Delhi, or Dilli. These characters still need work, I know. Sorry for the lack of images; I haven’t any photos yet.

Wednesday, May 14
My flight left Heathrow in the morning, quite early. I flew with Air France to Paris, and then switched planes to fly to Delhi. While I was waiting in the terminal in London, I went online at one of those pay-as-you-go Internet terminals. They also had sites that you could surf for free, like the UK Foreign Office travel advisories/country reports. I looked up India and saw that it had just been updated—on the 13th, a coordinated series of bombings hit Jaipur, where I’m travelling to next week. Oh dear.

On the plane I read more about the bombings in The Times. It seems that several blasts hit the city center, where tourists congregate. Many people were killed or injured. Although I worry about everything, I still guess that it is safe to travel there. Is Jaipur significantly more dangerous than New York or London?

My takeoff from London was delayed. As a result, I didn’t have much time to catch my connecting flight. I did make it to the airplane in Paris on time , but my luggage did not. Air France only flies once a day to Delhi, which means that they won’t deliver my bag to my Delhi hotel until Friday morning…

I sensed this as soon as I got off the plane in Delhi. Already they had a message board up on the jetway with my name on it, asking me to report to the Air France desk in the baggage claim area. There were about four or five other names on the list. The two Indian Air France workers at the desk were completely over-worked; in addition to those of us on the missed luggage list, several passengers’ luggage had been damaged, and they were all angry and wanted claims filed immediately. Some people in the queue felt the need to tell these employees how to do their jobs, while two Italian men quickly lost their temper and began screaming. In an airport, I might have screamers arrested.

I had arranged for pick up to my hotel, for Rs 690. The driver had to wait an extra hour and 15 minutes for me, even though my flight arrived early. My delay was mostly caused by the above-mentioned baggage mess, but I also had to wait in line for some time in order to exchange money. Although I hope to pay for all of my hotel accommodations with credit cards, and I suspect that ATMs will work just fine, I feel better with some rupees on hand. So I changed about £200.

The hotel seems all right enough; my Rs 1600/night room is spartan, but it is also cold (hurray air conditioning!), and has TV. But no Internet. I’ve certainly stayed in worse places (in London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Thessaloniki, Bucharest…).

I room-serviced a large bottle of water before I went to bed, for which I feel oddly weird, but the whole water-born disease thing does have me thinking. Brushing my teeth with the bottled water, I had to keep telling myself, “don’t turn on that tap! that’s what you have the bottle for.” Well, that, and hydrating myself.

 
Thursday, May 15
My hotel’s name is the Hotel Broadway, and their logo is set in Broadway, naturally. I really wanted a hotel room without bugs. The Hotel Broadway’s roaches at least had the courtesy to let me have the room to myself for the first night. So far, I’ve seen two small ones. Not at the same time, mind you, but one in the morning, and another in the evening. I was too tired to kill this morning’s little bugger, but his evening cousin didn’t escape my grasp.

I had a nice little breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant, which turned out to be the only food I ate all day. The hotel provides each room with a free copy of the Times of India each morning. Score! That means more issues for my collection; too bad that the newspaper isn’t in Hindi, though. But at least this gives me something to read over breakfast. After breakfast, I walked to the New Delhi train station, which is about a half hour away. I saw a few donkey’s carrying goods along the route, and should have photographed them for Otmar. I also saw a proud bull standing by a cart. What a different-looking animal!

At the train station, I went into the new Metro, which is just fabulous—and air conditioned, at least during the day. I only wish that the network was more comprehensive, but I guess that it will become so. At the moment, they are building a new line to the airport. If I come here again, that is the route I would take in and out of the city. I rode the Metro for one stop, to Connaught Place, which was a nightmare. Most of the stores weren’t open yet. The whole place was teeming with tourist agent racketeers. Someone will approach you on the street and strike up a conversation with you in hope of steering you into one of the competing branches. They tell you at first that they are not trying to sell you anything (and they aren’t), all the while moving you in the direction of their specific travel agency, which will give you a free map of the city, even. They go along saying that they are just interested in getting to know someone new. My hair seems to people. When I tried to ignore these agents, they become upset, and accused me of being a stereotypical foreigner, unfriendly, and too stressed out. I was looking for a map of Delhi, which I somehow managed to get without booking a package tour to Kashmir or the Himalayas. Those in the tourist business that I talked to seemed a bit distressed that I was planning a trip to Jaipur, and suggested Agra instead, orr Dharamsala.

I decided to go to Lodi Gardens next, hoping to relax. I’d heard good things about this park, which you can’t reach directly via Metro. I took the Metro to the Rajpath near the government buildings, and was determined to walk from there. An autorickshaw driver approached mw and I couldn’t manage to shake him off, so I asked for a short lift to Lodi Gardens. He offered to take me there for Rs 50, and show me a shopping center along the way. I agreed, which was a mistake. I got taken for a ride instead.

We actually went to two stores; these give him gas vouchers for bringing in customers. At the first stop, I bought what I thought was a cheap scarf as a gift. I mean, I like it, and it is rather inexpensive, but at the next shop the same item would have been just a third of the price! The shopkeepers where all a bit uncertain about my craft interests: just stuff with writing on it, thank you very much! I managed to fend off an insistent rug seller, but I ended up with two more scarves, a small touch of jewellery, a little painted elephant, and a nice present for myself: an illustrated manuscript page (it was the only one that was in Devanagari instead of Urdu, and it had a full page of writing on the obverse of the image).

I finally got to Lodi Gardens, with an other detour at an Internet den that my driver suggested after hearing me mumble something about email. I was about to pay the drive Rs 50 when things got rude. He wanted more money for the long trip and the waiting time. Granted he did wait for me at the second shop and while I was online, but he did get commissions. He wanted Rs 300. I only had 200 and 500, and he only had 100 in change. This was really stupid. I should have given him 200. Hell, I should have given him 50. But I didn’t see the point of an argument over what still amounted to the same fare that would be reached in Reading in five minutes. Sigh…

I sat down on a bench in Lodi Gardens, and more people came up to speak to me. By now, I was super weary, but these people did only want to speak English with me, I guess. The first did not have such good English, but we did manage to have a conversation about the differences between Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s state visits to Delhi, and about Jenna Bush’s wedding. Then a yoga instructor heard us speaking and came by. He taught me about inner peace, and was fascinated that at least Anke had taken yoga. “The mother power is very strong,” he said. “Your girlfriend is very wise. You should bow down before her and worship her intelligence. She must be very strong and very happy. Follow her!” I’m sure that Anke will get a kick out of this when I tell her.

After this guru left, I walked around the gardens a bit more. The gardens are very nice. Someone there told me that it is the best-kept green area of the city. Amid the historic architectural ruins, there were lots of young, kissing couples, which shows that there might well be hope for the world. Several locals wanted to have their picture taken with me, or at least with my hair. Then I walked a few minutes further to the Khan Market, which has a few bookstores. I also went into a cafe there, and had the first of what ended up to be three frozen coffees with ice cream—what the Germans call Eiskaffee—over the course of the afternoon and the evening (each at a different establishment). My last stop at the market was another Internet shack, where I searched for a cafe where I could go online with my own laptop over wifi. It seems that most of these were at the dreaded Connaught Place, so I mustered up my courage for the journey back.

I walked from the market to the India Gate, and from there back to the Metro. This time, I avoided most of the rickshaw drivers by walking in the direction of traffic, and on the grass of the park that line the Rajpath. Two did try to give me a lift, though—one even insisting that my red hair would bring him and his family luck for the evening. Once I was in the Metro, I took a quick stop off at the train station along my way to Connaught Place. The New Delhi train station is crazy hectic, but I got to the tourist office upstairs without any problems and purchased tickets for my two train journeys next week.

At Connaught Place I first tried the Oxford Bookstore, which has a nice selection of books but no longer has wireless Internet. I ended my evening across the street at a Barista coffee franchise where I could surf an hour for Rs 100. Around 10pm, I took the Metro back to the train station and walked in the dark the full length back to my hotel. This was probably a bit dangerous, but I really have no idea.

Newspapers? I picked up five so far: Desh Bandhu, the Economic Times, the Hindi Business Standard, Mahamedha, and the Shah Times.

New from Wordshape: Cooper Black Swash Italic, Rubber Vloeren™

New from Wiescher Design: Fleuraloha

New from Sideshow: Creaky Frank™, Creaky Solid™, Creaky Tiki™

New from 066.FONT: Old Stefan

Au Typographe on se soucie de contenu pointu, d‘éditorial béton, et ces derniers temps de plus en plus de déco d’intérieur.

New from Thaddeus Typographic Center: Agitas Gallery, Big New Sign, Breslau City, Daily Fix, Deltona, Nigerian King, Stigmal Font

New from BluHead Studio: Churchward Chinatype™

New from Gasoligne: Abalys™, Consortium™, Korsen™

Tomorrow (May 14) through May 24: In India! First Delhi, then Jaipur, Mumbai, and Pune. See you there, maybe. Links, images, and recaps are sure to follow.

We love OpenType. It’s not just the latest font technology, but also the most advanced, poised to replace the old TrueType and PostScript formats. This font file format brings so many more possibilities for typographers and graphic designers. But, of course, a new technology always means new things to learn. To help you understand OpenType, we published a new page that describes the whole efficiency and power of the format, and answers the question: “Is OpenType right for me?”.

So if you now want to know how a Swiss Army Knife deals with our most favorite font format, check out our OpenType page on our support section. Last year we spoke to attendees of the PINC Show about OpenType, so if you prefer to learn in a more visual way, have a look at the slides from that presentation.

• What is OpenType?
• OpenType presentation slideshowSo, for the sake of metaphor, let’s think of a font as a tool all of us can understand: a pocket knife.

  Here’s a TrueType font. You all know TrueType as the most common font format. As printers or designers you probably work with PostScript, and that format will work for this metaphor as well, but we like the TrueType icon, so that’s what this knife is.”>

  We’re designing a newsletter in FF Unit and this font has what we need for setting Roman text. Right?

  Uppercase,
  lowercase,
  numerals,
  punctuation.

  But let’s say we have a small team working on this project. Our coworker is designing a few of the pages and he insists on using his Big Fat Dell machine.

  We’re using a Mac. So will this file work on our friend’s PC?

  Nope. We gotta get a Windows version of the font.”>

  But wait, there are no Small Caps in this font! We can’t set proper acronyms without small caps. Better get FF Unit Small Caps.”>

  OSF stands for Oldstyle Figures (or numerals). But I like the term “Text Figures” because that’s what these numbers are for: they are designed to sit in upper- and lowercase text without standing out too much, distracting the eye.

  So we need FF Unit OSF. There it is, with those cute little finger holes.

  Now our tool drawer is starting to fill up, but it’s ok. Nothing we can’t handle. Cool.

  Well, word comes from the client that they want more pretty in the pages of this newsletter. “We need more pretty,” they say. No problem, that’s what swashes are for.”>

  So we’ve got seven TrueType fonts now. (We’re not counting any extra fonts that the Windows user needs.) This is lot of files to handle. The font menu is starting to require some heft scrolling.

  But now our client’s organization is really doing well. They are expanding into Eastern Europe and Greece.”>

  Fifteen TrueType files we’re left to deal with. This is starting to look like a mess. A junk drawer more than a tool drawer. And suppose we’ve got some old school output device that doesn’t play well with TrueType fonts. We’ll that’s fine, there are Type 1 versions of all these fonts.

  But then we have to add …”>

  Ouch.”>

  No more issues with document reflow or missing font files for the PC. The same file will work on any machine. An OpenType file can hold more than 65,000 glyphs, compared to a typical Western PostScript which is limited to 256 glyphs. That’s why all these extras can fit in a single font.

  So your options are this …”>

  Pretty simple choice.”>

  The Basic Character Set. Uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation. But up there at the top it says Glyph set. Glyph? What’s the difference between a Character and a Glyph? There is a difference, and it’s an important one to get if you want really want to understand OpenType layout features.”>

  This is a Character. A lowercase latin ‘a’.”>

  The standard lowercase ‘a’, a small cap ‘a’, and an alternate swash lowercase ‘a’. They are all the same character, but they are three separate glyphs.

  Characters are the “code points” assigned by the Unicode standard, which represents the smallest semantic units of language — such as letters.

  Glyphs are the specific forms or shapes that those characters can take.”>

  The PostScript or TrueType version of any typeface with small caps relegates the small caps to a separate file. Usually titled Caps or SC.

  With OpenType fonts, they can be built right into the same font file that carries the standard upper- and lowercase characters. This makes them much easier to access, as we’ll show you later.

  An OpenType interface can switch lowercase into small caps …”>

  This can be handy depending on the state of the text you’re given.

  Or if you change your mind about using all caps and want to change them to more discreet forms.”>

  An example of one of these extras that were once standard is Case-Sensitive Forms.

  Most punctuation and brackets are designed to be used with a mix of upper- and lowercase characters. Because there are usually many more lowercase letters in a word than uppercase, the punctuation usually sits lower so that it is vertically aligned with the letters that surround it. But when you wrap a string of uppercase letters in parenthesis or stick a hyphen in there, they can feel way too low.

  A good typographer will take the time to baseline shift these characters a point or two so they look appropriate with the caps. But with Case-Sensitive Forms, that work is done for you. If you use the OpenType tools to set a line in “All Caps” and the hypens, brackets, parenthesis and other punctuation will shift to the position that is recommended by the type designer.”>

  The reverse can also be true. A single glyph can represent more than one character, such as in ligatures, where one glyph like this one, can correspond to a sequence of three separate characters, ‘f’, ‘f’, and ‘i’.

  OpenType fonts can contain what are known as Standard Ligatures. These are those like the ‘ffi’ that are recommended for most uses. The type designer takes a sequence that would otherwise be clumsy and creates a single harmonious glyph.

  It may be hard to see at this size, so see the large image and note the clumsiness here where the three characters ‘ffi’ awkwardly bash into each other. The ‘ffi’ ligature in this font, which happens to be FF Nexus, is much cleaner, more graceful, less distracting.”>

  Not necessary for proper typography, but handy to have if you want a more formal or decorative feel to your text.”>

  But there can be several more glyphs per character, making a typeface more flexible. So here, in the font Bryant, you don’t have to use that ‘a’ if you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit the project. You can go with the alt ‘a’ and ‘n’ for a cute or futuristic look.

  This soft, rounded stuff, by the way, is very hot on the web these days. If don’t mind reading more of our drivel, Google “web 2.0” logos. There’s an article on FontShop.com about this trend.

  So with Stylistic Alternates, fonts can take on a different flavor.”>

  This is where OpenType really shows its intelligence. Contextual alternates can kick in depending on the placement of the characters. So script fonts like this one, Handsome Pro, can take on a more natural, fluid appearance. It appears to have a single stroke, all the way through the word.

  This is possible because the OpenType font is looking at each character and picking the most appropriate glyph to place next to it. I’ll show you an example of this later on.”>

  These decorative stroke embellishments are usually used at the beginning and ending of words for a fancy appearance.”>

  These figures are best used for tables of data, like financial numbers. Each figure has the same width, so each line and column of numbers line up perfectly. This is great for tables, but not so much for regular lines of text. Because, as you can see, forms like the number one don’t occupy as much space as the others. This can leave an unsightly space in running text.”>

  These are designed like regular letters, so that a string of numbers is evenly spaced without any large gaps. They won’t line up in tables of data, but they are good for setting amongst letters in regular text.

  But Lining Figures are all the same height. Sometimes the height of a capital letter, sometimes a bit smaller. But always larger than a lowercase letter.”>

  These have the varying size of lowercase letters, with descenders that dip below the baseline, and ascenders that rise above the x-height. This helps them flow with regular upper and lowercase text, rather than stick out and call too much attention to themselves.”>

  Lowercase numerals that all have same width. There isn’t nearly as much use for these. We suppose if you were setting a setting a table and you wanted it to look antiquated or fancy, these might do.”>

  They can change numbers divided by slashes into typographically correct fractions with smaller figures in the right vertical space, and a true fraction bar, which is actually a different form than the backslash. The fractions that are included are often only the most common, such as 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 2/3, and 3/4.

  But some OpenType fonts include every possible numerator and denominator so that you can build any ridiculous fraction you want. Like 413/826.”>

  Again, these aren’t simply smaller versions of the regular figures. In a proper font, these are designed specifically for their size, with the proper thickness (or “weight”) to help them coexist side by side with upper and lowercase letters.

  If you simply use the “footnote” command in MS Word or manually reduce the size of a number and raise it above the baseline, you won’t have a true subscript character. It will appear too light next to the rest of the text.

  Finally, Ordinals, which are known to English speakers as the ‘st’ in “1st” and the ‘nd’ in “2nd”. But most fonts include only the ‘a’ and ‘o’ required for Spanish words like segunda (feminine) and segundo (masculine).”>

  If there are more than one or two of these little images they are almost always relegated to another font or they are stuck in the Expert font file.

  But with the glyph capacity of OpenType, they can exist in a single font file with all the other letter-like characters. Here are some icon style dingbats from FF Nexus.”>

  (This font demonstrates the power of OpenType very well.)”>

  The first level is OpenType Standard with the (unfortunate) abbreviation of “STD”.”>

  What’s the difference?

  For foundries that follow Adobe’s standard, the only difference between these two labels is language support.”>

  This includes most Western languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, and the languages of Scandinavia.”>

  Language support varies between fonts, even within the same foundry, so it’s always best to check a PDF or other documentation before buying a font if you need to set type in a specific language.”>

• OpenType presentation slides as a flickr set

Photo: Yvonne Schüttler

Following a series of Non-Latin workshops conducted earlier in the year by Fiona Ross, we added two further notches to our belts earlier in the month. Our fist visitor was John Hudson, who was followed by Thomas Milo and Mirjam Somers from DecoType.

John conducted a script workshop. Not only do we dive into Non-Latin scripts here at the University of Reading, but we also learn to master scripts for languages that do not exist. Yes, you heard that right, and in a nutshell, this is what John set out for us to do. First, he introduced us to the imaginary boʧɪn people, who are desperately in need of a script for their language. Working in groups, we all stared down the path to different solutions. After three days, John let us know that another culture—this time the equally-imaginary pɑʔæŋ—were so impressed with our writing systems that they requested we adapt it to fit their language as well.

John also introduced us to a website—http://paulmeier.com/ipa/consonants.html—that plays phonetic sounds on demand. After a while, and after each of us playing clips from our individual MacBooks in a cacophonous manner, the whole workshop began to sound like a Trio song…

John’s workshop may well have represented the first group project we’ve undertaken here in our year at Reading. Each of our three groups independently developing their own script for the boʧɪn and pɑʔæŋ languages. I was very fortunate to be in a group with Mathieu and Michi, who drew most of the outlines you can see in these images; my only contribution to the final font file were some of the angular elements.

On the last day of John’s workshop, Tim Holloway, Thomas Milo, and Mirjam Somers arrived in Reading. In the afternoon, Thomas and Mirjam gave a presentation into their work and the Tasmeem typesetting system, which seems to be a plug-in to InDesign ME (the “Middle East” version of InDesign, distributed by WinSoft).

 

Part of the key to the writing system displayed in the above images.

After a weekend to recuperate from John, the boʧɪn, and the pɑʔæŋ, we spent two days together with Thomas and Mirjam. Two students from this year’s MATD cadre are designing Arabic components in their typefaces, so we divided into two teams, each backing up one student fill out their Arabic character set.

The Tasmeem system seems ingenious (read some more about Tasmeem on Pascal Zoghbi’s blog). Thomas and Mirjam presented us with two templates, a simple Alef template and a more complicated Bet template. A designer just has to design all of the necessary template glyphs, and the Tasmeem system will put the glyphs together into working text fonts. You can start with an Alef template, and only add Bet coverage if you thing that the Alef’s glyphs don’t give typesetters enough alteration. The template is just a catalogue of shapes. As the designer, you determine how they will look. Designers are not required to work within any specific stylistic varieties or rules.

I have never seen anything like the Tasmeem plug-in in action. It seems like this is really what OpenType always should have been. Imagine if InDesign would show you all of the various glyph combinations a word set in Zapfino or Ed Interlock could have? Right now, it can’t. You have to fish around the glyph palette or click through various menu options. This is how text setting should be in the 21st century. I guess I envy InDesign ME users that they actually have this capability, while the rest of the text-setting world does not.

Although to date most DecoType fonts seem to come from Thomas and Mirjam themselves, these templates open up Tasmeem font production to anyone who wants to join. Thomas showed us upcoming fonts from at least two other designers. And maybe more… my head was too busy spinning with all of the possible options. I wonder who will join up next? If I were designing an Arabic font at Reading, I think I’d make it Tasmeem-compatible, too.

New from Tipo: Overlock™

New from Corradine Fonts: Arcos™