A component of desktop publishing and page layout, text composition deals specifically with how copy is arranged on the page. It involves manipulating text placement and altering the visual appearance of the text.
Some of the tasks that come into play in text composition are choosing text alignment, changing font sizes or making text bold or using italics, deciding how much space to put between lines of text or columns of text, and using typographical embellishments such as drop caps.
Text composition goes hand-in-hand with page layout where you are applying the principles of design to the placement and interaction between text and images. Although it originally referred to print design, the application of various styles and the use of HTML to format text for a Web page is also text composition.
