This area of munchfonts is devoted to important aspects of typeface design that are occasionally discussed on the newslist Typo-L, and involve visual material. To subscribe to Typo-L, see the website for details (a hyperlink is available on a short step up and over to the Typo-L site).

Looking at the changes of spelling from s to x in French plurals, here is a scan of a scan of a photograph (it's really not very good) showing the s and x in contrast. Is it really an x? There aren't enough fine hairlines in the scan to show the lower left tail of x, and did the scribe consider it to be an x?

See oyseaulx, deux, glorieux; and you will notice the initial and medial long-s, and final round s in les, temps, contans. And, are those two words appetres, a petres, with a trailing s?

The text is in a Bâtarde current hand, from the 1400s. From Degering, Lettering plate 108.

Here is the delta from Nicholas Jenson's 1472 Greek typeface, in the orthotic, upright style.

h geusews hdonhn. h gignomenhn
(With h as eta, w as omega. That u-like form with left-and-right tails is a mu.)
The written order of strokes is unclear, offering two possibilities: delta's main ascender modeled first, followed by the triangular lower part; or, the triangular lower part first, followed by the ascender. in the latter, the ascender could be made from baseline up to the left, though the dynamic would tend towards the more contemporary rightward loop of modern delta.

Illustration from Zapf's chapter, "Development of Greek Typefaces" from Greek Letters: from Tablets to Pixels

How do marks, edges, and counters relate to one another?

1. Left two marks:
   • A visible mark has width and breadth; it's a two-dimensional shape.
   • As it is made, it separates from the ground (background).
   • What is not marked is counter to the mark.
   • Where mark and counter meet is an edge. An edge has no width or breadth, only length, along the boundary of mark and counter.
2. Right two marks :
   • A mark that returns to itself often makes a closed mark. There is an interior counter separate from the outer counter. Many viewers imagine that the interior counter (plus the bordering closed mark) is the mark.
   • A mark that returns to its beginning has been closed and filled. The mark could as easily have been made with a bigger marker tool, or else be an enlarged portion of a smaller mark.

At ATypI Roma 2002, Linotype Library GmbH revealed their latest project: Sabon Next, a full renovation of the Sabon family of Jan Tschichold, redrawn and expanded by Jean-François Porchez. The image here is low-resolution, and of only part of the wide range of styles (yes, the italics are now free of the requirement that they be the same width as the roman) which includes new weights, alternate-sort fonts, and ornaments.

The shaping of the German s-s ligature (ß) is a delicate and culturally sensitive matter, but can be done well. Or badly. Two variants of the shape in a design originally by Morris Fuller Benton, the first from Adobe's Franklin Gothic and the other from ITC's verison, show two attempts at the hmm, s-z ligature. The traditional variant (Adobe's) is clearly the superior sort for native readers.

In HTML, ß can be marked up as ß, referring to the two camps that posit the shape as a ligature of either long s and s, or long s and z. A version that uses the s-s style (Tschichold) is below, for comparison. Though more Latinate, and thus perhaps not completely appropriate for a grotesque such as Franklin, the third style is typical of Humanist and Antiqua ß. It is a tat too wide, perhaps, in this Bold style rendering.

Setting contact information unambiguously on a business card. Information is clustered in two ways: with a rule to differentiate personal (phone and email) information from the more general facsimile and Web site information, and with space to differentiate telecommunication from Internet communication.

The typeface is Humanist 521 Condensed (Gill Sans) in place of the (here, unavailable) Akzidenz Grotesk Condensed.
Original card and emblem by Michael Brady, RR,Typo-L.

Diferent serifings in historical hands relied mostly on what in type would be called semi-serifing; the pen makes a serif at the start and end of a stroke or letter, primarily as a way of trailing off excess ink.

From top to bottom:

The Late Renaissance model closely relates to the models used by Jenson and Aldus. Here, the pen moves (retracts, or retraces) to the left and then right before lifting to make the arcade stroke.

Examples were roughly written by GM with about the same care that might be given one letter on a long page. They are not to be considered definitive forms.

The use of different typefaces to mark the speakers of dialogue was used by Massin in the Grove Press edition of Eugene Ionescu's The Bald Soprano.

Two Devanagari typefaces, one traditional, the other a project by Adrian Frutiger.

The sense of the pen angle in the calligraphic is strongly of Northeast to Southwest light; in the Frutiger, it is more strongly North to South.

A comparison of custom Mac bitmaps for screen reading to Verdana TrueType at 12, 10, and 9 points.

The custom 9pt is problematical.

The 12pt is the normal browser size, and at 82dpi renders at about 10.5pts physical.

An ornamental gif of Really Greek Medium
(TDC² 2001 Type Design Competition Winner)

Jean-François Porchez has provided a PDF that details comparisons of his Le Monde Journal typeface and of Times New Roman.

• 185KB ComparaisonLMJ-TNR.pdf
  
  
• 155KB ComparaisonLMJ-TNR.pdf.sit

The PDF is composed of typeface font text converted to outlines, and can be opened in Illustrator, etc. for examination of the curves.

What goes around.

A: On this Mac, PS1 fonts will show the glyph. In justified text, extra space is added to the right of the glyph; it isn't centered.