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This area of munchfonts is devoted to important aspects of typeface design that are occasionally discussed on the newslist Typo-L, and involve visual material. To subscribe to Typo-L, see the website for details (a hyperlink is available from the [&] section of the munchfonts site).
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A comparison of custom Mac bitmaps for screen reading to Verdana TrueType at 12, 10, and 9 points. The custom 9pt is problematical. The 12pt is the normal browser size, and at 82dpi renders at about 10.5pts physical. |
An ornamental gif of Really Greek Medium |
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Jean-François Porchez has provided a PDF that details comparisons of his Le Monde Journal typeface and of Times New Roman. |
The PDF is composed of typeface font text converted to outlines, and can be opened in Illustrator, etc. for examination of the curves. |
| The usage of ornamental faces with Blackletter (Gothic) came up. Here's a modern sample of the use of Lombardic Uncials as a heading for a English Textura Quadrata text. Typically, the usage alternates red-blue/red/blue. This is preferable to the use of all-capital Blackletter characters whose forms and ornamentations drastically impede legibility -- not that Lombardics are as legible as lowercase, but they are certainly more legible than Blackletter capitals!
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A while ago, another list was looking for a logo. Idly, I knocked up a prototype; and put it away. On Typo-L the subject of the Golden Mean (Section, Ratio; Phi) arose; and so here:
What goes around. |
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Q: What happens to glyphs placed in the Space character slot? A: On this Mac, PS1 fonts will show the glyph. In justified text, extra space is added to the right of the glyph; it isn't centered. |
| TT fonts don't show the glyph at all. |
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First lines are flush-left, rag-right; second lines are justified. Upshot: for reliable setting of the raised period, use that glyph (Shift-Opt-9); the two rasterisers (TT & ATM) seem to disagree on how to show the space glyph.
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Q: What is the relationship of the strokes to each other in sans serif typefaces? Are they all the same? |
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Here, you can see that the strong strokes from upper-left to lower-right are distinctly wider than the weak strokes from lower-left to upper-right. This differentiation is directly derived from the way the angled edged pen will place the weight in those positions. That all great sans benefit from this compensation of weights -- rather than having their strokes all physically equal -- points to either a possibly culturally-induced bias towards the weighting of edged-pen letters, or else towards a natural optical illusion that causes lower-left to upper-right lines to appear wider and heavier, and therefore necessitate compensating for the illusion in order to appear to be equal; which latter argument positions the edged-pen as the premier instrument for judging the amount and position of such compensation. |
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Q: What does a blackletter Euro look like?! A: Might look like this, in Rotunda: |
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Here is the illustration of the earlier message on the design of the Cyrillic de. Top to bottom:
1. A Trajan-like typeface project. Sorry for the low resolution (but I hope you get the idea).
Maxim |
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...how essential are the extensions on the lower bar of de? My gut reaction is that, since they confine a counter, they are essential parts of the letter, and are not mere ornament; though I can see the evolution from serif to feature -- like the horizontal of many sans G's. They are *very* essential, Gary. In the equilateral variety of the de this is precisely those hanging terminals that make the glyph look Cyrillic, not Greek. They are pretty prominent in the earlier, pre-Petrine, styles (ustav, polu-ustav). As a rule, in more "standard" romans (old styles, transitionals, moderns, slab serifs) the shape of the terminals should be coordinated with the terminals of the bar of the T, and the hanging terminals of the tse and shcha. Exceptions exist, though. In some more flamboyant, idiosyncratic styles the terminals of the tse and shcha can go pretty wild (in that sense they are comparable to the queue of the Q).
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