Category: ultratypographic

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!

In Charles T. Jacobi’s Gesta Typographica (London, 1897, although I was only reading passages reprinted in 1964 at the Maidstone College of Art), there’s a mention of a decree made by the Star Chamber on July 11, 1637, that limited the number of master printers in in England to just twenty, and also limited the number of type-founders to just four.

It was a startling tidbit, which made slightly more sense after a little digging. The restriction of legally sanctioned printing to a handful of shops in London was intended as a way to make it as easy as possible for all publications in the kingdom to be monitored and censored by the court of Charles I, whose attempts to consolidate power led to the English Civil War. The 1637 decree was the most extreme of an escalating series of attempts to stifle dissent, often spread by means of pamphlets and books published by independent printers throughout the kingdom. Although small presses continued to produce seditious (in this case meaning anything not sanctioned by the crown) pamphlets and books, many unlicensed founders and printers were raided and arrested, and their equipment destroyed.

In terms of type history, I wonder how many punches, matrices, fonts, and examples were lost in all these purges. The literature I’ve seen so far only discusses the printers themselves, and doesn’t say much about the foundries, or doesn’t make clear if any of the printers had founders working with them under the same roof. It seems possible that entire strands of typographic development may have been snuffed out during this period.

(Note to self: Keep an eye out for other mentions of the censorship by the Star Chamber between 1632 and 1641, thereabouts.)

I finished Kinross’ Modern Typography last week, but it will take a while (and probably a few subsequent readings of things in it) before I really digest all of it. It might be the most lucid examination of the whole notion of “Modernism” I’ve ever read, because it views it not as a stylistic period, but as a fundamental change in the way things were done that naturally influenced the end results. From this perspective, the whole history of movable type in the West is a result of modernism, and so the book examines the layers of causes and reactions and counter-reactions that are all a part of Modernism in some way or another.

Note to self: Pick up Natalia Ilyin’s Chasing the Perfect one of these days. She seems to have similar ideas about opening up the definition of Modernism and modernity.

Kinross, Robin, Modern Typography. London, Hyphen Press, 1992