Thomas “my other car is a sans serif” Phinney on fonts, typography & text. Geeky troubleshooting and info for font developers and users. Read more...
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Through my day job I am doing a 3-part webcast series on web typgraphy best practices. It is free, and registering once covers all three webcasts (with no obligation to attend).
Read all the details on the WebINK blog. Or just register now.
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Recently, a question by Cynthia Batty on the ATypI mailing list led me to do a quick survey on what we call typefaces without serifs. Click here to take survey.
Here are the results of my little survey. There have been over 300 responses. It’s certainly not a random sample, mostly people deeply involved with typography in some way. Interestingly, the results didn’t really vary by expertise level. (The order of the possible answers was randomly varied so as not to influence the answers, btw.)
The most common comments under “other” were that it should be “sans serif” as a noun and “sans-serif” as an adjective (for example, “a sans-serif typeface”). Certainly if the noun form is “sans serif” then standard English usage would dictate that the compound adjective would be hyphenated.
Another common response was that “sans” is an acceptable informal shorthand for “sans serif.”
Finally, it seems that despite a bit of solid support in the UK for “sanserif,” that spelling is neither particularly widely used nor accepted. The Oxford English Dictionary accepts it and dates it back to 1830, and the Oxford University Press, Robert Bringhurst (The Elements of Typographic Style) and eminent professors James Mosley and Michael Twyman all use it, as does typographer and typography author Robin Kinross. I must confess to not much liking “sanserif” myself.
[Edited to correct spelling of "Mosley" and add a little more detail on "sanserif," and again to add Bringhurst the to list of "sanserif" supporters.]
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Many years ago, the very first digital font I ever worked on was a version of Hermann Ihlenburg‘s 1892 typeface Columbus, for American Type Founders. I had an interest in it because it was used in the logotype for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, which I had long enjoyed. I never did anything serious with it, both because I did my revival by eye without benefit of scans or good quality originals, and because I didn’t know what I was doing back then.
Specimen — click for higher-res sample
Ihlenburg is pretty darn obscure, btw. He had the misfortune to be prolific back in the late 19th century, when type designers got very little recognition, and typefaces were just starting to be given unique names. The main available info about him is in a 1993 article David Pankow wrote about Ihlenburg for the American Printing History Association’s journal, on the occasion of an archive of Ihlenberg material being assimilated by the Cary library at RIT (Pankow was then curator of the Cary, and editor of the APHA journal).
Fast forward almost 20 years to 2010-11. While unpacking some boxes, I ran into some photocopies I had made of some good quality type specimens of Columbus, from early ATF specimen books. This was handy, because the earliest ATF book I have is about 1906, and the design had already been dropped by then. A quick search online verified that nobody had done a decent digital version yet. There’s a free version called by its original name, Columbus, by a fellow named Sam Wang, and an $18 commercial font called Beaumarchais from Scriptorium that is particularly awful, worse then the free font. Each has about 100 glyphs.
So I’ve been working on and off on doing a better version from digitized scans. It’s not “done” exactly, but it is already a whole lot better than either of the other versions currently available. I’m still tuning spacing and additional glyphs. I plan about 260 total glyphs, of which about 106 are in good shape right now, including alternate swash caps, which were not done in the previous digital revivals. I am using my old typeface as a placeholder and replacing glyphs as I fix them up.
I did a little bit of work on this font during the type busking at TypeCon New Orleans, and got some good feedback on the eszett and the spacing while I was there (thanks to Gary Munch et al).
I can’t call it Columbus, however: ATF’s trademark lapsed, and Monotype trademarked the same name for a 1992 Patricia Saunders typeface (celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ famous arrival, while Ihlenburg’s typeface was so named for the 400th anniversary). My previous attempt had for a while been called “Columbine” but that has taken some unfortunate connotations, so for now I’m calling it “Cristoforo,” after the sailor’s first name.
I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it. For now I am licensing it on special one-off terms to a very small handful of companies doing material related to the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Maybe I’ll do a commercial release at some point, who knows?
Here are samples of my work-in-progress and its nominal competitors. I’ll leave telling which is which as an exercise for the viewer—make your guess before you hover your cursor over the images, or read the comments.
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Geez, I thought it might take another year or two, but Amazon says their unit sales of Kindle ebooks (which can be read on the Kindle devices, computers, tablets and smartphones) have passed their unit sales of print books, by 5% for the period since the beginning of April.
Amazon Kindle
Now, of course this is just Amazon and not all retailers, and it’s unit sales rather than dollars, but then again, these figures do not include ebooks Amazon “sells” for free, either. However you slice it, it is still a major milestone. Unlike PC Magazine’s John C Dvorak, I do generally believe the numbers, but unlike Mr Dvorak I also see Kindles on every flight I take, and every bus I ride to and from work. Dvorak makes a big deal of the possibility much of this content is being read on other devices besides Kindles per se, which (as I said last summer) misses the point. The Kindle is good for Amazon because Kindle users are locked into Amazon’s (Kindle-branded) ebook sales, but as long as people buy the Kindle ebooks from Amazon, it’s no skin off Amazon’s nose what device they get read on. The profits are on the content sale, not the reading devices.
I rather expect that retail books as a whole will pass this milestone some time in 2012. We are living in the proverbial interesting times.
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Some current subscription rates:
The Economist:
New York Times:
Time magazine:
Why the craziness? These publishers want me to pay more for the electronic version than the printed one, even though their marginal costs are lower. Publishers are so worried about protecting their paper publishing business that they are hobbling the digital one in ways that make no sense in terms of their overall business and especially in terms of their future.
I didn’t just look up publications that happen to be crazy. The first two are publications I like and enjoy reading and would like to subscribe to. I don’t want the printed versions, which pile up in my home and use up resources for insufficient value (to me, anyway). I want to get the digital versions. I am perfectly willing to pay a “fair” price. Time was the first other big periodical that came to mind, and did not surprise me in having an equally crazed pricing model.
But these sorts of pricing decisions just piss me off, and leave me feeling that the publishers are trying to use digital-only revenue to prop up their failing paper-based businesses. As a would-be digital-only subscriber, I feel exploited. Or I would if I actually gave them my money… which I won’t do under these conditions.
End result of this kind of pricing? Those who continue it will find their market share eaten by those who don’t make that mistake. They will find competitors who either are perfectly willing to let their digital business take over some of their print business, or just don’t have a printed paper business to worry about.
Just as I finished writing this piece, I found an article that sums up the problem nicely:
www.betatales.com/2011/04/24/the-word-that-should-be-banned-in-all-media-companies/
Print media businesses are so worried about cannibalization that they are shooting themselves in their heads. I hope it stops before we lose some fine publications, or they become shadows of their former selves.
NOTES:
Yes, I call them “print media businesses,” because that is how they are behaving: at some level they have not figured out that they need to become simply “media businesses.”
Yes, I’m omitting some details and extra options. For exmaple, the NY Times offers a discount on the first two months of digital, and cheaper digital-only options are available from NYT as well, but those offer trimmed-down access choices instead of allowing people access from whatever device they want. Still, the all-digital version that is equivalent to the digital options the print subscriber gets is more expensive, as best as I can tell. Without getting the paper copy, whose price includes home delivery.
Finally, I kept on looking, and sure enough, there are publications that have sane policies in this area. For example:
Seattle Times:
I’m voting with my pocketbook.
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Speaking of end-of April deadlines, there are only four days left for talk submissions for the ATypI international typography conference in Reykjavik, Iceland in September.
As always, it will be a great event with tons of fascinating and varied content about fonts, typefaces and typography. Going as a speaker usually nets you free conference admission, which saves you hundreds of dollars. It also gives people you don’t know yet a reason to talk to you about something you are interested in… recommended!
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Noted type designers Veronika (“Vik”) Burian and Jose Scaglioné are poised to do a 4-day type design and FontLab workshop right here in Portland, Oregon, in July. It’s being sponsored by the Portland Type Foundry (Pete McCracken), and hosted by the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts.
Type Design & FontLab 4-day workshop
Note that the poster offers two additional options if you work through Portland Type Foundry (details on the poster) and register through them by Thursday April 28: either get a $100 discount on the whole four-day event, or if you already have some type design and FontLab experience you can attend just the last two days for an even cheaper rate.
Check out the poster for more details, or go to the PNCA to register if it’s after April 28 and the poster special is over.
Unfortunately, PNCA is understandably nervous about getting enough registration for such a specialized event, and are considering cancelling the seminar if they don’t get at least a dozen people registered by the end of April! So sign up now to guarantee that it actually happens. Maybe we can at least extend the cut-off until the end of May if it looks close, but no guarantee.
Personally, I’m jazzed to hear that Vik and Jose are coming to town to do this. I’ve been fans of their work for many years, which is why their foundry TypeTogether was among the first I got signed up for the WebINK web fonts service. They are part of a new(er) generation of type designers who have been working with advanced tools and OpenType from very early in their careers.
They also have a particularly international perspective: Vik is based in Prague, Czech Republic, while Jose is in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They met while both working on their MAs in typeface design at the University of Reading in the UK (one of only two such programs in the world). I’ve done a number of guest lectures at the Reading program over the years, and watched as it has turned out a number of outstanding type designers and type tech geeks. Recommended for folks who are really serious about getting into type design, as is the TypeMedia program at the Royal Academy of Art in the The Hague.
BTW, this isn’t the first collaboration between TypeTogether and Portland Type Foundry: Pete McCracken and Vik Burian worked together on a typeface called “Spore” (seen in the poster).
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It’s a week late this month, but our monthly Portland Type Tuesday social gathering continues with our fifth gathering. This month it is at:
7 pm
Tuesday, April 12th
Hawthorne Hophouse
4111 SE Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR
I was part of a similar once-a-month gathering in Seattle, that met in a bar in the basement of a bookstore. It was fun and I missed it when I moved to Portland, so I started a monthly get-together here in Portland, which has been meeting since December 2010. I even created a Meetup group this month, sponsored by my employer, Extensis (who do WebINK and Suitcase Fusion).
We usually get together the first Tuesday evening of each month at 7 pm onwards. Folks gather at a local pub, have a brew, snack, and/or meal, talk about things typographic, and sometimes bring an item of interest for show and tell. There are always one or two new people, and a large handful who have met before.
Please join us if you are interested in getting together to talk about fonts and typography, and perhaps share typographic items of interest (not a requirement to bring something!). Because it’s at a bar, you need to be over 21, though if a few people tell us this is an issue we could try a café or something instead. Other than that, people of all ages, genders and aesthetic backgrounds are welcome.
I will be the fellow in the green hat and red mad scientist glasses. There might be more books and such kicking around our party than you usually see in a bar. See you there!
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It’s easy enough to determine that a point is 1/72 of an inch, and used to be about 1/72.27 in the days before digital type. But the challenging question is, when you look at printed type on a page, what part of a 12-point font is 12 points high? The short answer is “none.” Seriously. For metal type it’s the “body” which is not something you see in print, and for digital type it’s the “em,” which is completely virtual.
[I have been working on this piece on and off for months, and I keep on thinking it needs more graphics. But in the interests of getting it out there, I'm letting it go as is, because I think most of this is clear enough even without. If anybody wants to point me to a link or create a graphic to illustrate a point made here, feel free!]
The background to this is long and complicated, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I first explain how this is the question that just refuses to die, and the confusion it can cause… in painful detail.
Back in the days of metal type, the answer was simple, even if it didn’t relate to anything one saw in the printed output. The point size of the type was simply the height of the metal body the type was cast on. Additional line spacing was added by means of thin strips of lead between the lines, hence the term “leading” (pronounced “ledding”) for line spacing.
Above is shown a piece of traditional metal type (photo courtesy Daniel Ullrich, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0). The added red bracket shows the body height, which one would measure to determine the type size.
In metal type, without leading, the distance from the baseline of one line to the next would be the same as the point size. However as you can see in the example, once the metal type was printed, there was no direct means of knowing what the original point size had been, unless one also knows either the original typeface or the amount of leading used with some certainty.
In digital type, the font’s letters are drawn on a grid, where an arbitrary number of units (often 1000 or 2048) are set to equal the “em” which is then scaled to the current point size for output. So to get 12 point type in print, with a 2048-unit em, that digital space is scaled so that the 2048 units in the design space are equal to 12 points. As Karsten Luëcke put it in a recent discussion on Typophile:
In digital type, the EM does not refer to a “real” box. You better consider the EM as a yardstick – an abstract letter-height yardstick which establishes a link between micro and macro level, between font-internal unit system and font-external unit system: The font-internal unit system is defined via UPM, i.e. as the number of units per EM. It is the letter-design grid or resolution. The font-external unit system may be typographic point, millimeter, pixel, etc. And this abstract EM serves to project the font-internal unit system onto the font-external unit system.
An example. You have a font with 2048 units per EM, internally, which is to be projected on 12 pt type size, externally. So 12 pts = 2048 M-units or 1 M-unit = 12/2048 pt.
So to image the font at 12 point, one scales the abstract EM to equal 12 points.
The catch for purposes of measurement and standardization is that while there are some restrictions on how large one can draw letters in the design space, there is no necessary and required relationship between the size of the letters and the em. On average, with Latin-based languages such as English, the “cap height” of capital letters is about 70% of the point size, and the “x-height” of lower-case letters is about 70% of the cap height, or about half the point size. But (and I cannot stress this enough), those are only averages, and there is no technical requirement whatsoever that one be close to those averages. Indeed, x-height relative to cap height is one of the ways typographers describe typefaces (“high x-height” vs “low x-height”).
[UPDATE : I did some research for a client, and verified that as expected, cap size varies substantially between different fonts. In my sample, cap size was most usually 62%-78% of the em square, averaging right around 67-70%. Or to put it another way, if you take an “average” font printed at a given point size, other fonts at the same point size will commonly have capitals as much as 10% smaller or 10% larger than the capitals from the average font. At the extreme you can find fonts “in the wild” with caps barely over half the average size! (I expect you could also find fonts with caps close to half again the average size, but I wasn’t looking so hard in that direction.)]
Moreover, the Zapfino example given earlier shows how a given font could be at a radically different size relative to the point size and still be a legitimate font. Indeed, anyone knowledgeable in modifying fonts could in a matter of minutes, take almost any font and create a modified version, with the only visible difference being that text at a given point size is only a fraction of the size.
The web can use points, but just defines them in terms of pixels. It has inherited the Windows definition of that ratio, so on the web by default 1 pt = 4/3 pixels, so 12 pt = 16 pixels (but see below).
It used to be that Mac browsers used the Mac relationship of points to pixels, which was one-to-one, but that has been abandoned just a few years ago. so at least points vs screen pixels are now consistent across platforms, though how big a point is on screen (or a nominal browser pixel for that matter) depends on your screen resolution, what zoom level your browser happens to be set to at the moment, and (on Windows) whether you have set something other than the default screen resolution of 96dpi.
But the relationship between pixels and points is broken in some browsers on Windows (such as Internet Explorer 7 and earlier) when the user has a non-standard resolution set. For example, if you actively tell Windows your screen resolution is 120 dpi instead of 96 dpi, that means that point sizes get multiplied by 5/4, but sizes in pixels do not. So at 120 dpi, a font set to 9 pt will instead show up at 15 px, but a font set to 12 px will still be 12 px, and now smaller. Arguably this is a reason never to do font sizes in px. (Bitmapped grapics generally are not scaled by the 5/4 ratio in browsers, but they are in other apps such as Word or the usual graphics previewing programs.)
This may get even less standard in the future, as CSS 3 is threatening to make pixels a truly imaginary thing, always equal to 4/3 the point size. This would cause pixels to scale into virtual pixels when non-standard resolutions are set.
Of course, some users (like me) are constantly changing the zoom level in their browsers, which also plays hob with any notion of fixed sizes for points, though at least relative sizes are maintained by browser zoom.
Things get kinda weird on the web, in another regard. CSS can use “ems” as a measurement unit. Okay, that makes sense, right? I mean, why not set an indent or margin in ems? No problem. Where it gets weird is that you can set the type size in ems. Now, logically based on the “normal” definition of the em, this makes no sense, because the size of an em is always the same as the type size, so the size of the type is always one em. But CSS allows you to break that assumption by setting an em to some specific number of points or pixels, and then setting the type size to some multiple of that. It gets even weirder, actually, because you don’t need to define the em in the first place. If you don’t define it, the standard browser assumption is that one em = 16 pixels (Firefox and possibly Chrome), or 12 points (Internet Explorer). The difference betwe