Typophile - Any text faces being designed now with contextual alternates to improve fit? - Comments

I’ve not read the thread

Eben Sorkin — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:50:15 -0800

I’ve not read the thread (yet), but you might want to look at some of the Arabic work of Tom Milo et al. Thanks! Actually the Bringhurst talk was part of what cemented my interest in giving this talk. Does Tom’s work relate to what Robert’s talk was about?

Thanks Chris! fl ligature /

Eben Sorkin — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:20:26 -0800

Thanks Chris!

fl ligature / I think that’s not real. Unless I see something that convinces me otherwise I would have to agree! I expect that a combination of letters that occurs early in a word or late in a word is likely to behave similarly. I do that that sometimes it might be useful to consider the shape of a letter at the beginning or ending of a word though simply because there is open space to the left or right of the letter in question and that makes a difference for precisely the same reason that having a flat or round or diagonally shaped neighbor might.

cfijklrstvwyz Nicely put! I would add g to that depending on the design. A single story g not so much; but the double story creates interest and potentially some problems not least because of the many ways to handle the ear. The lc ’a’ also has a lot of potential to vary if you want to push on it simply because it’s form seems so especially good at resisting having it’s utility ruined as it is reshaped.

old specimens
Exciting!

Eben, Check your

dezcom — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:40:39 -0800

Eben,

Check your email.

ChrisL

John, ”...the

dberlow — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:28:21 -0800

John, ”...the exchangeables in ClearType involve different currencies....”
You mean the addition of ’color’ to a ’b&w’ specification? otherwise, No comprendo. The ’exchange rate’ may be different, and the ’granularity’ may be reduced, but the issues are identical in all Latin text - big things, little things, inside, outside, black space, white space & round-eyed brains.

”...to handle fit without knowing whether subpixel positioning...”
...is to mentally fuse rendering and layout — something I’ve already defused to prove cleartype non-useless.

”...then all things, including contextual variants, should be on the table.”
And to paraphrase from Jaws, you’re gonna need a bigger table.

Read Eriks, not to mention our typographic past, carefully. fi fl ch ck tz. What do they have in common? A stroke with a tiny remainder, then a stroke (or significant remainder) following. cfijklrstvwyz plenty-trouble. abdeghmnopqu not so much trouble. Which leaves the ’x’ factor. :-)

Why do you think I’m ’so opposed’ to Kevlar’s letter-only-reading theory and them thar read-a-hillbillies insistence on readability as ’exclusively’ a software engineering problem? lol, It’s certainly not because my opinion counts outside of mine own clientele — it’s because I can count in ’alphabet arithmetic’ and apply it to the issue, everywhere it exists. You do to, if you think about it.

Tim, “an fl ligature makes sense in “flying” it looks somehow odd to me in “briefly” because the fl does not really “belong together”
You’re young, so I’ll not give up, but honestly I think that’s not real.

Cheers!

I see another issue specific

Tim Ahrens — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:13:53 -0800

I see another issue specific to German: We have lots of prefixes and compound nouns written in one word and you could argue that you should not use ligatures “across the border” of two parts of a word. In Fraktur this is even obligatory as far as I know.
Then, if you do not use ligatures in some cases an alternative, shorter f can be handy for combinations such as fl fi fb and so on. I personally would never include an fb or fk ligature in my fonts.
You could try something similar in English: whereas an fl ligature makes sense in “flying” it looks somehow odd to me in “briefly” because the fl does not really “belong together”. But you can certainly argue whether visual, linguistic or consistency matters are most important.

Where would you best go to

eriks — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:17:29 -0800

Where would you best go to see the a really well made German, ch, sch and ck & tz for German use?

I’ll have to dig up some old specimens. I’m flying back to Berlin (actually: in 90 minutes) and will have to look there.

You mean like

John Hudson — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:07:35 -0800

You mean like Cleartype?

Not what I had in mind: the exchangeables in ClearType involve different currencies. But if one is wondering how to handle fit without knowing whether subpixel positioning will be active in target environments, then all things, including contextual variants, should be on the table.

“In other words, are

dberlow — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 12:02:15 -0800

“In other words, are people deliberately setting out to make letter fit more challenging in order to collect stylistic dividends in other areas?”
You mean like Cleartype?

Cheers!

What kinds of context might

John Hudson — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:40:01 -0800

What kinds of context might cause you reduce the internal white space of a letter in a word?

Where a letter with a long left entry letter follows an r the serif is dropped. This does two things: it clears up the ugly collision of the serif with the top of the r and it also allows me to position the letters closer together, reducing the white space caused by the shape of the r.

A similar thing happens following the г (ghe) in the Cyrillic portion of the font.

The Greek implementation is different, because there are no serifs, but certain letters create lots of white space when adjacent to each other, e.g. the combination στ as in the word Χριστου. So I have variants with shorter horizontal bars that are used contextually.

I should mention again that I’m talking here about something that is intended as a display face, and it has design features that are more exaggerated than they would probably be in a text face, e.g. the serifs are longer.

But this leads me to wonder if perhaps you are asking your question backwards? Instead of asking if anyone is making fonts that use contextual alternates to improve letter fit, you could ask if anyone is deliberately breaking the canons of text face design, e.g. with regard to serif length, in the knowledge that such alternates can be used to adjust the resulting word shaping. In other words, are people deliberately setting out to make letter fit more challenging in order to collect stylistic dividends in other areas?

Absolutely. Great! This is

Eben Sorkin — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:36:07 -0800

Absolutely. Great! This is obviously addressed to Erik, but if others want to answer as well please do. Where would you best go to see the a really well made German, ch, sch and ck & tz for German use?

Erik, also thanks for letting me know about the email. I had worries my had been relegated to a spam folder somewhere. ;-) Thanks again for looking at it whenever you do. And thanks for looking for the Glasgow proposal!

or reduce the size of word-internal white spaces This sounds almost like a style selection but I understand you to mean that it is being done to create better word forms. What kinds of context might cause you reduce the internal white space of a letter in a word? I am imagining something unlikely such as an o that varies... but maybe that’s the wrong direction. Maybe it’s a CAP L in an all caps setting next to an N or M or something like that. In any event, if would expand on this line I would of course be most interested!

Eben: what was the reason

John Hudson — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:33:19 -0800

Eben: what was the reason for your project’s contextual variations?

There are several different classes of contextual variations in the new display face, but the ones that relate most directly to the topic of this thread either remove serifs selectively to avoid ugly combinations, or reduce the size of word-internal white spaces, or both. The design is based on an expansion stroke model, with some natural variation in the presence/absence of serifs anyway (the ascenders in the basic style do not have serifs, for example, following the French rondo model), so removing serifs and changing the way strokes start makes more sense than merely shortening the serifs.

Would a German local (locl)

eriks — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 10:33:01 -0800

Would a German local (locl) feature that made these relationships space in the manner you describe be a satisfactory solution?
Absolutely.

And I did get your mail, but it’ll have to wait until I’ve got all the business stuff out of the way.
I’ll try and find my original Glasgow proposal. It was only one page of analog sketches, that’s why I cannot find it easily.

David, You wrote To improve

Eben Sorkin — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:25:53 -0800

David, You wrote To improve ’reading’, maybe different, but it could be the same thing as you’re talking about. I am definitely interested in reducing reader fatigue with the improved fitting I think is possible. I also think that the greater variation will have a positive knock on effect as long as it is unobtrusive.

John H, what was the reason for your project’s contextual variations?

Erik, You said: I am very

Eben Sorkin — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:18:14 -0800

Erik,

You said: I am very fond of serifs on i and j, but they do make bad combinations with r, g and others with a protruding top right.
So it sounds like in this place at least you could be in favor of seeing contextual shapes become more common for text. I will be sure to provide an example of this combination in my talk then. Thanks!

You also said Or insert one or two different g’s in the gg combination
I agree in a big way. I think subtly different repeating characters is a great use of contextual scripting. Looking at ff combinations and then other letters I started to wonder if there was any point in considering other letters too. Then I started looking at scribal books from the 15th c. and found that I really liked what they were doing with doubled letters. Partly what happening of course is natural variation; but in the best examples I felt like they were in fact making a deliberately better word form with their variation. Most of the time I found that the 2nd letter is slightly more exuberant than the 1st.

In German, ch, sch and ck are pronounced as one sound, as ck is in English. The c always looks too far from the h or the s, and in metal we had ligatures for these (as for tz by the way), also a time-saving device. I cannot kern the c for these combinations, as they would look bad in all the other languages.
Would a German local (locl) feature that made these relationships space in the manner you describe be a satisfactory solution?

When we designed the typeface for Glasgow in 1999, I wanted to have different combinations – kind of ligatures – for the different ways certain diphtongs are pronounced in English.
This is the bit of your post that delayed my response. O wanted to try to get what you meant... I think I do now. Maybe. I suspect that for a native reader this sort of thing would be of limited use. But for a reader with english as a second or third language it might be quite useful. I base this assertion ( maybe foolishly) on not having seen what you have in mind. Do you have any images?

BTW - I sent you a email with some images of contextual r+a combinations a little while ago. Did you get it? Should I resend it?

...making text faces with

dberlow — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 07:07:03 -0800

...making text faces with contextual alternates to improve letter fit,
To improve ’reading’, maybe different, but it could be the same thing as you’re talking about.

You do not want to associate any layout that is necessary for normal display of a complex script language with a feature that can be turned off, [ i f ] turning off the feature would render the text unreadable.”
“if” not “because”? If it doesn’t render the text unreadable, then caltify it, being the implication.

Obviously not Eriks, but for reading people, this issue is much like kerning. The reading people are somewhat used to text type composed without, if they must read it...they read it. It’d be nicer if a few dozen kerning pairs were there, but, eh.

It’s when reliable kerning pairs & resolution are taken away from text... a fact borne out by the reading people’s preference for sans online, that gulfs have come to exist between print and online, serif and sans, and me and...others.

So, calt if you heart serifs online, pray for ’the next sdk’, and remember typography. :-)

Cheers!

Any text faces being designed now with contextual alternates to improve fit?

Eben Sorkin — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 20:21:18 -0800

I am working on a proposal for a talk and I wanted to get the up to the minute info - So, ( and assuming it doesn’t violate an NDA!)...

Are you, or do you know of anyone making text faces with contextual alternates to improve letter fit? This could be anything from ligatures beyond the call of Unicode, to Sliced off serifs, to even deeper changes in letterforms.

I know many people are and have made Display faces that do this - I am asking specifically about Text faces.

Thanks!