Typophile - The bouma of space craft - Comments

This one! At least you are

Stefan Seifert — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:19:50 -0700

This one!

At least you are still here ;-))
(the one planet in financial troubles)

Planet? What planet? hhp

hrant — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:14:02 -0700

Planet? What planet?

hhp

Hi Raph! (hello Hrant) Are

Stefan Seifert — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:25:44 -0700

Hi Raph! (hello Hrant)

Are you still on this planet?
Yesterday I did a demonstration at Leipzig, Germany, of the Valdonega Aesthetic LIne characters of Martino Mardersteig. (I managed as you know good part of the project and redesigned some faces there).

He gave me a book which will be selled in the states (which I shouldn’t talk too much about ;-) that was printed in VAL Centaur and I by myself - although I made it (sorry the lack of modesty ;-) - was struck how brillant it worked in (I think) 18 point. Seemed exactly like letterpress. I didn’t believe it by myself, I nearly had to use a magnifying glass to see the difference from hotmetal!

I only wanted to tell you that, as I know that you are a great fan of this face that also for me is one of the most important in the world. And this version (VAL) is overwhelming! The irregularities that I did in the design gave it the effect nearly as if being physically impressed in the paper. Yeah! I love it. It almost frightens me. For right now I would not be able to do it the same way again. Maybe it was the Italian coffee these times..

salute
(to all the Centaur lovers!)
Stefan

PS
I was very near to talk to Mardersteig about your BEAUTIFUL Zeno version but I was too afraid to put you into some trouble.
Though I don’t believe he would mind (he actually became more relaxed with these themes recently. At least it was my impression) However I mentioned in another discussion your brillant idea to invent new curves as design tools and that you already did it. Sadly noone is very deep into this theme (apart from myself;-)
Go on designing!!

? So long. William, Hrant

Stefan Seifert — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:55:55 -0800

So long.
William, Hrant and Raph in one post only.
This is storic.
Like it is Centaur! ;-)
Best classic typeface on earth.
Yeah!

Stefan

Marking ChrisL

dezcom — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:55:17 -0800

Marking

ChrisL

>Stefan, 2 years is nothing

Stefan Seifert — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:43:31 -0700

>Stefan, 2 years is nothing around here! :-)
>Feel free to go back as far as you’d like.

Thanks guys!

>A lot of this sort of thing has to do with the physical limitations of metal,
>especially “hotmetal” (Monotype, Linotype, etc.) as opposed to foundry.

Yes I do also believe it had to do something with restrictions in the Monotype machines because there was only a certain number of widths possible I think. Yet, as I said its not so easy to make it better. For example the e’s shifted slightly to the right side are genious solutions and have a certain logic to the eye. If you cut those particularities out of those fonts they get kind of strange and boring without their special rythm (happened so to my Baskerville Monotype). May also have to do something with our eyes that got used to see the classic characters and read them this way for decades. Maybe.

salute
Stefan

A lot of this sort of thing

hrant — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:14:47 -0700

A lot of this sort of thing has to do with the physical limitations of metal,
especially “hotmetal” (Monotype, Linotype, etc.) as opposed to foundry.

hhp

That's an interesting

William Berkson — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 06:24:44 -0700

That’s an interesting question you raise about Monotype.

The current received wisdom seems to come from Walter Tracy’s book ’Letters of Credit’ and other influences from the old metal Linotype drawing offices.

Monotype’s practices seem to have been somewhat different. Does anyone know about the approach of the drawing office in English Monotype’s old metal days?

Stefan, 2 years is nothing

hrant — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:30:25 -0700

Stefan, 2 years is nothing around here! :-)
Feel free to go back as far as you’d like.

hhp

Hi enne_son! Hi Raph

Stefan Seifert — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:06:43 -0700

Hi enne_son!
Hi Raph (again)!

As I am new at typophile I don’t really wether it makes sense to respond on discussions that were made years ago and wether anyone may take notice of it. Yet, I surfed a little in these old comments and I am again astonished that there are so much people thinking about stuff like this, I mean almost in terms of philosophy and so on. So I did always.
As I already told here and there I worked long ago at the Valdonega project and since then I have learned to have great respect what was done in the past in my example the Monotype faces.
And I do believe that existes this “atmospheric” thing you talked about.
I once tried to better a Baskerville Monotype drawn very closely to the metal original.
Without kerning (I think it spoils the rythm of characters) but I simply “bettered” the spaces of letters and up with:
Go to the start again keeping Monotype spaces because they added so much to the very character of the font.
My tries to better it were more even thats true but at the same time liveless and boring.
So I think there are some secrets about it.
Anyone there who wants to restart this discussion?

Salute
Stefan

To follow up on Raph’s

enne_son — Wed, 11 May 2005 08:44:38 -0700

To follow up on Raph’s comment about the general usefulness of fourier processing for understanding spacing, see the attached (sorry, couldn’d figure out how to attache in the new interface: try http://www.thecharlestaylorprize.ca/downloads/raph_spacing_protocols.pdf) comparison of a transform of Raph’s custom spacing with a transform of the kernus spacing and a transform of the ikern spacing. I did some gaussian blur and thresholding processing to highlight the differences. (There is a small margian for incompatibility introduced by manually adjusting the darkpoint and midpoint levels after the gaussian blur.)

The interesting thing to note is that, unlike kernus, ikern keeps the general concentration of information visible in Raph’s spacing (note the similarity in the 75%grey horizonatal band), but spreads out the very highest peak (the white peak in the manin frequency band disappears).

For those who are interested, I’ve prepared an entire suite of fourier transforms. One is designed to compare the spatial frequency distribution of a suite of fonts, ranging from bold to light, normal to condensed, serif to sanserif. Another shows the effects of course spacing adjustments to Mendoza (using QuarkXpress tracking units on the ±10 order. Another shows the effects of fine spacing adjustments on the order of ±1 (through 9) qxp tracking units. Another compares the spatial frequency distribution of the black in a block of text with that of the white.

Those who are interested in accessing this should send me an e-mail request (penneson@sympatico.ca), and I will send them a link. (I prefer to know who is downloading this, because I might want to extend these exercises and make it into a presentation.)

I will hold off on applying my interpretations of the tracking experiments, font comparison, black versus white experiments for now.

Now do you see why I thought

Joe Pemberton — Fri, 6 May 2005 23:33:09 -0700

Now do you see why I thought you’d like the wiki? A lot of the nuggets in this thread should be ported wholesale into the wiki for reference.

billtroop — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:05:47 -0700

>Fog? Quark? What's that?

Oh, just things that people like Matthew Carter use. You probably should, too.

>I usually deactivate the old version of the font, return to InDesign

That should work with any program. It is certainly the way people tend to work with Quark, with predictable results. BUT ...

>This seems to make sure that InDesign doesn't cache the old font info. Your mileage may vary, of course.

_Seems_ ... _may vary_ ... these aren't things anyone should be worrying about. If even TP doesn't know for sure what InDesign is doing, why on earth would a font designer use it for proofing?

The thing is, we _know_ what Quark does when it comes to proofing type. This has been established pretty well. I would like to say we know what Fog does, but I don't think we do, as I don't think its print preview honours hinting, or if it does so, does it eccentrically.

One thing I always do on any font in the editing stages is to set the PS IS to 0, which should prevent the printer from caching it.

It is also essential to consider that different printer rasterizers will print font data differently. For example, I have noticed in the past that it is tendency of an Adobe rasterizer to prevent dropout at any cost; clone rasterizers are not necessarily designed with this imperative, and may thus give a more useful indication of problem areas in a design. Adobe rasterizers ought to be the gold standard, of course, but in these competitive days, they are seldom used, for cost reasons. I have no idea the extent to which the latest clones have achieved parity or functional identity with Adobe PS.

Thomas Phinney — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:33:17 -0700

Personally, I usually deactivate the old version of the font, return to InDesign to make sure it knows the font is gone, then install/activate the new version. This seems to make sure that InDesign doesn't cache the old font info.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

T

Nick Shinn — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:24:55 -0700

>I have to restart InDesign to get it to load a new build of my font,

I don't have that problem.
I'm using InD CS and the Users>Nick>Library>Fonts folder.

The bouma of space craft

raph — Thu, 7 Apr 2005 14:39:31 -0700

We have a number of threads going about spacing. Please forgive me for starting a new thread attempting to tie them together.

In Creative Suite 2, we have a rousing debate about the merits of the "optical kerning" feature of InDesign (which is actually Kernus licensed from URW).

In the massive TYPO 13 thread, largely devoted to competing theories of letter recognition and the role of the bouma, there is a subthread on spacing, kicked off by five questions including "what letterspacing optimizes readability?" There is a new thread continuing the investigation into the human visual system, but I'd really like to see the spacing discussion continued.

There's a small thread entitled Theory of Spacing, worth referencing if for no other reason than Nick Shinn's beautiful graphic illustrating his own approach to spacing.

In context of Kernus, here are some observations and opinions I'd like to offer.

I think what Adobe is doing is slowly recovering from the loss of optical scaling in the transition from metal to digital. You see that with their release of optically scaled families (such as Slimbach's brand new Garamond Premier), but I think Kernus also plays a role, for the probable case where the font is not available in optically scaled variants.

To briefly sum up what I've learned about Benton's optical scaling technology implemented about 100 years ago, there are four major things that happen to a font as the size scales down:

1. The stroke weight increases, essentially implemented by stroking the outline with a fixed-width circular pen. Doing it this way also has the important effect of reducing stroke contrast. For example, let's say that the font at large sizes has a 2:1 stroke contrast, and at 6pt the thin and thick strokes are 5 and 10 mils, respectively. Let's also say that the radius of the circular pen is 2 mils. Then the resulting strokes are 9 and 14 mils, a contrast of approximately 1.5:1.

2. The width increases, based on linear nonuniform scaling (the same affine transform technology responsible for Squooshing, implemented using pantographs).

3. Extenders (particuarly descenders) shorten, or to put it another way, the x-height increases.

4 (and most important to this thread). The fit becomes looser.

I haven't collected serious data yet (I need to code up some tools to extract spacing from scans), but from eyeballing the ATF books, I'm sure that that the looser fit is not just a matter of adding the same hairline space between each letter pair (or, equivalently, adding half that space to the left and right side of each letter). Rather, I believe that both large and small sizes were fit individually.

At text sizes, I consider the ATF fonts a landmark example of good fit; in other words, I believe that the fit is better than the majority of digital faces available today. Most strikingly, the fit is good even for difficult words such as "power"; today you would expect even color in this word without additional kerning of the "ow" pair. See p. 536 of the ATF 1923 book (Century Catalogue) for example.

At larger sizes, the fit is not nearly so good (see, for example, the very uneven "power" in the 18-point sample on p. 537, but I believe it is still close to the best that can be done given the limitations of metal.

I believe that the perception of the space between letters is dependent on scale. At text sizes, I believe the eye sees mostly the space between the strokes (as is emphasized by Tracy's "Letters of Credit" approach and this tutorial). Serifs have a relatively minor contribution.

At larger sizes, I think the perception of spacing incorporates more delicate features of the lettershapes, particularly serifs. In other words, the perception of space between letters is more closely approximated by the actual length of the gap between the two letters. To set "noonn" tightly requires shaving a lot more space from the "no" and "on" pairs than from "oo". I'll illustrate:

example of tracking, PDF
tracking.pdf (12.7 k)

To my eyes, at 12pt, Adobe Caslon Std looks just fine with the metrics, or with no kerning at all (the metrics call for -5 on the "on" pair). InDesign's optical kerning feature shaves 13 from "no", 14 from "on", and adds 6 to "nn". To my eyes, this is not an improvement; it makes the "on" and "no" appear crowded.

At 72pt, though, the story is altogether different. Not only is the fit too loose, but the "no" and "on" pairs appear gappy. Applying -30 tracking helps with the overall looseness, but makes the relative "no" and "on" gaps that much worse. The "optical kerning" feature here does almost exactly the right thing.

Combining tracking and optical kerning does not always yield good results. Adding +17 tracking (to keep the oo pair at the same spacing as the original) works well, but -20 tracking (for an overall tight effect) does not. The "oo" pair is too close for comfort relative to the rest of the word. I included a hand-spaced tight setting for comparison.

From all this, I draw these conclusions:

1. Optimal fit is highly scale dependent -- the smaller, the looser.

2. The perception of space is also scale dependent -- the larger, the more delicate features such as serifs affect the perception of space.

3. Adding constant tracking to a good fit at one scale yields a bad fit at a different scale. This fact strongly supports conclusion 2.

Unless one is designing a Multiple Master font or an optically scaled series, current digital font technology forces a "one size fits all" approach. Kernus is an improvement in that it will space a single font fairly well at different scales, but is still not as good as hand-fitting with the size taken into account.

I must say that this has been quite a learning experience for me. It was bad enough when I'd start tuning out the world around me because I was distracted by letterforms, but now I find myself constantly looking at the spaces between letters. A casual observer could easily conclude that I'm out of my mind. I look forward to continuing this discussion with the rest of you out there who are obsessed at looking at what isn't there.