Category: ultratypographic

We’re finally getting feedback on the essays we completed back in January, drawing a long period of uncertainty to a conclusion. I haven’t done any kind of academic writing in quite a long time, and considering the rather modest expectations placed on writing for people in art programs in the States, it might be said that I’ve never done any serious academic writing.

It was hard just to choose a topic for the essay. It was suggested that it should be no less an effort than a dissertation, just restricted to about 4,000 words. that’s more than I’ve written at one time before, but still short enough to demand a pretty tight focus for a topic. I finally settled on an overview of Monotype’s 4-line system for setting math in hot metal, a technique they introduced back in the 50s to try and automate the setting of math a bit more than had been possible before. I knew I wanted to do something about math so I could make a little headway on my dissertation topic, and the more I read back in the Fall the more it seemed that everything happening in the early and mid 20th century came down to Monotype. I had a hunch that whatever Monotype made available had a huge effect on how people expected math to look ever since, so I wanted to see what their type for math was all about.

I started worrying that it would be hard to write enough, but after a lot of research at St. Bride, in Spur H, and in Special Collections, and a couple of invaluable demos of hot-metal equipment (first by David Bolton at the Alembic Press, and then by Mick Stocks here in the department) I began to realize that I easily had enough for a full dissertation and would have to struggle to present it concisely enough for the essay. I would have to explain the basics of hot-metal composition clearly enough to make it clear what was different about the 4-line method, and I would also have to analyze the new version of Times New Roman that was introduced to work with 4-line math. The topic was basically a history, and it was a struggle to find something original to say. It would have been easy enough to make suppositions, but it was a lot herder to arrange the facts in a way that set up a final conclusion.

In the end it turned out well. I certainly wasn’t convinced of that, but Gerry’s feedback started out with: “This was a real pleasure.” He thought there were a couple of details that could have used elaboration (more illustration of how character widths were controlled in the caster, more primary-source reactions from customers who used the 4-line system) but on the whole he though I did a good job of presenting the facts, and he liked that I went beyond just the technical details and concluded some things about the business decisions at play and why Monotype went for an evolutionary solution rather than a revolutionary one. He also said that he was very curious about some ideas I threw in at the end about how digital typesetting took off in other directions, and that’s good, since that’s basically what my dissertation will be all about. “Publishable” was probably the best word that came up during the feedback, which was gratifying.

The whole thing can be read here, if you’re nerdy enough to be curious.

I know that Dave from Helveti.ca is finishing up his first book design project over here, so I am shamelessly scooping, and shamelessly stealing these pictures of awesome typofabrics from India, Ink.

Even though I can barely sew on a button I’ve been fantasizing what I could do if I bought up every stitch of it that this eBay seller could get her hands on, especially once I discovered that she has other kinds as well:

Friends, students, admirers, and mockers already know of my vast collection of type-themed t-shirts, but now I’m imagining myself wearing a full suit made out of type cloth. Perhaps all Helvetica, with a nice shirt made out of the serify stuff, and a tie and pocket square made from the numbers? Or at least some sheets and pillowcases. What with the tattoos, the t-shirts, and flights of fancy like this, I realize that I’m on the verge of becoming a Batman villain, albeit one with much more style than this loser. Still, if anyone can make this happen I will be your slave for life.

Of course, I’d much rather have a Cooper Black leather jacket. (Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week.)

Now that we’ve started drawing and sketching for our practical work, I’ve been spending more and more time thinking about the kinds of forms that might work well for the problems I’ve been talking about so far. In many ways, it’s a very open-ended question: it’s not a unique problem to want clarity and legibility in type for dense text situations that may not be produced well. For the kind of technical publications I’m targeting, a certain kind of “classical” or “traditional” feeling would probably be received well, but I’m determined to sneak in as many technical adaptations (addressing issues of reproduction quality, optical sizes ranging from titles down to elaborate superiors and inferiors, legibility of individual letters as well as words) as I can.

Continue reading “You Can Judge a Book by Its Counters”

In Counterpunch, Fred Smeijers talks about the importance of word shapes in how we read:

At the root of configuration or overall visual arrangement is the design of the word. . . . Though it might seem that the type designer’s aim is to make new characters, the real goal is to create a new word-image. [ch. 4, p. 29]

Good type leads to good word shapes which leads to good comprehension. Makes sense, right? It’s a concept I’ve read about elsewhere, but as I try to develop a brief for this whole math type issue, it leads to some additional questions. Namely, how do we read word shapes in math? As I’ve mentioned before, equations don’t really work as words quite the same way, and comprehension is a little harder since you can’t easily rely on context to clarify individual characters. Equations have basic rules for structure and notation, though, so there are conventions that aid comprehension in that context. So what kinds of patterns emerge form those rules? What are the functional “word shapes” that make math notation comprehensible? And — most importantly — how can type be optimized to make those mathematical word shapes easy to read?

Spacing in math is, in general, much looser than in text since it’s often a collection of symbols and operators. In a way, each symbol is a noun and each operator is a verb. Rows of symbols are usually shorthand for values multiplied by one another, and looser spacing helps clarify their separation from one another. You may find actual words like “sin” (sine) or “cos” (cosine) scattered within, set in roman rather than italic. These words ought to be spaced normally. You also have changes in vertical positioning all the time — superiors, inferiors, division, limits, matrices, etc. Readability, then, has to factor in the different meanings of space, different meanings of style, and different reading directions. This is pretty different from anticipating word shapes that move in one direction along one line.

Smeijers, Fred, Counterpunch: making type in the sixteenth century; designing typefaces now. London, Hyphen Press, 1996

And a few other ideas to file away for the practical work:

• • The STIX folks have been keeping up with developments to Unicode, and are maintaining tables of recommended Type 1 character names. Look into that.
  • Structured documents can have a tough time dealing with the level of granularity that might be required for complex font changes, unlike TeX documents that seem to thrive on it. What can be done to anticipate fitting and usage problems in when it’s not easy to change back and forth between fonts? For instance, can OpenType contextual alternates be used to insert terms like “sine” and “cosine” that wouldn’t be set italic like other characters in math?

In addition to standard text and numerical glyphs, a good family for dealing with math would need a pretty robust set of agate glyphs for superiors, inferiors, dense tables, etc.

• Also, spacing would have to be very different for characters that get used for equations, so a different font that spaces the glyphs differently may be needed: probably not monospaced, but certainly set wider, and with no italics that kern or overset their bounding boxes.
• Should the type be optimized for screen display, publication, or some happy medium?
• Italics should be fairly upright, but definitely italic in style rather than staying too close in form to the roman. They will need to be very distinct from one another.
• Not too much contrast, or any details that are too delicate. However, not too blocky and informal, either.
• The equation might may also benefit from having short ascenders and descenders to minimize trouble with spacing of overbars, stacked combining symbols, and divisions.

Mitja’s “Reflection on Practice” essay talks about some good qualities that would be relevant to what I’d like to do, especially the notion of case-sensitive punctuation and operators.

An article by Donald Knuth and Hermann Zapf about the development of their Euler fonts for typesetting math gives me a lot to chew on. More than I can lucidly process right now, so instead let me jot down a few notes to file away for further thought or inquiry:

• Knuth mentions a lot of qualities that mathematicians expect to see that are based on blackboard-writing conventions. Are those still relevant at this point, or is more teaching and research with math being done with electronic tools. If so, how do those tools present the math?
• Optimization for screen display could be a big factor with the practical work.
• Track down the digital Euler fonts themselves. The AMS only offers a few of the fonts as part of their TeX resources, and Linotype seems to have the full set, but only as part of a fairly pricey collection of Zapf’s work on CD.
• What other math development projects have there been? Something must be happening with the STIX fonts, right? What kind of research went into Microsoft’s Cambria Math? What about Lucida Pro’s math? What other major efforts were there before the Euler project?
• Maybe a general idea for the dissertation could be an investigation of the various efforts that have been made to address the type-for-math problem. Every time I read about one, it seems to have been formed out of nothingness, without much inquiry into what’s come before. that’s probably not the case, but it could help to dig up antecedents and follow them through to more contemporary efforts.
• Knuth and Zapf talk a lot about the scripts and frakturs and such, not just the romans, italic, and Greek. Look for more examples of all of those.

Knuth, Donald E., and Zapf, Hermann, “AMS Euler — A New Typeface for Mathematics” Scholarly Publishing, April 1989, pp 131–157

It’s interesting to read “Future Tendencies in Type Design” in 2006, 20 years after Hermann Zapf first wrote this article about whether or not there is any point in updating classic typefaces for yet another new type technology. (Short version: He says “no.”)

I tend to agree with him, for many of the reasons he cites. Typefaces are very much products of their own era and its technologies, and attempts to carry them over into other contexts lose a fair amount of the spirit inherent in the source. At the same time, it’s not as if the basic designs of type should be laid to rest just because new technologies call for adaptation. Instead, it would be wiser to openly acknowledge the source and inspiration, but solve the problems of the new context from scratch without holding too slavishly to the model.

Of course, any revival of an old typeface is forced to do this to some degree or another. The problem, though — one which Zapf (and plenty of other people I’ve heard/read) feels has mostly been handled badly — is one of typefaces getting badly updated without enough regard to the past to accurately match them, or enough thought about the future to adequately evolve them in to something else.

It strikes me as a very Modernist stance to take: form follows function, so if the function (or manufacture or reproduction methods) changes, then the forms should adapt accordingly in order to give the best result. Zapf has seen his own work designed for metal go through some poor adaptions from film to digital, and wishes that market forces would have made it easier to create new versions altogether rather than corrupt the original ideas and slap the same names onto them.

The interesting questions come from the time this article was written, when digitization of type was really in its infancy. From the vantage point of a couple of decades later when we have more sophisticated type technology and more processing power and storage capacity for handling digital type, we’re probably in much better shape to produce more faithful historical revivals. However, whether or not to do so is a big decision. Some foundries, thankfully, are coming out with newer, more sophisticated versions of their initial adapations of older fonts (Adobe Garamond Premier Pro, Linotype Sabon Next, Monotype Bembo Book), but they still involve compromise. At the same time, there seem to be more and more families like Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Mercury, which may start from some historical models but really blossom once they are adapted for contemporary usage problems and take full advantage of contemporary production technology.

Zapf’s essay is followed in the same volume of Visible Language by an essay from Matthew Carter, in which he describes his historical references and the extent to which he followed or departed form them in his design for ITC Galliard. Carter based Galliard very directly on the work of Robert Granjon in the 16th Century, but describes in some depth how his own design for a contemporary typeface required many adjustments for technical reasons, market demands, and & perhaps most importantly & to preserve the actual spirit of the source material. To get something to work in film and eventually digital setting, a slavish recreation was less useful than an informed, sensitive tribute.

Zapf, Hermann, “Future tendencies in type design: the scientific approach to letterforms.” Visible Language, vol XIX, no 1, 1985, pp 23–33

Carter, Matthew, “Galliard: a modern revival of the types of Robert Granjon.” Visible Language, vol XIX, no 1, 1985, pp 77–97

While griping about the hassles of typesetting math in this Typophile thread, I finally put my finger on what makes so many otherwise good typefaces fall apart in math or technical work: character-level legibility. A good text face works best when its letters work together to make good word shapes, right? When the individual glyphs don’t pull the reader outside of the flow of the text with too many quirks or spacing irregularities. The trouble with setting math or other technical material (chemical equations, charts of ID codes, etc.) is that the context for the individual letters is much less familiar than in typical text. If text is comprehended word by word with less need for the letters themselves to be individually distinguished, then math is read letter by letter in such a way that almost any character could be swapped out for another and change the meaning entirely.

Most of my problems setting math over the years have had to do with letters that just aren’t unique enough when you pull them outside of normal text and start mixing and matching them with Greek and symbols and numbers and lord knows what else. Especially once superiors and inferiors are used, it becomes absolutely critical to know if a glyph is an “l” or an “I” or a “1” or a vertical bar, for instance. (If you’re seeing the right CSS styles for this page, see how nicely Georgia distinguishes those from one another? Check out Arial: l I 1 | )

A good face for this environment needs to strike a balance between the ability of the letters to combine easily for typical reading comprehension, but still hang onto enough unique appearance to hold their own in the free-for-all world of tables and equations.

Hot on the heels of the typolicious preview I saw for Helvetica! The Movie (Well, it’s just called Helvetica, but damnit a documentary about a typeface deserves an exclamation point) comes this absurdly sexy system of wall panels made up of interlocking Helvetica numerals. My god, if only I weren’t just about to become a poor student!