Horizontal stroke in Latin Extended characters

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María Ramos
María Ramos Posts: 100
edited May 2017 in Technique and Theory
Hi all,
I came about different approaches when designing the characters that include an extra horizontal stroke like Hbar, Eth or Tbar. Is there any reason for using different stroke thicknesses for those characters? It seems classic high-contrast typefaces tend to use one thickness for Hbar and Tbar and another one for Eth and Dcroat. Candara is a peculiar case of a sans were the bar in Dcroat and Eth is thicker than the one in Hbar and Tbar. Any thoughts?

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  • André G. Isaak
    André G. Isaak Posts: 631
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    AFAIK, (Northern) Saami is the only language where this would be relevant, since it has both Eth and Tbar. My own intuition is that I would prefer the crossbars to be the same weight, but then I'm not a Saami speaker.
  • Bhikkhu Pesala
    Bhikkhu Pesala Posts: 210
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    Bodoni, Caslon, and Baskerville all look wrong to me. IMO they should use the light horizontal stroke to match other horizontal strokes. 
  • María Ramos
    María Ramos Posts: 100
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    Bhikkhu Pesala said:
    Bodoni, Caslon, and Baskerville all look wrong to me. IMO they should use the light horizontal stroke to match other horizontal strokes. 
    That’s what I thought, but maybe they use a thicker one so it doesn’t get lost in small sizes and the letter Hbar for example is not confused with an H.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 349
    edited May 2017
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    I suspect that the Hbar and Tbar in Didot, Baskerville, Bodoni and Big Caslon are later additions that have not been carefully designed to match the other similar letters. Eth is part of the old Windows and Mac encodings, while Hbar and Tbar belong to the "Latin Extended" character set.
  • Bhikkhu Pesala
    Bhikkhu Pesala Posts: 210
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    María Ramos said:

    That’s what I thought, but maybe they use a thicker one so it doesn’t get lost in small sizes and the letter Hbar for example is not confused with an H.
    I don't think so. If the thin horizontal bar on the H bar suffered from drop-out, so would the horizontal stroke. I am sure that the font is hinted to avoid that. 
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 908
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    Florian beat me to it with the C&C Big Caslon that Matthew was involved in extending.

    Sometimes I will make the cross stroke in Ħ slightly lighter than the others because of the more congested visual space that it typically occupies. This is especially true with heavier weights.

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