Punctuation Feedback

Eryk Kosinski

I started to work again on my punctuation and other glyphs. I would appreciate to know which glyphs need a redesign as well as adjustments to be better for text font. My period has left sidebearing further than right one. Is it a good idea to do so for text?

Matthijs Herzberg

• Figures could be a little wider, especially 0, 6, 8 and 9. 8 is vertically disproportional.
  
• I find the geometric comma/quotations ill fitting with the somewhat humanist nature of the alphabet. Also, comma could definitely dip down further to avoid confusion with period at smaller sizes.
  
• Percentage mark, fractions, ordinals and superscript look like the figures were just scaled down/stretched. You'll have to manually match them to the rest of the glyphs in weight and proportion.
• All currency symbols except $ need work. Euro should be closer in shape to C, cent's extenders are too meek, pound sterling symbol's top curve should match other terminals (again like C) and bar brought down for equalized negative space. Yen's bars should be closer to Euro's.
• Punctuation is generally better off with a little more side bearing than letters. This seems especially needed for the hyphens and math symbols.
• Pound sign should generally be slanted, and horizontally symmetrical.
• Both your @ and & kinda work, but are also on the expressive side compared to the rest of the font.
  

Hope this helps!

Michael Rafailyk

• Comma and quotation marks (because of their geometric vertical stroke) feel a bit left-leaning, like a reverse italic. It would be helpful to show them in the context of the letters.
  
• Maybe it's just my taste, but the Small Caps could be a little wider, or with somewhat larger sidebearings.

Eryk Kosinski

Matthijs Herzberg said:

• Figures could be a little wider, especially 0, 6, 8 and 9. 8 is vertically disproportional.
  
• I find the geometric comma/quotations ill fitting with the somewhat humanist nature of the alphabet. Also, comma could definitely dip down further to avoid confusion with period at smaller sizes.
  
• Percentage mark, fractions, ordinals and superscript look like the figures were just scaled down/stretched. You'll have to manually match them to the rest of the glyphs in weight and proportion.
• All currency symbols except $ need work. Euro should be closer in shape to C, cent's extenders are too meek, pound sterling symbol's top curve should match other terminals (again like C) and bar brought down for equalized negative space. Yen's bars should be closer to Euro's.
• Punctuation is generally better off with a little more side bearing than letters. This seems especially needed for the hyphens and math symbols.
• Pound sign should generally be slanted, and horizontally symmetrical.
• Both your @ and & kinda work, but are also on the expressive side compared to the rest of the font.
  

Hope this helps!

- New oldstyle and smallcaps figures have been added.
- Comma/quotations have been changed. Comma dips down further.
- Percentages, fractions, ordinals and superscripts changed.
- Currency symbols changed.
- Punctuation have wider sidebearings. ,.!?"' have their left sidebaring much further than right. ({[ have much wider sidebarings for text between them. (I have read a post about what is wanted in a text face and done it for that reason).
- Ogonek, cedilla and Q swash are identical. Im not sure if it is a good idea.
- Diacritical marks have been made bigger for the eye at smaller sizes.

Thomas Phinney

There are just a few things not working for me still:

- a and e thin parts are out of place
- tail of the Q, even the thickest part isn’t thick enough, and the thin bit is bizarre and out of place in this design
- the oldstyle 7 needs to descend
- in the ampersand, if the crossbar from the "t" part merged to the left with the other stroke, I think it would work better
- 8 is somewhat improved but still a bit weird. The bottom bowl can just be smaller than the bowl of the 6 and smaller than the x-height; that’s ok, really!

Eryk Kosinski

Thomas Phinney said:

There are just a few things not working for me still:

- a and e thin parts are out of place
- tail of the Q, even the thickest part isn’t thick enough, and the thin bit is bizarre and out of place in this design
- the oldstyle 7 needs to descend
- in the ampersand, if the crossbar from the "t" part merged to the left with the other stroke, I think it would work better
- 8 is somewhat improved but still a bit weird. The bottom bowl can just be smaller than the bowl of the 6 and smaller than the x-height; that’s ok, really!

- I made a and e thin parts wider
- Tail of Q have been made much darker
- Oldstyle 7 now descends
- ampersand appeal better with your changes
- Bowls of 8 changed

Eryk Kosinski

Also I have started to work on my diacritical marks and glyphs with them and have a problem. When marks are over my Capital glyphs they go too much into glyphs with descenders like g and mix. 

Thomas Phinney

There are a couple of ways to address that. You can do either or both.

1) have alternate diacritics for the caps. They can be both heavier and flatter than the lowercase diacritics.

2) Check your vertical metrics—depending on where the problem is happening. If you are seeing the problem in apps that just scale (e.g. Adobe InDesign, most pro design apps) go to 2a. If you are seeing this problem ONLY in Windows office apps that use additional vertical space info from the font (e.g. Microsoft Word), but NOT in pro design apps, go to 2b.

2a) What is your cap size as a proportion of the em square? The average used to be more around 65-70%. But as people started to worry more about things like accented caps, they have trended a bit smaller, as little as 60% of the em. (These are sweeping generalizations, though—cap height varies a lot more than I might seem to be suggesting in those statements.) At this late stage of the game… you could effect such a change just by increasing the em size (e.g. from 1000 to 1100, or 2048 to 2250) without changing/rescaling anything else.

2b) Increase the "Safe Top" and/or "Safe Bottom" as those impact line spacing in typical Windows GDI apps

Eryk Kosinski

Thomas Phinney said:

There are a couple of ways to address that. You can do either or both.

1) have alternate diacritics for the caps. They can be both heavier and flatter than the lowercase diacritics.

2) Check your vertical metrics—depending on where the problem is happening. If you are seeing the problem in apps that just scale (e.g. Adobe InDesign, most pro design apps) go to 2a. If you are seeing this problem ONLY in Windows office apps that use additional vertical space info from the font (e.g. Microsoft Word), but NOT in pro design apps, go to 2b.

2a) What is your cap size as a proportion of the em square? The average used to be more around 65-70%. But as people started to worry more about things like accented caps, they have trended a bit smaller, as little as 60% of the em. (These are sweeping generalizations, though—cap height varies a lot more than I might seem to be suggesting in those statements.) At this late stage of the game… you could effect such a change just by increasing the em size (e.g. from 1000 to 1100, or 2048 to 2250) without changing/rescaling anything else.

2b) Increase the "Safe Top" and/or "Safe Bottom" as those impact line spacing in typical Windows GDI apps

My capitals are 70% of em. My ascender is at 750, c at 700, x at 450 and d at -250.  
My tallest diacritic is 182 units tall. I think I will use your 2a approach of increasing the em size.

Eryk Kosinski

Im my Font Info panel I have changed units per eM to 1300, but nothing changed. Am I doing something wrong?

Eryk Kosinski

There is a line gap section in family dimensions. It is currntly set to 100. When I increase the value it turns yellow but increases the amount of space between top and bottom of glyphs. Is it fine for me to change that or should I leave it as it is.

Thomas Phinney

First, did you have “change only UPM value” selected? If you scaled the glyphs and metrics, then… yeah, that would have no visible impact.

Increasing linegap "increases the space” in… which apps? This will have no effect at all in most design apps (typical drawing and page layout programs). That’s why I asked which apps you were seeing problems in, which you did not respond to.

If it is just in FontLab itself, I have no idea which approach they use to line spacing for display in their own text preview. (Although I would like to know, and ought to know.) If linegap affects FontLab itself, then we know their line spacing is “dumb” like office apps.

Fwiw, here’s Google’s advice on setting vertical metrics: 
https://github.com/googlefonts/gf-docs/blob/main/VerticalMetrics/README.md
I set LineGap to zero for the reasons mentioned here.

Eryk Kosinski

I have only done in it Fontlab. When I change line gap in fontlab changes are visible. em change does nothing in fontlab. I will see it in other apps and see the changes.

Eryk Kosinski

I have only used change only UPM value option. Not the second one. 

Eryk Kosinski

Here I have changed the values of my family dimensions. results are behind the panel. I am not sure what the yellow colour means. 

Thomas Phinney

Huh. Something is very wrong if that does NOT affect the text size and line spacing in FontLab. Increasing the UPM should make the font smaller at a given size, giving more white space between lines.

FontLab’s line spacing caring about LineGap means it is behaving like a less sophisticated (non-graphics-pro) app, like a typical office app.