Insomnia Magazine

Type Casting: Steven Brower

Back to Basics: Stop Sloppy Type John D. Berry

Grooming the Font: Robert Bringhurst

p

ck

Ba to

Ba

pgs .1-

Issue :

4

asting

Type C

In this

sics s.

5G ro 6 om in gt he Fo nt

pg

7 . gs 1 1 -

I l a t ns l

p n o i at

1 . s g 1 2

Au 8 pg 1

’s r o th

7

te o N

Type Casting

Steven Brower

My first job in book design was at New American Library, a publisher of mass-market books. I was thrilled to be hired. It was exactly where I wanted to be.

I love the written word, and viewed this as my entrance into a world I wanted to participate in. Little did I suspect at the time that mass-market books, also known as "pocket" books -they measure approximately 4"x7", although I have yet to wear a pocket they fit comfortably into), were viewer in the design world as the tawdry stepchild of true literature and design, gaudy and unsophisticated. I came to understand that this was lie to the fact that mass-market books, sold extensively in supermarkets and convenience stores, had more in common with soap detergent and cereal boxes than with their much more dignified older brother, the hardcover first edition book. Indeed the level of design of paperbacks was a slow to evolve as a box of Cheerios.

On the other hand, hardcover books, as if dressed in evening attire, wore elegant and sophisticated jackets. Next in line in terms of standing, in both the literacy and design world was the trade paper edition, a misnomer that does not reader to a specific audience within an area of work, but rather, to the second edition of the hardcover, or first edition, that sports a paperbound cover.

Trade paperbacks usually utilize the same interior printing as the hardcover and are roughly the same size (generally, 6"x9")

image courtasy of http://milkconceptboutique.co.uk/category-fornasetti/fornasetti/

Mass-market books were not so lucky.

The interior pages of the original edition were shrunk down, with no regard for the final type size or the eyes of the viewer. The interiors tended to be printed on cheap paper stock, prone to yellowing over time, The edges were often dyed to mask the different grades for paper used. The covers were usually quite loud, treated with a myriad of special effects (i.e., gold or silver foil, embossing and de-bossing, spot lamination, die cuts, metallic and Day-Go pantone colors, thermography, photograph courtacy of Taylor Maguire http://www.taylormaguire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Cuba_2006-150.jpg

and even holography), all designed to jump out at you and into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. The tradition of mass-market covers had more in common with, and, perhaps, for the most part is the descendant of, pulp magazine covers of earlier decades, with their colorful titles and over-the-top illustrations, than that of its more stylish, larger, and more expensive cousins.

What I learned So, when I made my entry into the elite of literature, I began in the "bullpen" of a mass-market house. I believe I would be afforded a good opportunity to learn something about type and image. Indeed, in my short tenure there, I employed more display typefaces in a year and a half than I will in the rest of my lifetime. And, I abused type more than I ever dreamed possible. There, type was always condensed or stretched so the height would be greater in a small format. The problem was that the face itself became distorted, as if it was put on the inquisitionist rack, with the horizontals remaining "thick" and the verticals thinning out. Back then when type was "spec'd" and sent out to a typesetter, there was a standing order at the type house to condense all type for our company 20 percent.

Sometimes, we would cut the type and extend int by hand m which created less distortion but still odd-looking faces.

Once, I was instructed by the art director to cut the serifs off a face, to suit his whim. It's a good thing there is no criminal prosecution for type abuse.

1

The art director usually commissioned the art for those titles. Therefore, the job of the designers was to find the "appropriate" type solution that worked with the illustrations to create the package. It was here that I learned my earliest lessons in the clichĂŠs of typography. Mass-market paperbacks are divided into different genres, distinct categories that define their audience and subject matter. Through they were unspoken rules, handed down from generation to generation; here is what I learned about type during my employ: And so it went. Every month, we were given five to six titles we were responsible for, and every month, new variations on old themes hung up on the wall. For a brief period I was assigned all the romance titles, which, themselves, were divided into subgenres (historical, regency, contemporary, etc.) I made the conscious decision to create the very best romance covers around. Sure, I would use script and cursive type, but I would use Better script and cursive type, so distinctive, elegant, and beautiful that I, or anyone else, would recognize the difference immediately. (When, six months after I left the job, I went to view my achievements at the local K-Mart, I could not pick out any of my designs from all the rest on the bookracks.)

Soon after, I graduated to art director fo a small publishing house. The problem was, I still knew little of and had little confidence in, typography. However, by this time, I Knew I knew little about typography. My solution, therefore, was to create images that obtained the type as an integral part of he image, in a play on vernacular design, thereby avoiding the issue entirely. Thus began a series of collaborations with talented illustrators and photographers, in which the typography od the jacket was incorporated as part of the illustration.

Mystery books especially lent themselves well to this endeavor. A nice thing about this approach is that is has a certain informality and familiarity with the audience. It also made my job easier, because I did not have to paste up much type for the cover (as one had to do back in the days of T-squares and wax) , since it was, for the most part, self-contained within the illustration.

2

This may seem like laziness on my part, but hey, I was busy.

Eventually, my eye began to develop, and my awareness and appreciation of good typography increased. I soon learned the pitfalls that most naĂŻve designers fall into, like utilizing a quirky novelty face does not equal creativity and usually calls attention to the wrong aspects of the solution. The importance of good letter spacing became paramount. Finding the right combination of a serif and sans serif face to

photograph courtasy of Tobias Rosen

evoke the mood of the material within was now my primary concern. The beauty of a classically rendered letterform now moved me, to quote Eric Gill, as much "as any sculpture of painted picture." I developed an appreciation for the rules of typography.

The Rules As I've said, it is a common mistake among young designers to think a quirky novelty face equals creativity. Of course, this couldn't be father from the truth. If anything, for the viewer, it has the opposite of the intended effect.

Rather than being the total sum of individual expression, it simply calls attention to itself, detracting from, rather than adding to, the content of the piece. It is no substitute for a well-reasoned conceptual solution to the design problem at hand.

As a general rule, no more than two faces should be utilized in any given design, usually the combination of a serif face and a sans serif face. There are thousands to choose from, but I find I have reduced the list to five or six in each category that I have used as body text throughout my career:

Serif Bodoni Caslon Cheltenham Garamond Sans Serif Franklin Gothic Futura Gill Sans News Gothic Trade gothic You should never condense or extend type. As I stated, this leads to unwanted distortions. Much care and consideration went into the design of these daces, and they should be rewards with respect.

There are thousands of condensed daces to choose from without resorting to the horizontal and vertical scale functions. Do not use text type as a display. Even though the computer will enlarge the top beyond the type designer's intention that may result in distortions.

Do not use display type as text.

Often, display type that looks great large can be difficult to read when small. Do not stack type. he result is odd-looking spacing that looks as it it is about to tumble on top of itself. The thinness of the letter I is no match for the heft of an O sitting on top of it. As always there are ways to achieve stacking successfully, but this requires care.

Also, as I noted, much care should be given to letter spacing the characters of each word. This is not as simple as it seems. The computer settings for type are rife with inconsistencies that need to be corrected optically. Certain combinations of letterforms are more difficult to adjust than others. It is paramount that even optical )as opposed to actual) spacing is achieved, regardless of the openness of closeness of the kerning. It helps if you view the setting upside down , backwards on a light box or sun-filled window, or squint at the copy to achieve satisfactory spacing.

I would caution you in the judicious use of drop shadows. Shadows these days can be rendered easily in programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator, and convincingly, too.

The problem is, it is so easily done that it is overdone. Thus, the wholesale usage of soft drop shadows has become the typographic equivalent of clip art. Rather than being evocative, it mainly evokes the program it was created in. Hard drop shadows, ones that are 100 percent of a color, are easily achieved in programs and placed behind the main text. This method is generally employed when that main text is not reading against the background, because of a neutral tone or an image that varies in tone from dark to light. The handed-down wisdom is: if you need a drop shadows to make it read, the piece isn’t working. These solid drop shadows always look artificial, since, in reality, there is no such thing as a solid drop shadow. There should be a better solution to readability. Perhaps the background or color the color of the type can be adjusted. Perhaps the type should be paneled or outlined. Thee are an infinite number of possible variations. If you must use a solid drop shadow, it should never be a color. Have you ever seen a shadow in life that is blue, yellow or green? It should certainly never be white. Why would a shadow be 100 percent lighter than what is, in theory, casting a shadow? What shadows create a hole in the background, and draw the eye to the shadow, and not where you want it to go: the text: justified text looks more formal than flush left, rag right. Most books are set justified while magazines are often flush left, rag right. Centered copy will appear more relaxed than asymmetrical copy. Large blocks of centered type can create oddlooking shapes that detract from the copy contained within. Another thing to consider is the point size and width of body copy. The tendency in recent times is to make type smaller and smaller, regardless of the intended audience.

However, the whole purpose of text is that it be read. A magazine covering contemporary music is different form the It is magazine for the American Association of also common today Retired Persons.

I see very wide columns of the with the point set as a small point size.

The problem is that a very wide column is hard to read because it forces the eye to move back and forth, tiring the reader. On the other hand, a very narrow measure also is objectionable, because he phrases and words are too cut up, with the eye jumping from line to line. We, as readers, do not read letter by letter, or even word by word, but, rather, phrase by phrase. A consensus favors an average of ten to twelve words per line.

Lastly, too much leading between lines also makes the reader work too hard jumping from line to line, while too little leading makes it hard for the reader to discern where one line ends and another begins. The audience should always be ignorant in the designer’s approach and it is the affluence- not the whim of the designer, or even the client- that defines the level of difficulty and ease with which a pieces is read. As Eric Gill said in 1931, “A book is primarily a thing to 3 be read.”

A final consideration is the size of the type. As a rule of thumb, mass-market books ten to be 8 point for reasons of space. A clothbound book, magazine, or newspaper usually falls into the 9.5 point to 12 point range. Oversized art books employ larger sizes- generally, 14 point to 18 point or more.

Choosing the right typeface for your design can be time-consuming.

There are thousands to choose from. Questions abound. Is the face legible at the setting I want? Does it evoke what I want it to evoke? Is it appropriate to the subject matter? There are no easy answers. When a student of mine used Clarendon in a self-promotion piece, I questioned why he chose a face that has 1950s connotations, mainly in connection with Reid Miles’ Blue Notes album covers. He answered, “ Because I thought it was cool.” I lectured him profusely on selecting type simply based on it’s “coolness.” Later, I relayed the incident to Seymour Chwast, of the legendary Pushpin Group (formerly Pushpin Studios). He observed that Clarendon is actually a Victorian face, which he and his peers revived as young designers in the 1950s/ When I asked why they chose to bring this arcane face back to life, he replied, “because we thought it was cool.”

“Design can be time consuming.”

“The typeface is the point of

departure,

Breaking the rules of course, there are always exceptions to the rules. An infinite number of faces can be used within one design, particularly when you employ a broadside-style type solution, a style that developed with the wood type settings of the ninetieth century. Another style, utilizing a myriad of faces, is that influenced by the Futurist and Dada movements of the early twentieth century. As Robert N. Jones stated in an article in the May 1960 issue of Print magazine: “it is my belief that there has never been a typeface that is so badly designed that it could not be handsomely and effectively used in the hands of the right...designer.”

Of course, this was before the novelty type explosion that took place later that decade, and again, after the advent of the Macintosh computer. Still, Jeffery Keedy, a contemporary type designer whose work appears regularly in Émigré: “Good designers can make used of almost anything. The typeface is the point of departure, not the destination.” Note the caveat “almost” Still, bad use of good type is much less desirable than god used of bad type.

When I first began in publishing, a coworker decided to let me in on the “secrets” of picking the appropriate face. “if you get a book on Lincoln to design,” he advised, “look up an appropriate typeface in the index of the type specimen book.” He proceeded to do so. “Ah, here we go- ‘Log Cabin’!” While, on the extremely rare occasion, I have found this to be a useful method, it’s a good general rule of that not to do.

not the destination.”

4

photo courtasy of http://www.abstractinfluence.com/forums/gallery/image.php?album_id=7&image_id=7185

There's a billboard along the freeway in San

Francisco that's entirely typographic, and very simple. Against a bright blue background, white letters spell out a single short line, set in quotation marks: "Are you lookin' at me?" The style of the letters is traditional, with serifs; it looks like a line of dialogue, which is exactly what it's supposed to look like. Since this is a billboard, and the text is the entire message of the billboard, it's a witty comment on the fact that you Are looking at "me"- that is, the message on the billboard- as you drive past.

But, as my partner and I drove past and spotted this billboard for the first time, we both simultaneously voiced that same response:

"No, I'm looking at your apostrophe!"

The quotations marks around the sentence are real quotation marks, which blend with the style of the lettering- "typographers' quotes," as there’re sometimes called - but the apostrophe at the end of "lookin'" is, disconcertingly, a single "typewriters quote," a straight up-and-down line with a rounded top and teardrop tail at the bottom. To anyone with any sensitivity to the shapes of letters, whether they know the terms of typesetting or not, this straight apostrophe is like a fart in a symphonyboorish, crude, out of place, and distracting. The normal quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence just serve to make the loud, "blat!" of the apostrophe stand out. Of that had been the purpose of the billboard, it would have been very effective. But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become the scene of an exercise in typographic irony, it's just a big ol' mistake. Really big, and right out there in plain sight.

Back to Basics: Stopping Sloppy Typography photo courtasy of http://www.thecollegesolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pencil-eraser.jpg

The Devil Is in the Details

This may be a particularly large-scale example, but it's not unusual. Too much of the signage and printed matter that we read- and that we, if we’re designers or typographers, create- is riddled with mistakes like this. It seems that an amazing number of people responsible for creating graphic matter are incapable of noticing when they get the type wrong.

This should not be so. These fine points ought to be covered in every basic class in typography, and basic typography ought to be part of the education of every graphic designer. But clearly, this isn't the case- of else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simply forgotten what they first learned about type. Or, they naively believe the software they use will do the job for them. Maybe it's time for a nationwide-no, worldwide-program of remedial courses in using type.

5

6

Automated Error

As my own small gesture toward improvement, I’ll point out a couple of the more obvious problems- in the hopes at maybe, maybe, they’ll become slightly less commonplace, at least for a while. Typewriter quotes are straight apostrophes are actually on the wane, thanks to word processing programs and page-layout programs that offer the option of automatically changing them to typographer’ quotes on the fly. (I’m not sure what had made the phenomenon I spotted on that billboard so common, but I’ve noticed a lot of examples recently of text where the double quotation marks are correct but the apostrophes are straight.)

But those same automatic typesetting routines have created another almost universal mistake: where there is an apostrophe at the beginning of a word and thus appears backwards, as an open quotation mark.

You see this in abbreviated dates (‘99, ‘01) and in colloquial spellings, like ‘em for them. The program can turn straight quotes into typographers’ quotes automatically, making any quotation mark at the start od a work into an open quote and any quotation mark at the end of a work into a closed quote, but it has no away of telling that the apostrophe at the beginning of ‘em isn’t supposed to be a single open quote, so it changed it into one. The only way to catch this is to make the correction by hand every time.

Anemic type the other rude noise that had become common in the symphony hall is fake small caps. Small caps are a wonderful thing, very useful and sometimes elegant; fake small caps are a distraction and an abomination.

Fake caps are what you get when you use a program’s “small caps” command. The software just shrinks the full-size capital letters down by a predetermined percentagewhich gives you a bunch of small, spindly-looking caps all huddled together in the middle of the text. If the design calls for caps and small caps- that is, small caps for the word but a full cap for the first letterit’s even worse, since the full-size caps draw attention to themselves because they look so much heavier than the smaller caps next to them.(if you’re using caps and a small caps to spell out an acronym, this might make sense in that as, you might want the initial caps to stand out. Otherwise, it’s silly.

(And- here comes the word againdistracting) If it weren’t for a single exception, I’d advise everyone to just forget about the “small caps” command- forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. (the exception is Adobe InDesign, which is smart enough to find the real small caps in an Open Type font that included them and use them when the “small caps” command is invoked.

Unfortunately, InDesign isn’t smart enough, or independent enough, to say, “no thanks,” when you invoke “small caps” in a font that doesn’t actually have any. it just does ahead and makes those familiar old fake small caps.)

Dd You don’t really need small caps at all, in most typesetting situations; small caps are a typographic refinement, not a crutch. If you’re doing to use them, use really small caps/ properly designed letter with the form of caps but usually a little wider, only as tall as the x-height or a little taller, and with stroke weights that match he height of the lowercase and the full caps of the same type face. Make sure you’re using a typeface that has a true small caps, of you want small caps. Letter space them a little, and set them slightly loosest he same way you would (or at least should) with a work in all caps; it makes the word much more readable.

Pay attention, now there are plenty of other bits of remedial typesetting that we ought to study, but those will do for now. The obvious corollary to al this is, to produce well-typeset words, whether in a single phrase on billboard or several pages of text, you have to pay attention. Proofread. Proofread again.

Don’t trust the defaults of any program you use. Look at good typesetting and figure out how it was done, then do it again by yourself. Don’t be sloppy. Aim for the best. Words to live by, I suppose. And, certainly, words to set type by. *

Grooming the Font Writing beings with the making of meaningful marksThat is to say, leaving traces of meaningful gestures. Typography begins with arranging meaningful marks that are already made. In that respect, the practice of typography is like playing the pianoan instrument different form the human voice. On the piano, the notes are already fixed, although their order, duration and amplitude are not. The notes are fixed but they can be endlessly rearranged, into meaningful music or meaningless noise.

Pianos, however, need to be tuned. The same is true of fonts. To put this in more literary terms, fonts need to be edited just as carefully as texts do- and may need to be re-edited, like texts, when their circumstances change. The editing of fonts, like the editing of texts, begins before their birth and never ends.

You may prefer to entrust the editing of your fonts, like the tuning of your piano, to a professional. If you are the editor of a magazine of the manager of a publishing house, that is probably the best way to proceed. But development typographers, like lutenists and guitarists, often feel that they themselves must tune the instruments they play.

photo by http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/24100000/Piano-Wallpaper-music-24173621-1280-800.jpg

Legal Considerations Check the license before tuning a digital font Digital fonts are usually licensed to the user, not sold outright, and the license terms vary. Some manufacturers claim to believe that improving a font produced bu them is an infringement of their rights. No one believes that turning a piano or pumping up the tired of a car infringes on the rights of the manufacturer - and this is true no matter whether the car of the piano had been rented, leased or purchased. Printed type was treated the same way from Bi Sheng’s time until the 1980s.

Generally speaking, metal type and phonotype are treated that way still. In the digital realm, where the font s wholly intangible, those older notions of ownership are under pressure to change.

The Linotype Library’s standard font license says that “you may modify the Font-Software to satisfy your design requirements.” FontShop’s standard license has a similar provision: “you do not have the right to modify and alter Font Software for your customary personal and business use, but not the resale or further distribution.” Adobe’s and Agfa Monotype’s licenses contain no such provision. Monotype’s says instead that “You may not alter Font Software for the purpose of adding any functionality...You agree not to adapt, modify, alter, translate, convert, or otherwise change the Font Software...”

if your license forbids improving the font itself, the only legal way to tune it is through ta software override. For example, you can build into the font. This is the least elegant way to do it, but a multitude of errors in fitting and kerning can be masked, if need be, by this means.

Ethical & Aesthetic Considerations If it ain’t broke....

Any part of the font can be tuned - letter shapes, character set, character encoding, fitting and side bearings, kerning table, hinting, and, in an OpenType font, the rules governing character substitution. What doesn’t need tuning or fixing shouldn’t be touched If you want to revise the font just for the sake of revising it, you might do better to design your own instead. And if you hack up some else’s font for practice, like a biology student cutting up a frog, you might cremate or bury the results.

7

If the font is out of then, fix it once and for all one way to refine the typography of a text is to work your way through it line by line, putting space in here, removing it there, and repositioning errant characters one by one. But if these refinements are made to the font itself, you will never need to make them again, They are done for good.

Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type designer third, the foundry fourth the needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of the font, the integrity of the letterforms over the ego of the designer, the artist sensibility of the designer over the foundry’s desire for profit, and the founder’s craft over a good deal else.

Keep on Fixing check every text you set to see where improvements can be made. Then return to the font and make them. Little buy little, you and the instrument 0 the font, that is - will fuse, and the type you set will start to sing. Remember, though, this process never ends. There is no such thing as the perfect font.

photo courtasy of http://florica.files.wordpress.com/2008/

If the font is out of then, fix it once and for all one way to refine the typography of a text is to work your way through it line by line, putting space in here, removing it there, and repositioning errant characters one by one. But if these refinements are made to the font itself, you will never need to make them again, They are done for good.

8

If there are defective glyphs, mend them If the basic letter shapes of your font are poorly drawn, it is probably better to abandon it rather than edit it. But many fonts combine superb basic letterforms with alien or sloppy supplementary characters. Where this is the case, you can usually rest assured that the basic letterforms are the work of a real designer, whose craftsmanship merits respect, and that the supplementary characters were added by an inattentive foundry employee. The latter’s errors should be remedied at once.

You may find for example that analphabetic characters such as @+- are too big or small, too light of too dark, too high or too low, or are otherwise out of tune with the basic alphabet. You may also find that diacritics in glyphs such as ft qp mn, are poorly drawn, poorly positioned, or out of scale with the letterforms.

For readable text, you almost always need text figures, but most digital fonts are sold with titling figures, but most digital fonts also include the ligatures fi and FL but not ff, ffi, ffl, fj or ffj. You may find at least one of the missing glyphs on a supplementary font ( an ‘expert font’) but that is not enough. put all the boxy glyphs together on the base font.I f, like a good Renaissance typographer, you use only upright parentheses and brackets, copy the upright forms from the roman to the italic font. Only then can they be kerned and spaced correctly without fuss.

10/pianoapart2.jpg?w=500&h=375

if glyphs you need are missing altogether, make them Standard ISO digital text fonts (PostScript or TrueType) have 256 slots and carry a basic set of Western European characters. Eastern European characters such a éèëìîïòôùàâç are usually missing. So are the Welsh sorts and a lot of characters needed for African, Asian and Native American language.

9

The components required to make these character may be present on the one, and assembling the pieces is no hard, but you need a place to put whatever characters you ,make. If you need only a few and do not care about system compatibility, you can place them in waster slots - eg. ^<>\|~` positions, which are accessible directly from the keyboard, or slots which can be reached through insertion utilities or by typing character codes or by customizing the keyboard.

If you need to add many such characters, you will need to make a supplementary font or, better yet, an enlarged font (TrueType or OpenType). If these are for you own use only, the extra characters can be places wherever you wish. If the fonts are to be shares, every new glyph should be labeled with its PostScript name and Unicode number. check and correct the side bearings

The spacing of letters is part of the essence of their design. A well-made font should need little adjustment, except for refining the kerning. Remember, however, that kerning tables exist for the sake or problematical sequences such as f*, gy,”A, To, Va and 74-. If you find that simple pars such as oo or oe require kerning, this is a sign that the letters are poorly fitted. It is better to correct the side bearings than to write a loaded kerning table.

The spacing of many analphabetism however, has as much to do with editorial style as with typographic design.

Unless your fonts are custom made, neither the type designer nor the founder can know what you need or prefer.

I habitually increase the left side bearing od semicolon, colon, question and exclamation marks, and the inner bearings of parentheses, in search of a kind of Channel Island compromise: neither of that fitting preferred by most Anglophone editors nor the wide-open spacing customary in France. If I worked in French all the time I might increase these side bearings further.

Digital type can be printed in three dimensions, using zinc or polymer plates, and metal type can be printed flat, from photos or cans of the letter press proofs. Usually, however, metal type is printed in three dimensional type, but the gain in sharpness rarely equals what is lost anemic next to pager printed directly from handset metal.

This imbalance can be addressed by going deeper into two dimensions. Digital type is capable of refinements of spacing kerning beyond those attainable in metal, and the primary means of achieving this refinement is the kerning table.

Always check the side bearings of figures and letters before you edit the kerning table. Side bearings can be checked quickly for errors by disabling kerning and setting character, at ample size, in pairs: 11223344...qqwweerrttyy...if the spacing within the pairs appears to cart, or if it appears consistently cramped or loose, side bearings probably need to be changed.

The function of a kerning table it to achieve what perfect side bearings cannon. A thorough check of the kerning table therefore involves checking all feasible permutations of characters 1213141516...qwqeqrqtqyquqiqoqpq...and so on.

This will take several hours for a standard ISO font. For a fun pan-Europeans font, it will take several days. Calss-based kerning ( now a standard capability of front editing software) can be used to speed the process. In class-based kerning, similar letters, are treated as one and kerned alike.

This is an excellent way to begin when you are kerning a large font, but not a way to finish. The combination Ta and Ta and Ti,il and il, i) are likely to require different treatment.Kerning sequences such a Tp,Tt and f(may seem to you absurd, but they can and do occur in legitimate text. (Tpig is the name of a town in the mountains of Dagestand, near the southern tip of the Russian Federation; Ttanuu is an important historical sit on the British Columbia coast; sequences such as y=f(x) occurs routinely in mathematics) If you know what texts you wish to set with a given font, and know that combination such as these will never occur, you can certainly omit them from the table. But if you are preparing a font for general use, even in a single language, remember that it should accommodate the occasional foreign phrase and the names of real and fictional people, places and things. These can involve some unusual combinations. ( a few additional examples: McTavish, FitzWilliam, O’Quinn, dogfish, jacko’-lanturn, Hallowe’en)

It is also wise to check the font by running a test file - a specially written text designed to hunt out missing or malformed characters and kerning pairs that are either too tight or too loose.

It is nothing unusual for a well-groomed ISO font (which might contain around two hundred working characters) to have a kerning table listing a thousand pairs. Kerning instructions for large Open Type fronts are usually stored in a different form, but if converted to tabular form, the kerning data for a pan-European Latin font may easily reach 30,000 pairs. For a well-groomed Latin-Greek-Cyrillic font, decompiling the kerning instructions can generate a table of 150,000 pairs. Remember, though, that the number isn’t what counts. What matters is the intelligences and style of the kerning. Remember too that there is no such thing as a font whose kerning cannot be improved.

10

Check the Kerning of the Word Space The word space - that invisible blank box - is the most common character in almost every text. It is normally kerned against slopping and undercut glyphs: quotation marks, apostrophe, the letters, AT,V,W,Y and often to the numerals 1,3,5.

It is not, however, normally kerned more than a hair either to or away from a preceding lowercase f in either roman or italic.

A cautionary example. Most of the Monotype digital revivals I have tested over the years have serious flaws in the kerning tables. One problem in particular recurs in Monotype Baskerville, Centaur, Arrighi, Dante, Fournier, Gill Sans, Poliphilus, Baldo, Van Dijick and other masterworks in the Monotype collection. These are well-tried faces of superb design- yet in defiance of tradition, the maker’s kerning tables call for a large space (as much as m\4) to be added whenever the f is following by a word space. The result is a large white blotch after every word ending in f unless a mark of punctuation intervenes.

Professional typographers may argue about whether the added space should be zero, or ten, or even 25 thousandths of an em. But there there is no professional dispute about whether it should be on the order of an eighth or a quarter of an em. An extra space that large is a prefabricated typographic error - one that would bring snorts of disbelief and instantaneous correction form Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Jan van Krimpen, Eric Gill and others on whose expertise and genius the Monotype heritage is built. But it is an easy error to fix for anyone equipped with the requisite tool: a digital font editor. hinting

If the font looks poor at low resolutions, checking the hinting digital hints are important chiefly for the sake of how the type will look on screen. Broadly speaking, hints are of two kinds: generic hints that apply to the font as a whole and specific hints applicable only to individual characters. Many fonts are sold unhinged, and few fonts indeed are sold with hints that cannot be improved.

Manual hinting is tedious in the extreme, but any good font editor of recent vintage will include routines for automated hinting. These routines are usual enough to make a poor hinted text font more legible on screen. ( in the long run, the solution is high-resolution screens, making the hinting of fonts irrelevant except at tiny sizes)

The presumption of common law is that inherited designs, like inherited texts veiling in the public domain. New designs ( or in the USA, the software in which they are enshrined) are protected for a certain term but copyright ; the names of the designers are also normally protected by trademarks legislation. The names are of ten better protected, in fact, because infringements on the right conferred by a trademark are often much easier to profane than infringements of copyright. Nevertheless there are times when a typographer must tinker with the names manufacturers give to their digital fonts.

Texts fonts are generally sold in families, which may included a smorgasbord of weights and variations. Most editing and typesetting software takes a narrower, more stereotypical view. It recognizes one y the nuclear mail or roman, italic, bold and bold italic. Keyboard shortcuts make it east to switch form one to another of these, and the switch codes employed are generic. Instead of saying “switch to such and such a font at such and such a size” then say, for instance, “switch to this fonts italic counterpart, whatever it may be” this convention makes the instructions transferable. You can change the face and sixe of a whole paragraph or file and the roman , italic and bold should all convert correctly. the slightest inconsistency in font names can percent this trick from working - and not all manufacturers name their fonts according to the same conventions. Dor the fonts to be lined, their family names must be identical and the font names must abide by the rules know to the operating system and software in use.

If for example, you install Martin Majoor’s Scale or Scale San (issued by FontShop) on a PC, you will find that the italic and the roman are unlinked. These are superbly designed fonts, handsomely kerned and fully equipped with the requested text figures and small caps - almost everything a digital font should be- but that PC versions musts be placed in a font editor and remained in order to make them work as expected.*

11

12 12 Photo by Alex Steers

Photo by Alex Steers

13

14

15

16

17

18