I am generally of the belief that some glyphs ought to remain upright even in italic fonts.
I have long used lists of such glyphs when working on italics—even reverse engineering a list at least once, looking at my own previous fonts.
Anybody else keep such a list they are interested in sharing or discussing?
My previous list as a text file (FontLab .enc format) is here:
https://github.com/tphinney/science-gothic/blob/master/lib/encoding/upright-in-italic.encI am just about to update this for my current project, Science Gothic.
Comments
I've noticed that 'upright conventions' for italics can differ between foundries—though math symbols remain upright in most cases, so this follows standard practice.
I'd be interested to know if there are established conventions for rarely seen, encoded glyphs, which are found in extended Latin typefaces with huge character sets. i.e. Gentium, Brill etc. I say this with a large degree of nativity and personal interest.
And a side note why/where did the conventions come from as to what remains upright in an italic?
i.e. change RSB and LSB of mathematical symbols to match italic slant.
- notdef
Here's a thread.In typical text fonts I don't generally italicize or otherwise slant math operators with at least one or two exceptions, and then I provide alternates that are not slanted.
Even if that typesetter might be lazy and may use the font "wrong".
I agree with André. The tradition in metal typefounding was to make a set of mathematical symbols and operators in each size, in a single weight, to be used with any font. These included parentheses, brackets, and braces, each of which carries a mathematical instruction. While braces had no use in literary work, parentheses and brackets did, so text fonts that were “put up” (the term used in the U.S. to describe the standard assortment of letters arranged for sale) were furnished with parentheses and (sometimes) brackets, though if you look closely, you’ll find most often that their design was the same from font to font. The weight of parentheses varied with the weight of the font, but brackets were always the same: one weight, upright. In Anglo-American and most Western European typographic styles, the only use for italic parentheses is in texts set entirely in italics, but many foundries didn’t offer them at all. Morison’s program at Monotype was one of the first to regularly include italic parentheses, likely because he envisioned the first italic in the program, Blado (companion to Poliphilus), would be used to set texts in the Aldine manner.
Speaking as a typographer, I would urge designers to NEVER make italic brackets, because, as I see it, there is no such thing. As for italic parentheses in text fonts, I would prefer having them in a Stylistic Set, with upright ones in the main font, though my opinion on this might represent a minority.
Sorry, Andreas, but I was speaking rhetorically, with an eye toward typographic tradition. My point was not whether italic brackets exist in fact, but whether, as a new development without a history or any obvious usefulness, they should exist at all. Your examples look very orderly, but I do not think they are valid. I have never seen a mathematical text or formulation set entirely in italics—have you? The meaning of italic characters in mathematical formulas are quite specific; operators are never in italic. The lines you show in italic would be, at best, very rare exceptions. In my opinion, glyphs intended for exceptional usages should be part of alternative Stylistic Sets, not the principal set.
In Anglo-American usage, brackets are used in literature and scholarly work to denote the following: an interpolated text; an editorial remark within a quotation; or parenthetical text within parentheses. While one (not me) might argue that italic brackets would have a use in texts set entirely in italics, such an occurrence would be very rare. And even so, I do not believe that italicization applies to brackets. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should.
I prefer the second examples in each instance. [n.b. I haven’t adjusted the spacing here. Were upright forms included in the italics, presumably they would be shifted slightly to the right to provide better spacing].
In the 2.01 release of the STIX Two fonts, I added a set of upright ( ) [ ] { } to the italic text fonts as stylistic variants. This seems preferable to having users switch to the roman fonts for these signs, since they need horizontal offsets and some significant kerning when used with italic letters, which can be automated if the upright parentheses etc. are in the same font.
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The vertical bar | is another character that I personally prefer to set vertical in italic text, but again I know that some users disagree.
This has been very helpful for me in thinking through the issues. For my own work, I think my future choice of whether to make everything slanted will depend on the case at hand.
For a text typeface intended for sophisticated settings and users, keeping some glyphs upright still makes plenty of sense for me. I find André’s examples of the effect of that quite convincing.
But for a general-purpose display face intended for a broad range of general users, I am at least open to the possibility of slanting more things or nearly everything (or everything but the notdef, nod to Ray).
When I look at the core system fonts that most people are used to, many of them do keep plenty of glyphs upright in the italic. Not just oldies (like both the Lino and Mono versions of Times), but also slightly more modern typefaces such as Verdana.
But then again, Calibri goes all-slant. Some prominent open source options are also all-slant or close to it, including Source Sans and IBM Plex Sans.
For this particular project, for a variety of reasons, I may go all-slant. But in general? ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I will go with “it depends.”