Hey everyone,I'm doing a typeface as part of the Type@Cooper Condensed Program and had an idea about specific diacritic designs depending on the language.
I noticed that in Spanish (my mother tongue) we are used to the 'acute' being more horizontal, it goes well with the 'tilde' and hides better in paragraphs. But for example in French they are used to 'acute' to be much more vertical, as they have more frequency and types of diacritics the vertical 'acute' goes well together with the 'circumflex' and apostrophe.
So, I've created 2 kinds of 'acute' one more vertical (by default) and one more horizontal, and programed it to only apear in Spanish with the 'locl' feature. Here I have a screenshot (type in progress):
My questions are... – Is there any research about this subject?
– Do you know if other languages could potentially benefit from this? (I'm guessing Portuguese is similar than Spanish, but I would like to be sure before programing it)
Thank you!
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There has indeed been research about this, although it might be mostly informal. See also Polish, and the thoughts of Mandel on national flavor in type design.
http://gaultney.org/jvgtype/wp-content/uploads/ProbsOfDiacDesignLowRes.pdf
It’s more important to consider difficult situations in the particular typeface one is working on.
For instance, the sequence í_l in Fernando’s typeface.
With the variables of angle of diacritic and ascender height, certain combinations work better than others.
Presently, the steep diacritic works best (top left), because it doesn’t run into the following serif. However, were the ascender taller, then the flatter accent would work better (bottom right).
But diacritics aren't the only characteristic of a typeface that might usefully be specialized for different languages, although it is a characteristic that suggests itself within the Unicode model.
Sometimes the whole typeface is redone for a different language. For example, the Monotype Corporation provided a modified version of Times Roman for use with the German language where the capital letters were slightly lighter in weight, to be more appropriate for a language where it is the convention to capitalize more words... and a special version for French where the design was altered to make it look a bit more like the Romain du Roi.
Changing the appearance of the letters, though, doesn't seem like something you really want the rendering engine for a typeface to do based on the language.
But this suggests at least the possibility that, instead of making typefaces with accents that change depending on the language that is used, requiring advanced Open Type features to be implemented, that perhaps the whole typeface should come in different language versions, with every aspect subjected to study and examination.
This raises the possibility, though, of a potentially huge proliferation of localized variants (unless, of course, one were to decompose all accented characters in the ccmp feature and to provide localized versions of combining marks only).
André
I'm sure that plays a role, but the other thing to consider is contrast. For example, the modern greek tonos is often near-vertical which would not have been acceptable in polytonic greek where the oxeîa (acute) and vareîa (grave) needed to be kept distinct. For similar reasons, a steep kreska in polish is fine but I suspect that a very short kreska would be much less acceptable than it would be in a language which does not need to keep it distinct from the dotaccent.
Of course it is entirely up to the designer whether they want to go to the effort of making localized accents, but they might expand their fonts market by doing so.
André
That may well be true today, but it wasn’t always the case.
Historically, for example, see the Spanish fonts cut by Geronimo Gil for Joaquin Ibarra and the Real Academia edition of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in Madrid in 1780 — one of the finest editions of this seminal Spanish-language epic.
It features very upright acute accents (probably influenced by previous generations of French and Dutch fonts used in Spanish printing heretofore). To address the matter of harmonizing native accents, we find a much more exuberant and volante tilde (rather laying down the acute ;-).
But, as Nick points out, overall vertical dimensions may play a part in such decisions, on a case by case basis.
· @John Savard That's so interesting!
Is there any way to see the different Times New Romans?
· @Kent Lew Yes that was true a long time ago, In my country our first printing offices had english typefaces with 'vertical' diacritics. But if we see a book printed with this kind of 'tilde' today it will be really strange for us as readers, it would look like a mistake. So after several centuries we've developed a preference for certain designs.
· @Stefan Peev I understand what you say, but I do have made a decision! My decision is to try and make my typeface work for European languages and my local Spanish language alike*, for that to work I have to make two sets of diacritics. (In my opinion the Coca-Cola from my country is much more tasty than in US, so that tells us something )
* If I can make this happen, maybe (with a lot of research) it could be translated to many latin languages.
...
· Update (I've been trying to make two 'tildes' as well, and yes... the íl (wich it's not very often but happens in Spanish) doesn't work very well (yet):
Of course, when one gets to the point of changing the design of the typeface as a whole for a particular language, then, unlike the case of diacritics, where it seems like one is simply showing respect for a culture, the question comes up of whether one is isolating each language in a ghetto, where speakers of that language are expected to use only typefaces similar to what had previously been used with that language.
http://www.typophile.com/node/72900
http://www.alphabettes.org/language-as-design-criteria-part-i/
http://www.alphabettes.org/language-as-design-criteria-part-ii/
http://www.alphabettes.org/language-as-design-criteria-part-iii/
You'll find that some of the points other people raised in this thread will be covered there.
FWIW, I'm still very much in favour of accentuating a written language's characteristics and think you should continue your work in this direction.
Well, actually the letter 'ñ' in medieval times was actually represented by 'nn', so España was originally written Espanna, eventually, to save time, the scribes created this kind of digraph that became a letter. So it really is a (handwritten) 'n' on top of another 'n'.
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PS: On a sad note, we had two other digraphs on our language: the letters 'ch' and 'll' but the RAE decided to eliminate them from the Spanish alphabet on 2010 (yep I'm still mad about it!).
PPS: Also, the letters 'k' and 'w' are not completely necessary for our language, we can substitute them with 'qu' and 'gü'. For example Whisky can be Güisqui. (of course nobody uses that, it looks grotesque).
Shame on them.
On a recent trip to Croatia I also noted these funny rounded carons, but I don't know if they are just a local peculiarity, a historic variant, or truly a native quirk like those you are looking for.
I've seen numerous script faces in which the umlaut was drawn as lines (both oblique and vertical) rather than dots, and I think it’s safe to assume that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the designer. This, though, would pose a serious problem if they extended their glyph coverage to include Hungarian. So the designer has a choice: either abandon their preferred (and perfectly legitimate for german) design on the grounds that it creates problems for designing the hungarian double acute, or provide a localized, shorter version of the umlaut for hungarian. The latter seems like a far better solution to me.
André
We think that besides width, weight and size axis, and beyond into the parametric axes, (and working with composite technology already in the standard), there is separate need for interoperable accent control. So, we envisage independent "above" and "below" cluster parametrics for x and y, opaque and transparent. 8.
This creates a separately addressable design space for accents, linked if it's so desired to other axes, but within that addition space, the font developer can create "culture-specific" instances. Here, the term culture ranges from a publication to an entire language.
From there it's on to another proposal for axes flags, identifying them for UI and program interfaces.