Aside from tradition, is there any reason that would make it a bad choice to add a Book version next to a Regular and Medium version of a font? I know in many cases, Book is equivalent to Normal or Regular. But what if Book is in between Light and Regular? A bit like what Medium is between Regular and Bold?
I’m curious about recommended practices, technical issues, but also boundaries.
Comments
In usWeightClass from the OpenType/TrueType spec, Regular/Book is 400 and Medium is 500. (Not that it is great in this area, it has other issues.)
My earliest recollection of a “Book” weight was in the release of Tony Stan’s Berkeley Oldstyle by ITC, in 1983. Like most ITC types, Berkeley Oldstyle was an eight-weight family: Book, Medium, Bold, and Black in both roman and italic. The letterforms were based on Goudy’s University of California Old Style.
What I found perplexing about this weighting system was that the Book weight was, in my opinion, almost always too light for most book texts and the Medium was too heavy. The Book seemed to have been created more for headline use, or at least for larger subheads. This unfortunate weighting became common amongst many ITC offerings. I learned from people who worked at ITC that unfortunate or not, the company was determined to squeeze at least four weightings from everything they released, solely for the purposing of enhancing revenue. It should be remembered that, at that time, ITC was far and away the main source for type designs, licensed by all of the machine manufacturers. If what they offered was seriously flawed (such as in not having true text weights), people bought it anyway. The term “Book,” therefore, became so compromised and misleading that one had little idea what it meant.
Why does anyone bother with it now? Or, as Claudio suggest, does it matter at all? As a designer and compositor of intensely text-heavy books, I tend to ignore such designations. I feel I won’t know what a font will be good for until I try it. I do, however, admire Adobe’s approach taken during the period in which they made Arno, Cronos, and some others. They published a “Regular” design, a “Caption” design (for small text), a “Subhead” design, and a “Display” design—each in several usable weights. I dislike the term “regular” applied to type because it’s a word that’s both an adjective and a noun with too many meanings; why not just call it “text”? I suppose it’s far too late for such a criticism . . .
No one should ever expect consistency in these terms as they will mean different things for different designs. Be that as it may, it would behoove designers of text types to make types that actually work for at least an “average” text (10.5–12 pt.) and another version for small texts.
As I conceive it, in a modulated design, weight changes are mostly focused on the thickness of the thicks. Optical sizes are focused (among other subtleties) on the thickness of the thins (to achieve higher or lower contrast).
It sounds to me like the "book" label, which rings of optical sizing, was often simply assigned to a weight that had the approximate contrast of a running-text font but that came about through a lessening of the thicks rather than a strengthening of the thins. That would account for the frustration that the result was overall too light for what it seemed to promise.
(Has there ever been a "Book" weight offered of a monoline design?)
Futura Book is likely the best known example.
- https://twitter.com/alphabettes_org/status/1026514362444509184
- https://twitter.com/lettersfromswe/status/372012153018261504
- https://twitter.com/interplato/status/918109346818428928
If type designers, apps, and OSes are all over the map about Book, type users won’t get it either.For such historical examples, keep in mind that Book here originally designated not only a weight, but also a specific range of sizes (with respective proportions and spacing). While Futura mager and halbfett were cut in sizes from 4 to 84pt, Futura Buchschrift was limited to 6 to 14pt. This aspect was lost in the transition to scalable type.
After shifting to type design, I became somewhat more exposed to these options and their intent. But I actually found that currently I've preferred what fonts like IBM Plex Sans have done with a "Text" named weight as a complement to Regular by having it be slightly darker (instead of lighter, like Book).
https://www.ibm.com/plex/specs/ (Don't know if there was a different intent by the designers opposed to how I've viewed it or not.)
"Text" feels more open to me, whereas Book felt a little too traditional and like I was misusing the font/weight if it wasn't for actual use in a book layout. That may sound a little too literal, but I wonder how many customers it throws a slight curve ball to, as Stephen noted.
Conventionally, "Light" and "Bold" are directions on a continuum away from "Regular", so weight names like "Extra Light" and "Semibold" and "Extrabold" are easy to understand. Weight names that don't follow this implied system, like "Medium" and "Book", don't have obvious meanings.
FWIW, the common use of the name "Regular" is something fairly new. If you look at pre-digital type specimen books, you won't find it used much. Normally, there would be no weight name at all for what we call "Regular" now. But since digital fonts have to have a weight name, we end up with a lot of "Regular".