Cased question mark?

Nick Shinn

Are there any typefaces that have a beefed-up alternate question mark, for use in ALL-CAP SETTINGS?

Chris Lozos

By beefed up, do you mean bolder?  I regularly make a cap version of the Spanish inverted question, occasionally, I will make size adjustments for cap version but never have added weight.  I do adjust side bearings to minimize kerning with all caps.

Nick Shinn

Yes, bolder.

Ramiro Espinoza

I don't do it either, but if the capitals are much heavier than the lower case, it may make some sense.

Nina Stössinger

Ramiro Espinoza said:

if the capitals are much heavier than the lower case, it may make some sense.

But isn’t it the whole point of these marks to stand out? Would it be so bad to have a /question that is noticeably heavier than lowercase?
(Otherwise, would we also have to talk about the /exclam, and really all sorts of other punctuation marks too?)

Cory Maylett

Is the assumption that question marks are normally less beefy than caps?

I've never really thought of a question mark as having any kind of case, but since it's generally as large as a cap, not too bulky and usually fills the whole space (unlike a lowercase ascender), I've just always assumed that in most cases that it ought to be weighted similarly to an uppercase glyph.

A typical mixed-case sentence might begin with a relatively beefy cap, and might contain another beefy cap or two somewhere else. If that sentence also ends with a question mark that looks awfully cap-like in size, shouldn't that glyph be weighted similarly to the caps that preceded it?

Using this logic, there's usually no reason to beef up a question mark to match the caps in all-cap settings since it's already weighted like one.

joeclark

I have a distant racial memory of seeing exactly this usage in Photo-Lettering catalog(ue)s.

James Puckett

I haven’t done this for capitals, but I did design an alternate question mark for Rhodium to match the weight and stress of Devanagari. 

Nick Shinn

There is even more of a disjunct between lower case and capitals in many italic old-style faces. 

That’s the only circumstance in which I’ve designed alternate question marks (and exclamation marks)—up to now.