, the lines of text contain way too many characters.
It’s too bad that we still use typewriter-size paper. But like as not, that’s what’s in your printer, so you need to deal with the fact that your paper is much wider than it ought to be.
The first thing you can do is widen the margins—say, 1.5 inches instead of 1 inch. If the lines are still be too long to read comfortably (for example, your eyes have trouble finding the start of the next line), you can add some space between the lines of the paragraph.
A typesetter indents the first line with an em space. With long lines of text, you can increase that value, but keep it modest. One-half inch is way too much.
Full justification looks great in newspaper columns and books. With long lines, ragged right often looks better.
If you are tempted to apply center alignment, think twice. Centered text is the favorite of neophytes; it’s overused and not very pretty. Conversely, ragged left is underused.
A multi-line paragraph that relegates its first or last line to a different page is ugly. Either use Pagehand’s Prevent Stragglers setting, or tweak the paragraph manually.
Sometimes, especially at large sizes, two characters just don’t look right sitting next to each other. The spacing is off. Some fonts do a better job with spacing than others. For example, AV looks fine in Helvetica and Hoefler Text, but there’s too much space between the letters in Lucida Grande and Didot. In Copperplate, the spacing is correct for capitals but wrong for small caps. You just have to look over the printed text yourself; Pagehand cannot find these kerning problems for you.
If you mix fonts or font sizes on the same line, you might run into baseline problems. For example, a you might decide that a bullet character is too big for its accompanying text, so you change its point size. The bullet then might appear a little too high or too low. You need to adjust the bullet’s baseline to place it correctly.