Open houkanshan opened 11 years ago
Use real small caps; avoid fakes http://practicaltypography.com/small-caps.html
They’re a great alternative to bold or italic or all caps.
Most people have never seen real small caps. They’ve only seen the ersatz small caps that word processors and web browsers generate when small-cap formatting is used.
Compared to the other characters in the font, the fake small caps that result are the wrong height, and their vertical strokes are too light. Whereas with real small caps, the color and height have been calibrated to blend well with the normal uppercase and lowercase letters.
Bad news. If you want real small caps, you’ll have to buy them—they’re not included with any system font.
Sometimes, small caps come in their own font file that shows up separately in the font menu. So when you want small caps, you format the text with the small-cap font. Other times, small caps are included in the main font file as an opentype feature (named ‘smcp’).+ But either way, you can also use paragraph and character styles to apply small caps, and eliminate the tedium of finding them.
Some font like equity and concourse have separate sets of small-caps fonts with the letterspacing already baked in. This saves labor. It also allows you to get properly spaced small caps in any program, even those that don’t support OpenType features or letterspacing. (Including web browsers—see letterspacing for more.)
One or the other, as little as possible http://practicaltypography.com/bold-or-italic.html
With a serif font, use italic for gentle emphasis, or bold for heavier emphasis.
If you’re using a sans serif font, skip italic and use bold for emphasis.
Consider tiered numbers http://practicaltypography.com/hierarchical-headings.html
Prevent ABC, 123, I,II,III. Using tiered numbers as indexes for hierarchical headings.
In CSS, tiered numbers require a little extra work—investigate the counter-increment
property
Less is more http://practicaltypography.com/mixing-fonts.html
Is not about mixing fonts of different language
- Mixing fonts is never a requirement—it’s an option. You can get plenty of mileage out of one font using variations based on point size, bold or italic, small caps, and so on.
- Font mixing is most successful when each font has a consistent role in the document. In a research memo, try one font for body text and one font for headings.
- While I’m reluctant to endorse rote methods, this one usually works well: mix fonts by the same font designer. For instance, pairings of atlas and lyon (both designed by Kai Bernau), alright sans and harriet (by Jackson Cavanaugh) or concourse and equity (by me).
Font support + application support http://practicaltypography.com/opentype-features.html
Invented by M$ and Adobe. Adopted by Apple.
Provide better support for international languages and writing systems than its predecessors (PostScript and TrueType).
OpenType includes layout features—commonly known as OpenType features—that allows fonts to contain alternate letterforms, and rules for how they should be inserted into the text. These features are mandatory for handling languages like Arabic and Urdu.
Bad news, even though many OpenType-enhanced fonts are available today, software companies have been slow to upgrade their applications.
The best overall OpenType feature support is found in professional page-layout applications like Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and Quark Xpress.
All major desktop web browsers support OpenType features. Support is spottier among mobile web browsers, use font-feature-settings
. (??)
Pages ’09 on the Mac is the word processor with the best OpenType feature support. M$ word support a limit set...
Links: http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/webfonts/tiramisu.html http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/ http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm
There’s one font file for each style in the family. (A style means one visual variant, like roman, italic, bold, etc.)
The best professional fonts are better than any system font
Most professional fonts are delivered in the OpenType format. Some are offered in the older TrueType format.
Microsoft Office on Windows, for various bad and arbitrary reasons, still does better with TrueType fonts.
Typeface referred to the overall family (e.g., Baskerville) and font referred to a specific instance of the family (e.g., 10-point Baskerville Bold Italic). This distinction made sense in the letterpress age, when each font corresponded to a drawer of metal type. But, as lexicographer Bryan Garner points out, “Technology has changed the meaning of this term … font most often denotes a whole family of styles that can be printed at almost any size.” (See Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd ed., p. 364.) Therefore, it’s fine to use font to mean both the family and a specific style. I do.
To further complicate the picture, some fonts with trademarked names (e.g., Helvetica, Palatino) have been revised and released under slightly different names (e.g., Helvetica Neue, Palatino Nova). So pay attention to the full name.
Neutral need not mean dull http://practicaltypography.com/helvetica-and-arial-alternatives.html
Criticizing Helvetica is one of the favorite pastimes of typographers: It’s bland. It’s overused. It’s inapt for most projects. All true statements.
Today, we have better options. For Helvetica diehards, there is neue haas grotesk, a lovely revival of the original Helvetica design. Others can try a font that’s neutral without being dull, like my own concourse, or the excellent new atlas. Even good old frutiger would be an improvement.
My Linux system is using altas by default
As I mentioned in system fonts, Arial was designed as a clone of Helvetica. Helvetica has earned its place in typographic history honestly. But Arial, only by Microsoft imposing it upon us for 20+ years as the main user-interface font in Windows. That’s the only reason you’ve heard of it. That’s the only reason you might consider using it. That’s a terrible reason. I try to keep the litmus tests to a minimum, but this must be one: you cannot create good typography with Arial.
...
Every typesetting manufacturer had its own Helvetica look-alike. It’s quite possible that most of the “Helvetica” seen in the ’70s was actually not Helvetica.
Now, Monotype was a respected type foundry with a glorious past and perhaps the idea of being associated with these “pirates” was unacceptable. So, instead, they found a loophole and devised an “original” design that just happens to share exactly the same proportions and weight as another typeface(Helvetica). This is almost worse than an outright copy.
Arial, on the other hand, pretends to be different. It says, in effect “I’m not Helvetica. I don’t even look like Helvetica!”, but gladly steps into the same shoes. In fact, it has no other role.
There were two kinds of PostScript fonts: Type 1 and Type 3. Type 1 fonts included “hints” that improved the quality of output dramatically over Type 3 fonts. Adobe provided information on making Type 3 fonts, but kept the secrets of the superior Type 1 font technology to itself.
Apple and Microsoft signed a cross-licensing agreement to create an alternative to Adobe’s technology. While Microsoft worked on TrueImage, a page description language, Apple developed the TrueType format. TrueType was a more open format and was compatible with—but not dependent on—PostScript.
When Microsoft made TrueType the standard font format for Windows 3.1, they opted to go with Arial rather than Helvetica, probably because it was cheaper and they knew most people wouldn’t know (or even care about) the difference. Apple also standardized on TrueType at the same time, but went with Helvetica, not Arial, and paid Linotype’s license fee. Of course, Windows 3.1 was a big hit. Thus, Arial is now everywhere, a side effect of Windows’ success, born out of the desire to avoid paying license fees.
Links: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/how-to-spot-arial http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/monotypes-other-arials http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-scourge-of-arial
Get closer to the source http://practicaltypography.com/palatino-alternatives.html
Palatino is the work of designer Hermann Zapf, who is a calligrapher by training. Many of his fonts reflect this influence. But the Palatino system font is a harsh representation of Zapf’s original design.
palatino nova is Zapf’s own reworking of Palatino that restores its original fluid subtlety. bembo book is a revision of the famous 1929 Monotype face, which was itself based on Italian Renaissance typography.
Book Antiqua, which was created as a Palatino clone for Microsoft Windows. Book Antiqua has caused its share of controversy over the years—Zapf himself considered it an unethical pillaging of his work.
But the system font Courier New is a beastly imitation of the original: spindly, lumpy, and just plain ugly.
Georgia was designed primarily to work well on screen.
Verdana was designed for the computer displays of the 1990s, so it’s great for the websites of the 1990s.
A well-designed font can have a lot of subtle variation between letters and still look consistent on the page.
The converse of this principle is that a font with too much consistency can be numbing to read.
Cambria is an example of this problem. It works well on screen, but on the printed page, it induces headaches. (Charter is even available for free.) ff tisa has a more relaxed, informal rhythm.
Calibri does its job better than Cambria, though it’s still better on screen than in print. The rounded corners of the letters make text printed in Calibri seem soft. For a clean, slightly narrow sans serif font, you have better options. concourse, of course. whitney and source sans both take inspiration from the famous 1908 face News Gothic, which Calibri resembles.
You need to stop because Minion is not a font choice. It is the absence of a font choice. For many years, Minion has been bundled with Adobe design software. It became the default font starting in CS5. And that’s the main reason you use it. Not because you like it. Rather, because it’s already there.
type composition was about picking the right characters. text formatting was about the visual appearance of those characters. Page layout is about the positioning and relationship of text and other elements on the page.
But you only get out what you put in. Don’t accept the defaults. You can do better.
ttf, otf, aat
Adobe Type 1, TrueType, OpenType is font standerd/format
Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) is Apple Inc's computer software for advanced font rendering, supporting internationalization and complex features for typographers, a successor to Apple's little-used QuickDraw GX font technology of the mid-1990s.
ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system.
FreeType is a software development library, available in source and binary forms, used to render text on to bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations.
Increasing resolutions and new approaches to screen rendering have reduced the requirement of extensive TrueType hinting. Apple's rendering approach on Mac OS X ignores almost all the hints in a TrueType font, while Microsoft's ClearType ignores many hints, and according to Microsoft, works best with "lightly hinted" fonts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering
Links: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html https://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm
also use hyphenation
Between one and four times the point size
Also hanging indent, Drop caps
A space equal to 50–100% of the body text size will usually suffice. The larger the point size, the more space you’ll need between paragraphs to make a visible difference.
45–90 characters or 2–3 alphabets http://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html
If you need the body text to fit a broad range of widths, then use adjustments to point size and page margins to keep the line length in the right range. Don’t just rely on reflow.
On the web, body text can be in a sans serif or serif font. Sans serifs were once preferred for screen text because they rendered better on the lower-resolution screens of the past. (That’s why most graphical user interfaces are built around sans serif fonts). But on today’s screens, serif fonts look equally good.
http://practicaltypography.com/block-quotations.html
- Reduce the point size and line spacing slightly.
- Indent the text block between half an inch and a full inch on the left side, and optionally the same on the right. Or on the web, about 2–5 ems.
- As with first-line indents, make the side indents large enough to be noticed, but not so large that the line length is too short.
- Don’t put quotation marks at the ends—they’re redundant.
When only the last line of the paragraph appears at the top of the next page, that line is called a widow. When only the first line of the paragraph appears at the bottom of the first page, that line is called an orphan.
Keeping lines together is a blunter technique. It only works on whole paragraphs, so the longer the paragraph, the bigger the gap.
Always use this option with headings. It looks bad if a heading appears at the bottom of a page and the text it’s introducing starts on the next page. Keeping with the next paragraph prevents this.
Head
Kerning
auto
The browser makes educated guesses about when to optimize for speed, legibility, and geometric precision while drawing text. For differences in how this value is interpreted by the browser, see the compatibility table.
optimizeSpeed
The browser emphasizes rendering speed over legibility and geometric precision when drawing text. It disables kerning and ligatures.
optimizeLegibility
The browser emphasizes legibility over rendering speed and geometric precision. This enables kerning and optional ligatures.
Letter spacing
Always add 5–12% extra letterspacing to text in all caps or small caps, particularly at small sizes.
Lowercase letters don’t ordinarily need letterspacing.
body text in printed documents (e.g., motions, research memos, letters) must always be set in black type. No exceptions.
on the web
But consider making body text on screen dark gray rather than black. Screens have more severe contrast than paper, and thus are more tiring to read at full contrast. This is because screens produce color by emitting light directly, whereas paper produces color by absorbing and reflecting ambient light.
Pro designers sometimes unfairly malign gradient fills as a signifier of amateur design. As with any design tool, they can be used well—or poorly. In the physical world, most of the color we see is essentially a gradient, because any directional light creates a change in brightness. So with type, a background gradient that gently changes brightness can give a naturalistic sense of light and dimensionality.
Alternate figures
lining figures
These are the most common kind of figures, and the ones you’re most likely to find in the default position of a font. Lining refers to the fact that top and bottom of the figures “line up.” Lining figures can be used in any situation. Lining figures are always the preferred figures to use within all caps text, because they come closest to cap height.
Oldstyle figures
Unlike lining figures, oldstyle figures are designed to look more like lowercase letters. The ones in oncourse (shown below) are all one height. But often, some are short (0, 1, and 2), some descend below the baseline (3, 4, 5, 7, and 9), and some ascend (6 and 8). You won’t be surprised to hear that oldstyle figures work best in lowercase body text.
Still, I won’t say that they’re inherently better than lining figures for that purpose. As with justified text, you’ll see it done both ways in professional typography. And in context, oldstyle figures sometimes look a little, well, old. So the choice is yours.
With caps, however, you should not use oldstyle figures. They look wrong.
Tabular & proportional figures
Tabular figures are set on a fixed width, so that every figure occupies the same amount of horizontal space (somewhat like a monospaced font).
Proportional figures are not likewise uniform: the figures are set on varying widths that suit the shape of the figure.
In body text, proportional figures are preferred, because they tend to have more even spacing and a more consistent appearance. But tabular figures are essential for one purpose: vertically aligned columns, like you find in grids of numbers.
That said, the default figures on many fonts—especially system fonts—are tabular lining figures, so they can move easily from your word-processing document to your spreadsheet.
Ordinals
Superscripted ordinals are tiny and hard to read. So the best policy is to avoid them. To do this, you have to adjust your word processor’s default behavior.
Some fancy professional fonts include specially designed superscript alphabets and alternate figures that remain legible at small sizes. Those are fine to use in ordinals, but they’re typically made available as opentype features. So you’ll still want to turn off any automatic ordinal shrinking performed by your writing tool.
Web & e-mail addresses
For a more usable web address, use an address-shortening service