My text face wish list
Comments
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Nick Shinn said:…the text string posted didn’t render the angle brackets (U+2329, U+232A), I had to insert them via the glyph palette—why is that?
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Andreas, I don’t understand. Please explain.
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the string given by H. Wollmersdorfer (April 26, see above) contains U+27E8 and U+27E9 for the angled brackets. Apparently your brackets sit in the U+2329 and U+232A positions instead, therefore your glyphs didn’t show up in that text string.
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Never drew the angled brackets before, but I guess it's not too late to start.They won't rename themselves from ⟨ and ⟩ in Glyphs — are they too obscure to have a Nice Name...?Also: Should my | be shorter...?0
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Andreas Stötzner said:Joshua Langman said:Bravo, Andreas!the italic braces and angled brackets are too dark;0
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Nick Shinn said:[...]
However, the text string posted didn’t render the angle brackets (U+2329, U+232A), I had to insert them via the glyph palette—why is that?
They something do crazy things. Maybe the website of typedrawers or the browser changed the code points.
Mostly I use TextEdit on Mac because of the best support for OT-features.0 -
So I should give the angle bracket glyphs two code points each?0
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Christian Thalmann said:They won't rename themselves from ⟨ and ⟩ in Glyphs — are they too obscure to have a Nice Name...?1
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Personal pet peeve: fonts that lack a .notdef glyph.
Way bigger pet peeve: fonts that lack a .notdef glyph and have a zero width .notdef.
Related pet peeve: fonts that represent missing glyphs with a blank glyph rather than leaving them empty altogether. A blank can be misconstrued as a space. A notdef glyph is more noticeable and thus preferable.
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Mr Shinn, you're in my book of Very Good People. I absolutely didn't mean to imply you may be less than a decent guy. I had in mind young, barely-out-of-grad school kids in Europe; and various individuals who cannibalize the work of old masters, and regurgitate it at obscene prices.
A little-know fact: Mr Carter's Galliard comes with two italics /g/s. Here's a glimpse of the second, better one.
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Thanks Konrad, I was just taking the opportunity for a little font promotion.~
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There was a fellow who used to post a lot on Typophile, Charles, I think, I forget his surname, an old school “compositor”, who encouraged me to put a lot of features in Goodchild, similar to the ones that Joshua likes to see, for book work, serious books with all the bells and whistles. Man, I love that stuff! But I don’t always get around to including it.2 -
Possibly Charles Ellertson?2
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Christian: with the obvious caveat that I am not a type designer, I will try to answer the question of whether your vertical bar glyph should be shorter. In general, for serifed text faces, I prefer the bar to be the full ascender/descender height — but I also prefer for the delimiters ()[]{} to be the full ascender/descender height. So, in other words, I would not make the bar shorter; I would make the delimiters taller. I like when nonextending lowercase letters and small caps seem to be vertically centered within the space of the parens or brackets. To me it seems poised and elegant. Others may, of course, disagree.1
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Here is a little experiment done in Štorm's Jannon. I note that the delimiters do descend, although the intention seems to be to split the difference between centering them on the lc height and the cap height, which is understandable. The vertical bar is the same height as the delimiters. However, the virgule is shorter, which surprises me. I would prefer for the virgule to also reach the ascender/descender lines. I like that the delimiters are close to monoline and generously spaced. Obviously this style derives from the Renaissance and would not be appropriate in all typefaces. There are case variant delimiters for small caps, but in many circumstances I think I actually prefer the full-height delimiters, though they might have to be baseline-shifted to center on the small caps. Case variants for all-caps are, of course, essential when the delimiters descend.
As my typography has come to be slightly more classically influenced, I have increasingly come to think of roman and italic as categories that apply only to letterforms, numerals, and punctuation, not to anything else. In many cases, unless the typography calls for a more contemporary approach, I like to see things like / \ | + = remain upright even in an italic context. Like monoline parens etc, these symbols don't seem to count as letters, and should therefore be somewhat immune to italicization.2 -
A general principle would seem to be that parenthesis style should correspond to the main style of a paragraph.
For instance, a list of menu items in italic:½ cup (125 mL) sugar
¼ tsp (1 mL) pepper
1 tbsp (15 mL) sesame oil
etc.½ cup (125 mL) sugar
The roman parentheses look wrong here.
¼ tsp (1 mL) pepper
1 tbsp (15 mL) sesame oil
etc.
I did put alternate kerned roman parentheses in my Modern Suite italic fonts, accessible via a Stylistic Set. No doubt under the influence of Mr. Ellertson.
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Joshua Langman said:So, in other words, I would not make the bar shorter; I would make the delimiters taller.That seems like a good idea. Since Ysabeau is trying to emulate Garamond in the sans parameter space, I just checked with Garamond Premier and EB Garamond, and sure enough, they have deeply descending delimiters (though they disagree about / and \). I'll give that a try.For those who have slashes going all the way to the descender floor: Doesn't that cause kerning problems, e.g. with /g/?0
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Another suggestion: If you create a nice set of alternates, please don't just place them in 'salt'. Also add them to a stylistic set. InDesign allows you to assign a keystroke to toggle a given stylistic set, but doesn't allow this for 'salt'.6
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Yet another suggestion: If for some perverse reason you feel the need to add f-ligatures to a monospaced font, please put them in 'dlig' rather than 'liga'. These really should be off by default.11
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Another suggestion: If you produce a font with a nice set of alternates, try to make sure that the glyphs are ordered in some sort of coherent way so that the glyph palette gives a reasonable overview of the font.4
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André G. Isaak said:Another suggestion: If you produce a font with a nice set of alternates, try to make sure that the glyphs are ordered in some sort of coherent way so that the glyph palette gives a reasonable overview of the font.
Which sorting order would you prefer/suggest?
So far I more or less kept the "Opentype Standard" encoding (privileging in general the Unicode code points order), and then added the additional accented letters in alphabetical order (Upper and Lowercase), diacritics, additional punctuation, Letterlike forms (™℣℟), currencies, letters from Alternate sets, case sensitive © and ® and numeral sets (including fractions) with other associated glyphs (%, ‰′″), Dingbats (2700 range, inclusing the Angle brackets 276C and 276D), arrows, some historical punctuation (from the 2000 range), combining diacritics (with zero width) and the circledotted (25CC), custom decorative/typographic symbols and Math symbols at the end.0 -
I'm not advocating for any particular order -- only that the order make sense. For encoded glyphs, simply sorting by unicode or by encoding works reasonably well. But I've run across lots of fonts where the unencoded glyphs are either in an entirely random order, or are sorted purely alphabetically such that figures and punctuation end up being scattered all over the place.
I'm simply suggesting that these should be ordered in some coherent way, with alternate figures grouped together in numeric order, alternate punctuation grouped together, and alternate alphabetic forms grouped together, either in purely alphabetic order, or with specific types of alternates (small caps, swash, initials, finals) grouped together and then sorted alphabetically within each group.
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I strongly support Mr Isaak's suggestion. It would help a lot of users.2
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I tried out deeper and more consistent delimiters. Does this work?1
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Christian Thalmann said:I tried out deeper and more consistent delimiters. Does this work?1
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Regular weight:0
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Very nice, with little modulation an a bit lighter, it seems they stand out well.
I added the angle brackets myself, thanks to Joshua’s pointing it out.0 -
Earlier this year I bought the gorgeous new book A Grammar of Typography by Mark Argetsinger. I bought the standard hardcover, and I loved it so much on arrival that I ordered a second copy in the slipcase edition. I spent the last two months reading it cover to cover.
It is easily the most beautiful book I’ve seen in this century, and Argetsinger’s tastes in type align closer to my own than, well, I’ve ever seen elsewhere, though he enjoys blackletter less. He focuses on “classical typography,” eschewing all sans serifs, for example.
The chapter themes vary widely, but most directly relevant to this thread would be Chapter 8, “OpenType Features and Font Editing.” His specific desiderata are listed beginning on page 226.- Two weights, one for text and one for notes. Weight ≈ grade ≈ optical size depending on which typeface he’s using, but he’s generally talking about modifying existing fonts in Fontlab with Add Weight functions and whatnot.
- OsF remapped as the default style, generally for everything but the most modern designs.
- Manually adjusted kerning according to his projects’ needs.
- Punctuation marks such as comma and quotes made more substantial.
- Upright parentheses, brackets &c in the italic fonts (this is why your thread reminded me of this in the first place.)
- Add small caps and ligatures if missing; fill out additional f-ligatures, zy gy and what have you, and a full set of superiors and inferiors.
He then includes a handy chronological gallery of every major historical text typeface from Jenson through Walbaum inclusive, stopping at Walbaum, comparing the original to his own modifications. All of the fonts come either from Adobe, Monotype, Linotype, Carter & Cone, or DTL. Many of the older digitizations (most of these were digitized in the 80s and 90s) he has added weight to for the kind of paper and machinery he uses. He also seems to prefer the parentheses and brackets monolinear rather than modulated.I do realize EULA’s don’t typically let just any retail font customer charge headlong into modifying fonts without permission, and I assume he has good working relationships with his type vendors. The fact he used some Granjon ornaments digitized by Matthew Carter that I had not seen yet suggests my assumption is reasonable.Anyway, I had never heard of this guy. He just appeared out of the blue, and now already I keep him on my shelf right next to Bringhurst. I’ve seen no mention of his book here or any of the other usual places yet. It was printed last year, so presumably the pandemic accounts for its paltry publicity.7 -
Christian Thalmann said:I tried out deeper and more consistent delimiters. Does this work?they are all too heavy, compared to capitals and minuscules. Especially the slashes.I would not let the slash thickness exceed the horizontal of H, and never let the thicker parts of ( ) etc. get bolder than the stem of h.
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Like this?
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Christian Thalmann said:Like this?
What Andreas suggested, however, improved the overall situation in the heavier one.0
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