OUP is seeking a Global Fonts Manager

KP Mawhood
KP Mawhood Posts: 296
in Job Postings
No idea how I feel about this. I pushed for this title 6 years ago.
Hope you're all well.  <3
https://jobs.oup.com/uk/jobs/vacancy/global-font-manager-oxford/4337/description/
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Comments

  • konrad ritter
    konrad ritter Posts: 204
    About damn time. On the typography front, OUP has been a depressing failure for years now. Unbelievable incompetence. Whoever's been making font decisions for them should be sued for lost income and business reputation. 
    Also, whoever gets hired should be made to swear on the Bible they'll never use Minion again in a OUP book, on pain of instant banishment to Kamchatka or something. Atrocious. 


  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 792

    Mr. Ritter, I think you qualify for Kamchatka; with a detour via Oxford or without.
  • konrad ritter
    konrad ritter Posts: 204
    edited May 31
    My co-author and I spent eight years researching and writing our book. We offered it to OUP because of their prestige in the biz, not because we really wanted to. Like 75% of the books they print in our field, OUP set in in Minion. Very narrow margins, tracking that varies for no reason from one paragraph to the next, and the leading way too big. Gives me a headache to read more than a page or two, and I wrote the damn thing. We begged OUP to set our book in Times or something fit for immersive reading. They said no, even though some other books they sell were set in STIX -- a much better choice. 

    But wait, there's more! Some genius there thought the online versions of their Oxford Handbooks should be set in this abomination of a font:

    Why don't you sports fans try and defend this typographical choice too, seeing as you love OUP so much. 

    Yeah...


  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 290
    edited June 3
    Konrad, your complaints about Minion, “very narrow margins, tracking that varies for no reason from one paragraph to the next, and the leading way too big” sound more like problems with the bricklaying than the bricks themselves, apart from the fact that Minion is narrow as text fonts go. Do you dislike its overall design? Would narrower columns and better typesetting have been able to redeem it in your opinion? And the choice of the correct optical size, of course.
    Minion is not my absolute favorite design by Slimbach—his brand new Ten Roman just jumped to the top of that list—but it’s arguably his most versatile in terms of script coverage, features and optical sizes. Like so many fonts, I find its uses fall tragically short of their potential.
    Iain McGilchrist published a book a decade or two ago called The Master and His Emissary, set by someone at Yale University Press*, that had columns far too wide for the Minion it was set in, compounded by margins far too narrow, and it gave me exactly the kind of headache you describe. At least in the cheap perfect-bound paperback edition I bought. Years later McGilchrist or someone on his team made the correct decision to hire Bringhurst to set his next book, The Matter With Things, in Slimbach’s Arno. The result is night and day better. Arno is a gorgeous font, but it was still more bricklaying than bricks which distinguished the results for me. Both are important books, and The Master and His Emissary deserves to be re-set correctly, in Minion or otherwise.

    * CORRECTION: Yale outsourced the typesetting to some UK firm.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,207
    edited June 2
    Further to Andreas’ point, to keyboard left and right “curly quotes” (Mac), typographers use: 
    ‘     option ]
    “    option [
    ’     option shift ]
    ”    option shift [
  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 792
    Nick Shinn said:
    Further to Andreas’ point, to keyboard left and right “curly quotes” (Mac), typographers use: 
    ‘     option ]
    “    option [
    ’     option shift ]
    ”    option shift [
    this depends on which keyboard you’re using, local-wise. On a German Mac keyboard ‘ ’ lay under the #-key, “ ” under the 2 key. › ‹ lay under N and B; « » under Q.

    We need need new keyboards.

  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,207
    edited June 3
    @Andreas Stötzner
    We need need new keyboards.

    Yes! I’ve been keying curly quotes for 35 years and have never been perfect at the finger combinations.

    The problem is that deep down I expect the left [ key to represent both left quotes, but it doesn’t for the double quote. Something in me (visual logic?) just can’t accept a left symbol representing a right glyph, and vice versa.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,186
    The problem is that deep down I expect the left [ key to represent both left quotes, but it doesn’t for the double quote. Something in me (visual logic?) just can’t accept a left symbol representing a right glyph, and vice versa.
    You’re not alone. I have gotten used to typing ‘’ “” in this way, but it is not only counter-intuitive but inconsistent with the way in which other mirrored characters—() [] {} <>—are implemented in the basic and shift states of the keyboard as pairs of side-by-side keys.

  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,126
    Nick Shinn said:
    Further to Andreas’ point, to keyboard left and right “curly quotes” (Mac), typographers use: 
    ‘     option ]
    “    option [
    ’     option shift ]
    ”    option shift [

    I was wondering what English-language keyboard made curly quotes available with AltGr and Shift-AltGr. I checked on my web site, and I see my diagram of the U.S. keyboard for the Macintosh has... just what you said. However, on the diagram, it looks entirely logical. “ and ” are both on the {[ key, and the closing double quote is the shifted one. ‘ and ’ are both on the }] key, and the closing single quote is the shifted one.
    The real problem is that the {[ key is not the ][ key, and the }] key is not the }{ key; this makes the PC keyboard incompatible with the APL/ASCII standard - but it does put the square and curly brackets in more convenient positions.
    So what you are supposed to do is think of the curly quotes in relation to their positions on the keyboard, ignoring anything else that might be printed on the same keys: Apple chose to follow a historical precedent for keyboard arrangements, ignoring the innovation that the PC keyboard, also used by Apple, borrowed from Hewlett-Packard.





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