What’s the best (or most established) practice for English-language style names:
Semi bold,
Semibold,
Semi-bold,
Semi-Bold, or
SemiBold? Likewise for Extra wide, Ultra condensed, Back slanted, etc. (Context: Adding typographic terminology to Unicode CLDR, see
this discussion. But this question here is specific to English, hence the separate post; hope that’s OK).
Comments
Serif PagePlus strips the hyphens when displaying the style names in the Character Format dialogue.
I personally find forms with a detached prefix awkward, so I much prefer Semibold/Demibold to either Semi-Bold or Semi Bold.
Technically, ‘extra’ should be written as a separate word since it is the adjectival rather than the prefix form being used, so ‘Extra Condensed’ rather than ‘Extracondensed’, though for some strange reason I prefer ‘Extrabold’ to ‘Extra Bold’ (but I prefer ‘Extra Black’ over ‘Extrablack’).
I don’t have strong intuitions regarding ‘Ultra-’ Both ‘Ultracondensed’ and ‘Ultra Condensed’ seem fine to me.
I’m just speculating here, but I suspect that forms like Semi Bold might have their origins in early Mac postscript type-1 file naming conventions which always used the first 5 letters of the first word in the family name and the first 3 letters of of all subsequent words. For fonts with both a semibold and a semicondensed, you wouldn’t want to end up with file names like ‘HelveSem’ which would be ambiguous.
André
Most fonts seems to use Semibold:
I don't know when it started, but I think Semibold has become the most common way to do it.
I prefer it because it saves a character in the name, compared to Semi Bold or Semi-Bold, and I don't like how camel case looks in typeface names.
It doesn't bother me that the convention used to be separate or hyphenated words. This kind of thing happens from time to time in English. It's not hard to think of examples that have happened during my lifetime.
Long story short, GF uses SemiBold as hyphens are separating family and style, spaces separate weight width slope.
The general trend in U.S. editing has moved toward solid setting (that is, no hyphens) and lowercase, especially with terms that are repeated often within a document or a class of literature. Moreover, I would argue that a term like “semibold” is an idea of its own, not something directly dependent on “bold, ” as evidenced by the fact that it invariably precedes bold on the menu.
Type terminology is now familiar to more people than ever before, so it was inevitable that the orthography of its terminology would become a candidate for compression. The medial cap style that Dave Crossland says is used by Google Fonts seems to me an example of an already tired, overused branding style than of straightforward usage, though it does have a history that goes back to at least the 1950s and 1960s (CinemaScope, AstroTurf).
Apart from requiring an extra character and taking up more space, separating the weight names out could potentially be ambiguous. Is Fubar Ultra Light, the ultra-light member of the Fubar family, or the light member of the Fubar Ultra family?
Now that is a standard I could get behind.
Of course, this makes me imagine a family that contains both Demibold and Semibold.
The FontName generally consists of a family name (specifically, the one used for FamilyName), followed by a hyphen [my emphasis] and style attributes in the same order as in the FullName. For compatibility with the earliest versions of PostScript interpreters and with the file systems in some operating systems, Adobe limits the number of characters in the FontName to 29 characters. As with any PostScript language name, a valid FontName must not contain spaces, and may only use characters from the standard ASCII character set. If abbreviations are necessary to meet the 29 character limit, the abbreviations should be used for the entire family. In some cases, some additional characters may be included after the family name and before the hyphen, such as a Vendor ID (see section 2.4) or a language label such as Greek or Cyrillic.
FontName examples:
(but regular weight is: GaramondBE-Condensed; BE specifies that it is from the Berthold Library)
Note that that applies only to the PostScript name, which isn't the name which normally appears in font menus.
Of course, all this is very old, but I don't see the reason to name a font "Something Semi-Bold" when it's Postscript name will be "Something-SemiBold", it's unnecessary confusion.
By the same reasoning we shouldn’t use spaces in font names which would lead to all sorts of ugly CamelCase in menus.