Classifying Cambria
How do you classify Cambria?
The stress is vertical, or so close as to be imperceptibly different. But the contrast is quite mild, and the serifs are massively bracketed. I am inclined to say that it has elements of oldstyle and modern so it ends up being: (1) transitional...-ish; and (2) a fine exemplar of the problems of type classification.
Comments
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I should add: very open apertures, for a serif face, unlike most modern serif faces.0
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Medium contrast with vertical stress and bracketed slab serifs = clarendon.2
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Modern, owing to the letter widths and axis. Oldstyle may be an ambiguous term because it's been variously used to describe everything up to the 18th century.
So long as the details of one classification are grafted to the rhythm and proportion of another, the spacing still defines it function.
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Neo-Utilitaranist.3
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A bit glyphic to I think. It's a lot controversal with several overlaping classifications.0
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@James Puckett Agreed that it fits the “Clarendon” model pretty well. The schema I am trying to use (basically a descendant of the Vox-ATypI model) doesn't deal well with Clarendons... probably sticks some in slab and others in modern. Which probably means it's not a good schema for this purpose. Sigh.
@Wes Adams Yes, if one relies on axis of stress alone (note: I am not saying that is unreasonable, just not my preference), “modern” for sure. The caps are a bit condensed, so they cease to be a reliable disambiguator between modern and old style proportions. The low contrast makes it seem not so much a modern to me—because I think of higher contrast being a feature of .
After sleeping on it and thinking more, I am thinking the best thing to do for purposes of the job at hand is just to describe these variables, and downplay classification.0 -
I've always classified it as Cambria.2
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this is the description from the Now Read This book, if its helpfulCambria has been designed for on-screen reading and to look good when printed at small sizes.It has very even spacing and proportions. Diagonal and verticalhairlines and serifs are relatively strong, while horizontal serifsare small and intended t0 emphasize stroke endings rather thanstand out themselves. This principle is most noticeable in theitalics, where the lowercase characters are subdued in style, tobe at their best as elements of word-images. This font is suitablefor business documents, email, web design.A sturdy typeface for businessWhen the call for proposals came from Microsoft, type designerJelle Bosma says, he had been doing heavy-duty programmingfor four or five months straight, and he was eager to get back todesign work. Some of his colleagues at Agfa Monotype had justbeen in a meeting with Microsoft about the need for a set offonts for a variety of purposes, all of which would be designed totake advantage of ClearType rendering to look good on screen,while still being useful in print. “So my wish was granted,” saysBosma, “and I was put to work.” He found, however, that he hadcome into the process a bit late: Microsoft wanted proposals bythe end of the week.“I tried my hand at a proposal for a monospaced and aserif font in two variants: one variant as an e-book font, anda version adapted as a business document font: what couldbe a Times New Roman replacement.” It was the latter thatturned into Cambria. “The other bit of information was a listof fonts, mostly traditional old-style fonts, which Mike Dugganrecommended looking at, because they worked well. I mustconfess that once I got started, things developed in anotherdirection.”He studied how different geometric shapes were renderedby ClearType on the screen, and what the effects on them wereof hinting. He also looked at the fonts shipping with MicrosoftReader, since he knew they had been hinted for ClearType.“The result was that at the smallest sizes, the effect of hintingdid make a difference, but for most types of shapes, exceptlong diagonal lines near horizontal, shape detailing matteredlittle. However, starting at slightly above 20 pixels per em, some shapes worked better than others; it seemed best to usecurves that turn away from the horizontal extreme as quickly aspossible.“The next step was to draw a lowercase n in all sorts ofvariants, hint them, and select those properties with the ‘beststatistics.’“At the smallest sizes, ClearType gives the effect of ‘dressedup’ bitmaps. I do have some experience in that field, includingbitmap design proposals that were the subject of a legibilitystudy where various design parameters were tried out. Soonce the n had been established, I had some idea about theproportions and spacing which would create a suitable patternof black and white shapes that scores well in a legibility test.So starting from an n, I gradually built the rest, trying to keepthings in harmony.”Designing typefaces for the screen, Bosma points out, is verydifferent from designing for the printed page – or from designingfor the screen just a few years ago. “Within the TrueType format,hinting is part of the design. The outline drawings you makein Fontographer or FontLab are the outlines used when youhave no pixel limitations. With hints, you draw the outlinesthat express the design at lower resolutions. In the ClearTyperasterizer with subpixel positioning, you have fewer options toinfluence the appearance with hints, because in the x-direction,hints are mapped to a make-believe higher resolution. But it ispossible to force some things, if need be. For example, when thetop horizontal of the 5 and 7 has to be one pixel, because twopixels is much too heavy, I compensated to make the horizontalhairlines a bit heavier, to prevent the top half of the charactersfrom becoming too light.“In black and white bitmaps, you are by nature forced intocertain proportions. But if your font doesn’t have these, you canhint them to be that way. The price for that is that the screenappearance may give a false impression of what it will look likein print. In ClearType you still have the limitation that you needto separate vertical features clearly. Therefore proportions areeven and spacing open, even between round stems (oo). Soin that sense, you are a bit more limited than when you drawoutlines for black and white hinting, because there the hintstake over completely.”The features that make Cambria uniquely suited to its role as arobust, all-purpose workhorse text face have been carefully andprecisely thought through.“For ClearType,” explains Bosma, “one designs monoline fontsbest. At small screen sizes, hints make the horizontal hairlinesheavy, and if your horizontal hairlines are thin, they remainthin and look silly. You also want to make narrow charactersrelatively wide. In metal type terms: your serifed ClearType fontshould be made from the drawings for the 7-point. But thatlooks rather dull at large sizes, and not much like a Times NewRoman alternative.“So in order to have a bit of both worlds, the design has arelatively low contrast in the x direction, and a high contrastin y. With the given proportions, this makes the image heavyenough for it to survive being used at 8 pt printer sizes, whilenot looking dull and heavy at 16 or 18 pt. At these relativelysmall sizes, the perception of equally thick horizontal andvertical hairlines is making the verticals look lighter. A bit ofexaggerated compensation for this goes unnoticed. Of coursewhen used at really big sizes, it will start to look strange – butwith such wide spacing, I don’t see a big future for Cambria as aheadline font anyway.”Bosma has done something unusual in the f-ligatures, byusing the possibilities for contextual glyph substitution inOpenType. “The implementation of the OpenType ligaturedoesn’t use the drawn ligatures, but an alternate drawing ofthe f only. This has a narrower and lighter top and is used as asubstitute not only in front of the i, b, h, k and l, but also whenit is followed by any other lowercase glyph that has somethingsticking out in ‘f space’: narrow characters with top accents,anything with a left-side ascender.”Cambria comes with a large extended set of mathematicalglyphs, to support math setting in Microsoft Word. Thissupports an additional 2,000 math, scientific, and technicalcharacters from Unicode 4.0. Bosma describes some of these: “afull set of combining marks, additional punctuation marks, theletterlike symbols, arrows, math operators. There is also a set ofmathematical alphanumerical symbols which contains a variant of the italics. The lowercase has diagonal stroke endings ratherthan horizontal serifs. These characters are drawn to stand ontheir own, rather than as part of a word image.”The design of Cambria’s Greek and Cyrillic complements wasthe most difficult of all the new ClearType typefaces. Althoughthe x-height and the cap-height are consistent across all threescripts, conflicting ideas about consistency dogged the project.(Which is more important: keeping details the same acrossscripts, or making each conform to the standards of that script?There is no one answer to this question, nor to the questions ofstyle in designing a successful text face.) In the end, Bosma wasresponsible for the Latin design of Cambria, and the Greek andCyrillic were designed by Robin Nicholas and Steve Mattesonat Agfa Monotype with contributions from, respectively, GerryLeonidas and Maxim Zhukov. The result of this joint processshould be a family of fonts for business, math, and technicaldocuments that will function seamlessly for users in manylanguages and all three scripts2
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I think this type has a strong relationship to the original Cheltenham, which has similar stroke contrast and serif structure. Cheltenham is classified as an oldstyle (its original name was Boston Oldstyle), and I don’t see any reason why Cambria should not be classified in that category, which is pretty broad.
To my eye, Cambria has a kind of studied anonymity. That’s not necessarily a bad characteristic, though in this case it feels extreme to the point of unpleasantness. The terminals of the a, f, and especially r are clumsy and look as if they weren’t fully worked out. The lowercase is somewhat narrow, but the caps are even more so. The lowercase s looks expansive compared to the capital, which leaves me thinking that the type was edited by a committee.
No love here.
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Mike: Thanks! I do have Now Read This, but I am sure it is of interest to many who have not seen it.
Scott: I agree that it is rather like Cheltenham in most of the serifs, although Cambria's chiseled terminals (on a, r, f and s) contrast rather strongly with Chelt's rounded terminals. But although Cheltenham may have once had “oldstyle” in its name, that does not make it an old style typeface from a classification POV. The vertical stress pretty much rules that out, in my opinion. Cambria’s cap proportions are not particularly old style either, being condensed more than classical (and Cheltenham itself having pretty even, modern cap proportions). That said, I suspect our disagreement on this may be emblematic of why it is troublesome to classify.
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To build on what Christian and Thomas Höggren have said, to me it looks like an agate version of a glyphic style. As Jelle notes, it’s not a display face.
It’s important to consider how a style would scale optically.0 -
It’s important to consider how a style would scale optically.
A subset of characters in Cambria Math do scale optically, but only in a downward direction.
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I would more like:
"Serif, low contrast, vertical stress, open aperture, high superness"
(I'd like to add a "superness" parameter to describe the blockiness of the O shape. The idea comes from Lp space.)0 -
“Superness” is not a broadly used term in type, but “super-elliptical” is fairly well-known, I think.
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Super-ellipticity or super-ellipticalness?0
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Heck if I know. I didn't try to go there in the report I am working on. I'm just using adverbs like “slightly,” “moderately” and “highly” to modify “super-elliptical.”
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Knuth called the parameter "superness" in his Computer Modern sources:
superness:=1/sqrt2; % parameter for superellipses<br>more_super:=max(superness,sqrt .77superness);<br> hein_super:=max(superness,sqrt .81225258superness); % that's $2^{-.3}$
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Cambria can be classified as: Transitional. But it adds weirdness because the vertical stems and serifs are those of a low contrast design, the horizontal for high contrast. You might say one direction has optical scaling for small sizes, the other for large sizes... A transitional slab-serif hybrid.
At the time displaying serif fonts with ClearType at text sizes 0f 11-14 pixel per EM, worked best with low contrast designs. But these look dull at large sizes and in print, and do not combine very well with Sans. The design brief seemed to ask for high contrast. The hinting turns Cambria into almost a slab serif at the small ppm's. In the large sizes it has high contrast.
Of course a true Display version may have lighter vertical hairlines and serifs and somewhat more elegant proportions.7 -
Thanks, Jelle! I am very happy to get your input.
And I can’t object that you essentially agree that it is transitional...-ish.0 -
I don’t know how to classify Cambria, but for what it’s worth I have always loved (and used) it.0
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Sorry, I have to be honest: Cambria is by far the weakest one in CT collection. It's neither here nor there, like a person wearing clothes it visibly hates. In contrast, I wish people would use Candara more.0
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Hrant H. Papazian said:Sorry, I have to be honest: Cambria is by far the weakest one in CT collection. It's neither here nor there, like a person wearing clothes it visibly hates. In contrast, I wish people would use Candara more.
Candara (taste aside), on the contrary has subtleties which probably would render more nicely if used in print.1 -
Hrant H. Papazian said:Sorry, I have to be honest: Cambria is by far the weakest one in CT collection. It's neither here nor there, like a person wearing clothes it visibly hates. In contrast, I wish people would use Candara more.Yeah; if fonts are the clothes that a text wears, Cambria is the wrinkled suit that it drunkenly fell asleep in last night.I do appreciate Candara, except for that unfortunate /Q/. It's a bit like Papyrus without all the baggage.I had a bit of a crush on Constantia a few years ago. I wrote a successful proposal for a Marie Curie fellowship in it. We don't see each other much anymore, but we're still friends.I was also fascinated by Calibri when I first saw it, but nowadays I find it rather mechanical. Maybe just a matter of overuse.1
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Christian Thalmann said:
if fonts are the clothes that a text wears, Cambria is the wrinkled suit that it drunkenly fell asleep in last night.
Constantia: great "a".
Calibri: I'm always tempted to scoff at it, but it's a decent workhorse.0 -
Huh, I just saw that John wished he called Constantia Cormorant. I'm afraid that name's taken now.
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Bird names are foul. But yes, do act swiftly.0
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That's a bitter bill to swallow. Owl have to take it with a finch of salt.But enough with the grousing and the idle chiff-chaff.*ducks*1
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