Strategies for inverted exclamation and question marks

Vasil Stanev

Hello Spanish natives,
would you recommend the lowest point of inverted exclamation and question marks to sit on the baseline in an all-caps font?
Do you make .case versions? Are these marks used in other languages?

Juan Luis Blanco

Yes. Although I have not found any rules for the use of inverted exclamation and question marks in all-caps contexts, I would align them to the baseline, unless your font features two set of caps with different heights. In that case I would move them to match those heights.

I always make .case alternates for bicameral fonts.

Regarding your last question I know that in Catalan, the use of inverted question mark is recommended in some cases, but it is not compulsory as in Spanish. 

Nick Shinn

For a full U&lc font, you need three sets: default, <case> and <c2sc>.
Leave the default inverted marks in <smcp>, as per Juan Luis’ example.

(For <smcp>, the only characters involved should be minuscule letters, not figures or punctuation.)

Paul Hanslow

@Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer might be helpful in commenting on this. He spoke to my partner (Kaja Słojewska) a few months ago about what Spanish people prefer and this information was passed onto myself. If memory serves, I believe the lowercase version of the inverted question mark should have the dot resting on the x-height, and a CASE should have the dot at the cap height. This is going from memory though, so it may be best to get Rainer's comments. 

Cristóbal Henestrosa

Native Spanish-speaker here: yes, what @Paul Hanslow said. At least, that is what I and many others do. Anyway, in the last few years I’ve noticed that some Latin American type designers are designing exclamdown and questiondown aligned with the caps height by default. They have said to me that, since the next letter is most likely an uppercase letter, it looks better if both glyphs have the same height. I disagree, BTW.

Additional reason: if exclamdown has the same alignment than the uppercase, it could be confused with a lowercase i, specially in some sans serif designs, so it is better to use that alignment only with uppercase words.

Ray Larabie

Non Spanish speaker here. I think aligning them with the caps looks kind of dumb. I don't have a rule for alignment. It's like the @ symbol...just move it until it feels like it's in the right place.

John Hudson

My approach is very simple:

The default /exclamdown/ and /questiondown/ are aligned with their dots on the x-height (usually with a small overshoot). Since I often proportion my descenders to equal the difference between x-height and cap height, this means that the descending Spanish punctuation signs neatly align with my descender depth. Sometimes the descenders are a little deeper than the punctuation signs, and this looks okay too. If the punctuation signs end up deeper than the descenders, that would be a weirdly proportioned typeface, and maybe it would make sense to shorted or slightly raise the punctuation signs.

I treat the /exclamdown.case/ and /questiondown.case/ variants for all-caps settings simply as rotated versions of /exclam/ and /question/ (with adjustment to overshoot at the baseline as necessary for the design). In typical text faces in which the height of ! and ? aligns to the cap height, this will also mean that the dot on the rotated forms aligns to the cap height, but this method also works for designs in which these punctuation signs are shorter than the caps. The important thing for the .case variants isn't that they align to the cap height, but that they sit on the baseline and do not descend.

If one does have a design that, for stylistic reasons, uses shorter ! and ? in mixed case settings, you can also consider adding taller, cap aligning variants for use with all caps. So in addition to /exclamdown.case/ and /questiondown.case/ you might also have /exclam.case/ and /question.case/. When deciding what variants to put in the 'case' feature, don't presume that this is a fixed, standard set common to all fonts: think about how you want all-caps settings in your particular design to look. [Of course, we can't actually rely on the 'case' feature being used whenever text is set in all caps, but it's the only way we have to signal intention.]

Nick Shinn

Quite often, I can’t align the dot with the x-height, as the descenders are too short. It’s possible to cheat a little, by vertically scaling the glyph, but I don’t really see a problem with the dot being a bit above the centre line. As already noted, the next letter is generally a capital. As long as the body of the mark doesn’t align with the x-height, no problem. Better to have it above the x-height than way below the descender. Here is a comparison of the normal text size of a type with the Micro (“agate”) version, that has exceptionally short descenders: