Would another method be superior?

I think the best way to do a revival is by eye, with a magnifying glass.
Whatever method of revival you choose, you are making an interpretation, by the mere act of choice. IMO, it is not "human" interpretation that is banalizing, but attempts to automate the process of interpretation.

By using any system of averaging, you are opting for a composite which is softened and blurred, which is counter to the visually arresting effect of a letterpress impression. A flat two-dimensional photo-reproduction can never convey the bite of letterpress into paper, so the digital revivalist has to find some way of compensating, of adding an ingredient. But averaging does the opposite. The end result looks crude and ugly, whereas Griffo's intent and sense of style is clearly apparent in most impressions -- the calligraphic ductus underlying the form -- which averaging obscures.

...even if an averaged character better represents Griffo’s expectation of how the letter would look.

It doesn't. Griffo was well aware that the individual impressions of a particular character would vary, and would have designed his glyphs accordingly, to account for that variation of the final image. Had he been assured of a uniform reproduction of letter shapes, he would have designed them differently. More like Bodoni.

The variety of serif treatment in Incunabula type accomodates the fact that had they been made the same, they would have ended up different, due to the vagaries of the printing process. So the reader's attention would have been drawn to this deviation from the ideal. However, to make them varied to begin with is logical, it disguises the depradations of the printing process.

There is something disconcerting about a page of Poliphilus, especially when it is digitally set. Perhaps not if one only reads it once. But if one is to savor the text by rereading, and if one is reading the typography as well as the content, it palls. Hence Monotype Bembo, the antithesis of banality.

So if you want to use digital technology to reinterpret old letterpress printing, I think you would be better off exploring the possibility of contextual alternates in an OpenType font, to capture the variety of impression, which is an integral part of the original design. I suspect that Incunabula printers used textual context to inform their selection of a particular sort of a letter, and may even have physically "fine tuned" some of them, especially the lower case "r".

The long left side of the main stroke has acquired a texture (of paper?) in the original, but in both the derived versions shown it is straight. This texture is part of the design, like the resonance of the room in which a piece of music is performed. You cannot produce a "faithful" copy without finding some way of paraphrasing this quality of the printing.

Perhaps you could start with an idealized glyph -- clean, sharp and simple outline -- then apply a "letterpress" filter to it, similar to the way that the texture brushes in Illustrator can be applied to a glyph outline. This, and my comment about contextual alternates, is along the lines of your thought "to model in software the Aldine printing process from punch to paper".

Thanks Nick, all very interesting.

A flat two-dimensional photo-reproduction can never convey the bite of letterpress into paper, so the digital revivalist has to find some way of compensating

I think this is true: averaged forms should be toughened up by removing the glutinous deposite from inside the crannies and hardening up angles.

Griffo’s intent and sense of style is clearly apparent in most impressions — the calligraphic ductus underlying the form — which averaging obscures.

I think this begs the question rather. The calligraphic ductus is partly your imposition on the actual form, though it's probably the interpretation Griffo wanted his readers to impose: in 1500 departure from calligraphic ductus was thought of as simply erroneous. But Griffo was clever, and made small (in this p's case not so small) deviations from calligraphic ductus, presumably in order to better unite the word-image. My averaging makes this this very clear - perhaps too clear, because the illusion of calligraphy necessary to the total effect is weakened.

Must sleep now, more later.

Very interesting. I think I've written approximately the same program. I've wondered what would happen when applied to very old samples - I know I've been pleased with the results I've gotten from originals in the 100-year old range.

My own approach is simply not to threshold. In my curve editor, I use the grayscale averaged image to trace from. In my opinion, there is valuable information present in the grayscale which is lost in thresholding.

Look closely at two places you have grayness - the top join of the bowl of the 'p' to the vertical stem, and the spur that protrudes to the left. In the first case, it's reasonable to conclude that the grayness is caused by varying amounts of "glutinous deposit". Arguably, the truer shape of the metal can be recovered by tracing towards the light side.

On the spur, the grayness represents the probability of damage to the metal type - much, much higher for delicate projections such as this spur than, say, along the edge of a stem. With this interpretation, it should be clear that the truer shape of the metal is recovered from a trace of the dark side.

So when I'm tracing, I leave the image in grayscale, and make these judgements by eye.

A couple of other notes about my "recipe".

1. Start with a really high resolution scan. I almost invariably use 2400 dpi.

1a. Use as many impressions as humanly possible. I'm astonished by the difference in clarity between a handful and dozens, and again in the jump to hundreds.

2. I do my contrast adjustment after the averaging. There's no need to get the paper white pre-averaging, because the contrast of the paper texture will be dramatically reduced. In my opinion, this increases the chance of being able to see subtle gray variations.

3. After averaging, I sharpen the image pretty significantly. I believe this compensates for the blurring caused by the (inevitable) errors in aligning the individual impressions to the master template.

4. After sharpening, I tend to lighten the image so I can see the subtleties in the darker gray shadings more accurately.

Nick has a point about variation - you're likely to get results similar to what printers would have produced had they combined Griffo's punches with the type founding, paper, and printing technologies of, say, the 1912 ATF specimen book. If Griffo lived 400 years later, he may well have designed his letters differently to suit, but then again, perhaps not.

I disagree that averaging obscures the calligraphic ductus of the original letters. I think it lets you visualize an image much closer to the actual shape of the metal than can be seen in any of the individual impressions. In some ways, I think it's even better to work from the averaged image than if you knew the shape of the metal, because the latter was probably overthinned to compensate for the ink gain on the press.

Note, though, that in saying this I'm assuming that there was one punch, so each individual letter is a fair copy of the same original shape. Averaging together impressions from different punches would, I agree, be a travesty. If I recall Sergei Egorov's research correctly, part of what he found is that, for many letters, there may have been two or three similar, but subtly different, punches. If you carefully classify the impressions so that the vast majority come from the same punch, that should take care of that issue.

A "letterpress filter" for type is a very, very interesting idea. I've been toying with the idea of building such a thing, but the research, both into characterizing the letterpress process, and into getting usable digital outlines of the results, is nontrivial. How strong would be the demand for such a thing?

Anyway, George, very best of luck with your project. It sounds very much worth doing.

If your aim is to capture something of he 'mess of an Aldine page', then I think Nick's suggestion of making multiple versions of each letter and using contextual substitution to vary their use makes a lot of sense. I think the peculiar sensation that I sometimes get when looking at a page of Aldine italic type comes from the tension of variation constrained by the typographic identity of each sort. The italic text seems to hover somewhere between the chirographic and the typographic, in way that the roman doesn't and which later improvements in printing technology gradually diminished and erased.

Further replies to Nick:
To make [glyphs] varied to begin with is logical, it disguises the depradations of the printing process.

Even the dullest reader could hardly have been fooled. I doubt that this was the primary motivation, when variety of seriffing has so many other virtues. I think the 1499 caps are the best proof of this: the serifs are designed to scoop white into a convincing counter (L) or eject it (C), thus making perceived counter-size sufficiently similar for the caps to make a readable text face - something not repeated by Garamond and the later tradition, and certainly not by Bodoni!

Texture is part of the design, like the resonance of the room in which a piece of music is performed. You cannot produce a “faithful” copy without finding some way of paraphrasing this quality of the printing.

I could take the averaged letterform, toughen it, and then consistently waver the outline, paraphrasing the texture without simulating the actual and extreme variations of the printed letters.

As for Poliphilus, in 13+ point letterpress on suitable paper the only problems I see are in the consistently inconsistent weights of, for instance, h compared to m, resulting from Monotype's own attempts to paraphrase this texture. In fact I think letterpress Poliphilus is nearly one of the very finest typefaces - letterpress Bembo is the finest of all, but some of its letters are too wide and so too white (above all y) and its caps are a little too Garamondian.

Hello Raph,
Thanks for your help, and there goes my patent. Tracing from a sharpened version of the blended master sounds like a good idea. To clarify what you say about tracing the light side and dark side, presumably you're urging that I trace hard against the black at the top join of bowl and stem, but trace around the paler grey of the spur, on the understanding that it has been often blunted by damage. That would make sense - though it would be nice to investigate just how this damage characteristically operated, because I want to avoid unfounded interpretation. And Aldine type-metal was unusually good for the time, though the press-work was of course generally far below the level of a Ratdolt performance.

Failing to normalise the colour in advance means each letter contributing very different amounts to the blend, and also increases errors in superposition. It's a compromise: with these scans I think careful normalising is a good thing. I've tried without, incidentally. I'm careful not to mix punches - and that's something software is very good for. Sergei's conclusion was that mixing of punches was not done in a form consistent enough to be aesthetically motivated - more likely an all hands on deck response to a big job, or large number of concurrent jobs. And the compositors were, according to Aldus himself, a pack of dunces, while nothing but good came from the 'daedaleis Francisci manibus Bononiensis'.

Finally, is there a way to automate the selection from scans of all the letters from each punch? Cutting them out one by one is a bore.

As you say, John, the degree of mess varies: in the 1499 Scriptores Astronomici Veteres, which I expect will be my roman source, inkpress is less noisy than in most pages from a Hypnerotomachia, and much less noisy, simply because of font size, than in a page of Aldine italic. Meanwhile the Soncino italic, though approximately the same size as its predecessor, received better treatment than the Aldine: UPenn page. So in neither of my sources will there be the sheer randomness of the Aldine italic, such that using alternative glyphs to represent the same punch might look like affectation, if only because of the obvious artificiality of the simulation. On the other hand some Beowulf-style postscript coding to provide a letterpress filter would be valuable - as it would be, in carefully regulated doses, for almost any text face. Minute variation is good for orientation on a page, and the sense that the reader is making progress through the word-stream.

there goes my patent

Ah well, and the untold fame and fortune that goes along with.

I finally remembered the thread in which I first posted real results from this method: Christian Gothic. In that thread, you'll find a bunch of sample images, a heated discussion about the merits of the averaging technique and the process of designing revivals, and of course the inevitable flamewar in which Hrant labels others as "fascist-apologist".

Finally, is there a way to automate the selection from scans of all the letters from each punch? Cutting them out one by one is a bore.

Yes, I wrote some code to segment the image by bounding boxes, then to do a pairwise correlation between all samples of approximately matching size. I can post my code if you're interested, but it's quite unpolished and often requires manual touch-up of the results.

That Soncino sample is indeed gorgeous. Any way to acquire a higher resolution scan?

...attempts to paraphrase this texture
...faithful revival

George, I'm not critical of your project per se (technique), only of your mission statement, and the word "faithful" in particular (philosophy).

Those who keep the faith are still printing letterpress -- fundamentalists. What you are planning is a convincing deception. Nothing wrong with that, as it one of the destinies of new technology to perpetuate the virtues of the old, and mimicry is the sincerest form of respect. But the idea that new tools remove the element of interpretation is mistaken.

...it can’t really mean the copying of selected printed letter-forms.

It's a pity Justin Howes isn't around to explain his method. Copying in this instance is not like duplicating a digital file. He was digitizing an analogue 3D image, for offset reproduction, which requires not just selection, but interpretation. For instance, every digitiser has to decide "how long to make the coastline of Britain" -- and you too are doing that by picking a certain number of specimens to average. The more you choose, the shorter the coastline.

I just had a look at "The Well Made Book", Updike essays, published by Mark Batty, which is set in Founder's Caslon. Read for content, nice. Looked at for typography, one thing that stikes me is the bounce, i.e. the deviation from baseline. Howes has incorporated this quality --- I first noticed that the "o" rides high. That's not mere copying, it's a design specification. En masse, it adds to the personality of the page, but damn my typographic reading, (which must come into play when passages are re-read, certainly in a book for typophiles!), I'm thinking, "why is the 'o' always up? -- contextual alternates could fix that".

It's all about the mise-en-page.

There are two approaches to "redoing Griffo's last roman", engineering or design. The engineer would perhaps provide a tool that gives the font-user sliders to control simulations of:
- alternate character shape (corresponding to variable wear and sorts from different punches)
- paper texture
- ink spread
- bounce

The designer would work from an exemplary specimen (or edit several), choosing specifics for the above variables.

OK Nick: the mission statement is essentially an expression of piety. I am not as wholly naive about revival as I may, for brevity's sake, have given you to understand; and I know the complexity of Justin Howes' superb work, about which I recently spoke with a mutual friend.

To be more explicit, and perhaps more honest: I want to produce a set of letters as close as possible to the printed images Griffo while working can most reasonably be conjectured to have predicted, from type freshly cast from the first matrices struck from his new punches, evenly inked, and pressed into paper consistent in texture and thickness with zero bounce (not the same thing as a consistent apparent baseline/x-height - indeed I think Griffo, perhaps following his experience of making Greek type, cut variety in vertical alignment into his latin punches). What I am not trying to do is simulate Aldus' or Soncino's page, which I agree is not remotely possible without (as would be very pleasant) making a separate version for matrix engraving (and even then...). So: I've got to interpret, but I want to avoid selecting specimen letters. Now perhaps Griffo's expectations for his letters were so irreducably plural that modelling them in their most characteristic forms (ie averaged, then drawn rather than traced to take into account damage, clean out inkpress, and harden angles) would be pointless. But would he really, with his graver, have excitedly anticipated all the splodges and blurs given his work by second rate press-work? If so, I will misinterpret him fatally, but I would still like to see what comes out of the other end of this project.

Hi Raph, I've just read the thread containing your prior art, and both your method for automating glyph selection and this 'deconvolution' stuff sound interesting; I'm not much of a programmer, so pseudo-code in words of one syllable or Python would be nice, unless you have a windows or linux binary you'd be prepared to share.

I may find my vocation in this forum as a lightning conductor for political attacks - I'm a genuine Scrutonian conservative, something pretty rare in these circles, and for want of which all sorts of mild liberals have had to dress up as fascist apologists.

As for high-res Soncino: if only I had some myself! I might need to take a trip to Pennsylvania: can't find anything in the Bodleian, though All Souls has a Soncino omnilingual thing which might have some italic. (If I'd known sooner, I wouldn't have walked out of the Fellowship exams there in September: they maul with tigers any strangers who get too near their books). One thing I do have is a scan of the not-very-good repro in Mardersteig's Griffo book, provided along with many other goodies by the kindly Sergei, which I'll gladly email you if you'd like.

Although human interpretation is indeed unavoidable, wanting to tame it is a great and often useful act of humility - very Craft, as opposed to Art. As a result, even though you never -or at least very rarely- want to slavishly trace, good Method (like your technique, and Raph's) is central. Anybody who tells you otherwise simply wants to feel more... relevant than one could ever really be.

> A flat two-dimensional photo-reproduction can
> never convey the bite of letterpress into paper

The two are unrelated. This fact hits home especially when you consider
that digital fonts can be printed lettepress too! In the end, averaging is
not necessarily soft.

> he would have designed them differently. More like Bodoni.

I personally can't see Aldus/Griffo going for that junk at all.
And it's quite untenable to claim to read another designer's
mind, especially when he's so dead.

> contextual alternates in an OpenType font

That cannot substitute for true irregularity, it can only be a caricature of it.
Remember again the words of Von Neumann. The only way to really emulate
the original is through letterpress (although not necessarily metal type).

> Those who keep the faith are still printing letterpress — fundamentalists.

This is untrue. I print letterpress (again, not
necessarily from metal) because there's really
something there to revive. Although I don't
know exactly what it is yet.

> What you are planning is a convincing deception.

Like using OpenType to mimic true variance...

> There are two approaches to “redoing Griffo’s last roman”

1) There are always more ways.
2) Everything exists not in any pure state, but within extremes.

--

George, I'm certainly not a fan of revivals, especially not literal ones. But when I see somebody applying good craft -as opposed to merely his emotions coupled to a loupe*- to an effort, I dearly want to buttress that against discouragement.

* And why the loupe, really? :-/

hhp

Oh, and Raph, yet again: "fascism-apologist".
Huge difference. But it's OK, I won't ask for
an apology.

hhp

I dearly want to buttress that against discouragement. :-/

I wasn't critical of the project, only that expression of piety which was the mission statement.

And why the loupe...?

(A magnifying glass actually, which may be used with two eyes)

For the same reason one would draw from life, rather than a photograph.
It was in answer to the question "would another method be superior?"
The context was about being faithful.
If one is attempting to make a two dimensional version of a three dimensional artefact, why not work directly from the three-dimensional impression?
It seems to me that the more intermediate elements that are removed, the more opportunity for the process to be faithful to the intentions of the original type designer.

...as opposed to merely his emotions coupled to a loupe*

Why do you consider the more direct approach, without tracing over a simulacrum, more emotional?
I would say the opposite is true. The conscious effort required to work from life is more difficult than working from a tracing; one becomes immediately aware of how incorrect one's initial, spontaneous drawing is, and works to modify that, in order to get one's glyphs to look right. So the repetititve process of drawing, comparing, and redrawing is one of suppressing emotion. It gives a better understanding of the original, of why the forms were made the way they were, and of one's preconceptions. This enables one to better address the grey areas that are open to interpretation (caused by loss of resolution between metal and impression, and variablitity of impression). It's here that interpretation is unavoidable, and the draughtsman's personality may be expressed decisively, because he has acquired a knowledge of the original designer's intentions by going through a similar working process of trying to get all the design elements to come together as a balanced whole.

> I wasn’t critical of the project, only that
> expression of piety which was the mission statement.

It seems to me -through both this thread and Raph's- that you're critical of the method - in fact I think Method in general. And this project being centered on Method, I think you're critical of a lot more than a supposedly tangential "expression". I don't want you to hold back the criticality - that would be unnatural; but I in turn need to counter it when it shows up.

> For the same reason one would draw from life, rather than a photograph.

But I'm saying why bother with magnification.
Scale affects the essence of something, and it
seems to me that shunning George's (and Raph's)
methods requires shunning the magnifier as well.

> the more intermediate elements that are removed, the
> more opportunity for the process to be faithful to
> the intentions of the original type designer.

If that's true, then the magnifier's gotta go.

> Why do you consider the more direct approach,
> without tracing over a simulacrum, more emotional?

Because it assumes the reviver is infinitely gifted.

I would say that shunning Method is emotional. Don't get me wrong, I think emotion is indispensable in anything a human does, but wallowing in it, for example to the point of shunning Method, is anti-Craft.

> It gives a better understanding of the original

I don't think so. I think mostly it causes the reviver to express himself more, to tap what's in him more than the source; this confuses the -intended- results. Unless one's intent isn't to do a literal revival - which is great by me, but not the same thing, and not what George wants. I find that the best crits are the ones that take into account the creator's highly personal desires - not those of the person giving the crit. For example, I don't have to like humanist sans fonts to be able to make Ricardo feel like I helped him improve Lisboa. In giving a crit, I have to separate emotion and method, and focus on the latter. Trying to get people to make fonts I would make just makes everybody miserable. Like when I once showed a "progressive" design to a Famous Designer, and I told him the intent is such-and-such, and he come (sic) back to me with a ton of details of how to make it all homogenous like him (sic) own fonts, that's just a waste of everybody's time (not to mention arrogant).

Basically I guess I don't think anybody (short of a medium :-) is capable of subverting his own preconceptions to allow what was in the mind of another person to surface - especially not centuries apart.

hhp

What can [re]surface though is the outward forms.
Which is exactly where Method helps.

hhp

It seems to me -through both this thread and Raph’s- that you’re critical of the method - in fact I think Method in general.

George wondered if there was a better way to be faithful to Griffo's last roman than averaging. I suggested a magnifying glass, and contextual alternates, which to me are better methods than averaging. But as it transpired, I was thinking more of the effect of the Aldine page, and he of the type. He clarified his position as an interpreter, rather than a simulator, which is fine by me. End of that part of the thread.

But I’m saying why bother with magnification.

My eyes need a little help.
The magnifying glass is far less of a mediation than a scan.

Because it assumes the reviver is infinitely gifted.

Not at all. The reviver can never be photo-exact, but that's not the point, as such exactitude can't cross the barrier between the imperfect, varying impression, and the ideal piece of type. The reviver can only be relatively gifted, compared to the designer.

I think emotion is indispensable in anything a human does, but wallowing in it, for example to the point of shunning method, is anti-Craft.

I don't think you got my point about drawing from life being a process of un-learning emotion. The "magnifying glass" method is this: Look at the original specimen(s) through the lens, draw part of the glyph (with beziers), look at the original again and refine the glyph, as many times as necessary. Then do a print-out of the same text as the specimen at the same size, and compare them. Then go back to the glass and the beziers. And so on.

Trying to get people to make fonts I would make just makes everybody miserable.

I would hope that by answering my criticisms, George could be a little clearer in his own mind of what he's doing and why. Especially as this is an MA project, and he can expect some harsh crits there. I also made a number of what I consider to be constructive contributions, rather than criticisms, such as the contextual alternates for varying wobble thing, and the outline texture filter idea. I've used the outline-filter technique, but not the contextual.

Basically I guess I don’t think anybody (short of a medium :-) is capable of subverting his own preconceptions to allow what was in the mind of another person to surface - especially not centuries apart.

But don't you feel that you have a different understanding and greater insight into why Baskerville's type is the way it is, now that you have been working on a revival? And why wouldn't such an understanding correspond to what JB had in mind?

Arggh. I wrote a detailed response, but the flaky internet in the United lounge ate it. In brief:

Hrant: sorry for the innaccurate characterization.

George: I'll be happy to send you the code. I'm on the road at the moment, and would like to package it up with instructions and so on as soon as I get home. Bug me if I let it slip my mind.

Thread: the averaging technique is a tool. Having more and better tools avaiable is a Good Thing. Whether typographers prefer reproductions faithful in detail or modern interpretations inspired by historical models is up to them. In either case, the averaging technique can be very useful for visualizing much more clearly what the original type designers did.

> My eyes need a little help.

And those of Griffo's readers didn't?

Nick, you claim your methods allow you to get inside Griffo's head.
I guess I can't believe you.

> ... why wouldn’t such an understanding correspond to what JB had in mind?

It might. But the chances are slim enough that my own ideas are sure to overpower what I think JB might have been thinking if I look too far beyond the forms themselves. Thought patterns are not some mathematically pure, eternal things; they're entirely individual, highly dynamic and contextual to boot; there's no way a 21st century Armo is going to get inside an 18th century Brit's head (at least not enough to make type like him).

I think that in a revival it's important to distill the essence of a design, which comes from the forms, not what happened to be in the original designer's head. For one thing, stuff in people's heads changes. Should I revive the JB on the morning he decided to get into typography? Or the JB the night he finished printing his Virgil? Or maybe the JB on the verge of giving up on typography in disgust? It's hopeless to approach it that way. So for example when I'm making the British Pound character, I can look at what JB made and say "that was wrong", and make one that fits the design, as opposed to JB's perceived mindframe, better. Also, a key difference here is that my revival is not literal.

Raph, I know how it feels to lose a long post - sorry to hear it. More than the lost content I think it's the combination of improvidence (for not copy-pasting it periodically) and guilt (for rambling on so much in the first place) that makes it so frustrating, and the ensuing decision of how far to take the replacement post so unnerving.

> the averaging technique is a tool.

One problem is that powerful tools can be overly challenging, even scary.
Like how I'm much less inclined to learn now software these days.

hhp

I'm sort of with Nick on this one, at least insofar as I consider the human eye and brain to be a powerful analytical tool. I find it bizarre that 'emotional' and 'expressive' are instantly assumed to be the predominant characteristics of human interpretation, as if we are somehow unable to actually see what we see and perform a rational analysis, but must rely on machines to get past our overriding emotional and expressive faculties. This is bollocks. I also think Hrant is wrong to attempt to try to frame this in terms of his favourite 'art vs craft' dichotomy, as if craft cannot come from the eye and hand: where else has it come from for the millennia of human making? We have an analytical faculty and the ability to make rational judgements regarding what we observe. Among other things, we have an obligation to employ this faculty critically in considering the value of methods and tools. Looking at the images in the first post of this thread, the first thing I immediately see is that all of the derived forms based on averaging have a large black bump in the lower left, while the one photographic image shows something quite different; this seems to me to be a problem of method, because the averaging does not take into account relative lightness and darkness of the type image. Similarly, in the photographic image, there is a clear but very faint indication of the full extent of the terminal of the upper bowl where it crosses the stem, and this is completely lost in the derived shapes, presumably because it was too faint to be preserved in the threshold conversion. So these are just two places in a single letter where the human eye tells us more than the proposed methodology and tools. This is not to say that the methodology and tools are without merit or promise but, ironically, that they must be subject to the same critical and interpretative analysis that we can also apply to the subject.

> as if craft cannot come from the eye and hand

It's certainly not that it can't come from there, it's that it can come
from elsewhere as well; shunning other sources is what's anti-Craft.

> Looking at the images in the first post of this thread ...

Looking at them with magnification.
With a method not unlike George and Raph's averaging.

> they must be subject to the same critical and interpretative
> analysis that we can also apply to the subject.

Totally. And maybe it's this extra burden of thought that
causes some people to avoid new/elaborate methods outright.

hhp

Right on, John. And good eye!

George, I seem to recall that in the original Raph thread, I suggested that a good (and scientific) way to test the veracity of the averaging technique would be to recreate it now. ie take a typeface where you actually have a clean master, then produce a letterpress page, average the impressions, and see what divergence there is between the result and the original. Are you up for it?

The problem of course is that evaluating the veracity of something requires much objectivity and humility. People will see what they want. Some people more than others. Ergo: it's not a test that can really work (at least not in this case).

hhp

Hrant, you seem to have seen what you want to see even before you have seen anything :)

I think Nick's proposed test has a lot of value, even though I consider 'veracity' in this context to be a value judgement rather than an objective proof. But that's okay because I'm not expecting a proof result. Nick's test would provide insight into what the averaging methodology produces relative to a known form. This is valuable information, regardless of the conclusion that one draws from it or the relevance it might have to a particular goal. Obviously if your interest is in reproducing the letterpress printed appearance of a typeface, rather than the forms of the type itself, then what Nick's test would show is not directly relevant. On the other hand, if that is your goal, perhaps you should be making a full colour, high res Photofont, which would capture the paler artifacts of the letterforms in the printing.

> I’m not expecting a proof result.

Except of course when the person making a claim is me.

(More on this soon.)

hhp

No, Hrant, I have not asked for a proof result from you, I've asked for some kind of result, some kind of evidence, some quantifiable indicator, and only when you have made specific claims about reading performance improvements based on your theories. If I have ever used the word 'proof' in that context, I apologise, because I've spent enough time around philosophers to know better. What I'm interested in is evidence to support ideas, results that indicate whether a theory or a practice does what is claimed for it. I'm interested in information that extends our knowledge. And yes, in the absence of such information, I may favour my own prejudices, ideas or theories against your prejudices, ideas or theories. The expression of the latter has not convinced me, so I'm left wanting evidence. Sorry.

John, I would get into a detailed rebuttal of what you wrote,
but I think the problem is bigger than you, so doing so would
simply distract from real, broad improvement.

--

There's entirely too much personality-conflict-determined discourse on
Typophile (and, to be fair, most elsewhere). This drains much useful
energy from high-quality typographic discussion. For example, why do
I have to be the only person to counter Nick when he makes a claim
about the spacing of italics that's false in so many ways? Guys, if you
want me to lay off Nick (although, like I've said, it's not him, it's his
ideas), or whoever, a great way is to get off your finials and do some
of the countering instead. I think in the past (and on other lists) we've
had a lot more ego-sidelining passion for objective exploration of type.
Isn't it a beautiful thing, to strongly counter something you know is
wrong no matter who happens to have said it? Well, I think it is.

You're being civil? Civility is one thing, but too many of you guys seem
to be taking the "if you don't have anything nice to say then don't say
anything at all" proverb to a whole new level. Except of course when it
comes to Hrant, but that's OK because he can handle it, because "what
goes around comes around" or whatnot. Well, the result is just a bunch
of people yammering away, droning on about what they happen to believe,
throwing their weight around in an insular sandbox, not really interested
in changing (neither themselves nor others). This kills theoretical progress,
cripples cultural relevance, and really does start turning Typophile into
a cocktail party. Largely useless; and boring as hell.

People, come on - if you love type, fight for it a bit!

hhp

George, I think there is real value in mechanizing back-propogation from letterpress impressions. And even in deciding on the best method of back-propogation Nick's iterative process of adjusting the thresholding (or whatever) protocol in dialogue with interpretive inspection is not only indispensible, it is intrinsic. But considering ductus and writing-book precedants must have been at least a point of reference for Griffo, wouldn't it also make sense to approach things from the other side (ductus) and see where the two meet.

Approaching it from the other side would be "calculating systematic norm-violation" to swept-object routines.

Finding where mechanized back-propogation and swept-object norm-violation meet might tell us something of what Griffo intended.

It's one thing to evaluate a method in order to improve it, it's quite another to suggest evaluation with the intent of eventually rejecting the method outright. The decisions have already been made - and that's part of the problem I mention above.

hhp

There’s entirely too much personality-conflict-determined discourse on
Typophile

Thank-you for toning things down recently.

For example, why do I have to be the only person to counter Nick when he makes a claim about the spacing of italics that’s false in so many ways?

They probably agree with my observation. Karsten said "Yes!" to it.

> Thank-you for toning things down recently.

I can't know if you actually mean that.
Not that it matters much if I know I guess.

> They probably agree with my observation.

Some of them I'm sure do. But the problem is that I've been paying attention; and I know that some other people don't. If you can figure out the intentions of a 300-year-dead guy by looking at some of his glyphs, then I can certainly do the same with people who have explicitly expressed their ideas in writing in front of me for years.

The human complaint/praise parameters are strange: when it comes to people they don't know, people only write to complain; but when it comes to people they feel even a slight friendship with, they can only get themselves to be nice. To me, that's not real friendship.

hhp

I can’t know if you actually mean that.

I think so. At least, my nipples were erect when I typed it.

If you can figure out the intentions of a 300-year-dead guy by looking at some of his glyphs,

Not by looking, but by going through a similar design process to what he did.
That would be making the glyph shapes from scratch, rather than tracing.
Pre-photography and pantographic punch-cutter, those guys didn't trace over scans.
Was that Morris' epiphany, on seeing Walker's slide-show of Jenson type?
Was Morris the first to use the "tracing over photo" technique? -- One would think so, given the crude nature of the result, and in fact many of the faces of the years immediately after LB Benton's punchcutter were a bit clumsy, as would be expected of a new technology.

***

Also, perhaps people are reluctant to disagree with me because of my scary avatar.

> Not by looking, but by going through a similar design process to what he did.

Well, this is all tangential to my real point above, but:

> making the glyph shapes from scratch, rather than tracing.

The mistake you're making is that averaging necessarily leads
to tracing. I never trace - not even my own drawings [slavishly].

> those guys didn’t trace over scans.

Simply because they didn't have the technology!

Hmmm, what do you think of Bruce Rogers and Centaur?
Rogers doesn't have a scary avatar so feel free to be straight.

hhp

Hrant, what I understood Nick to be saying over in the italic thread was simply that italics can be better fitted in that they may require far fewer kerning pairs than romans. This seems to be to be self-fulfilling: if an italic has fewer kerning pairs than the associated roman, it meets the criteria for 'better fitted' that Nick is using. So what is to counter? He didn't say that this was good for readability, in fact he explicitly stated that it might not be a benefit. It is simply an observation about the way italic letters fit together as compared to the way roman letters fit together. If you consider even one factor affecting the fitting of italics vs romans, that the typical italic a is a cognate form with d and q, then you have identified a significant reason for the need for fewer kerning pairs. If you consider also that italic v and w and sometimes y often have convex sides, you have another why fewer kerning pairs would be needed. So I really don't see anything to counter in Nick's observation.

If you want an example of me spending a long time trying to change Nick's mind about something, go read the threads related to Greek casing and tonos angle.

If I've seemed to spend more time hammering at you over the years, it is because I've had so little success getting you to change your mind even about obvious things like the distinction between visual rhythm and temporal rhythem, even when I provide detailed illustrations and demonstrations. It has nothing to do with your being 'able to handle it' -- there are stronger souls than both of us in this forum --, but everything to do with your being stubborn in your mistakes. With most people, if I criticise or point out flaws in their reasoning, they respond directly to the points I raise and the conversation progresses, whether they accept my criticisms or disagree with them. You tend to just keep repeating the original statement or claim, and ignore the points that have been raised against it. So you come in for more and repeated persuasion, while conversations with other people proceed with more fluidity and less repetition.

John, I wasn't necessarily talking [just] about you.
Although I certainly do think you go out of your way
to counter me more than most/most. It all started in
Boston in '99, when I pointed out that a certain nose
is too big...

And I think you're not getting my point about italics.
Please check the other thread for an elaboration.

> it is because I’ve had so little success getting you to change your mind

On the contrary.
Which of course doesn't mean you should expect me to change my mind about everything you say; like the rhythm business is just hopeless - no matter how many illustrations or whatnot you provide (although it's flattering that you put in the effort - thank you for that). And I'm not the only person who thinks it's contrived. I guess it's just hard to give up a term so dearly used for so long - and you are fond of terminology [for its own sake] aren't you?

And John, what have I ever convinced you of?
I do manage to convince all kinds of other people about
various things, so I have to think the problem isn't me.

Also, I think you're mistaking civility in discourse with discoursive progress, and giving yourself too much credit for changing minds [other than mine]. You know when I know for sure that I've changed a person's mind? When they tell me I did. Like when Colin Banks did so in Leipzig, about blackletter. But don't try that with those who think they've arrived (especially when they don't admit that [as a] limitation) because all you'll get is deflections embalmed in tact.

hhp

If you want an example of me spending a long time trying to change Nick’s mind about something, go read the threads related to Greek casing and tonos angle.

And thanks for that. I thought those threads had massive "discoursive progress", otherwise I don't think you would have been able to convince me to have a tonos angle system different than Adobe.

Ripples on the surface.

hhp

Ripples on the surface.

To me, the accents in traditional Greek seem more like a flock of birds in a forest.

But I wasn't just talking about changing minds, I was talking about progressive discourse through direct engagement with criticism. So even if someone disagrees with my criticisms, he or she can further the conversation by responding to them directly. But you tend just to repeat your original assertion. You have not once even tried to explain why what everyone else calls rhythm is not rhythm, and your rejection of that term is based in the very mistake of associating it with flow, so the rejection is begging the question. You keep saying that rhythm implies flow and therefore there is no rhythm. But I've been demonstrating precisely that rhythm does not imply flow -- indeed, flow implies lack of rhythm --, but refers to the spacial relationship of letters within words. I come back to this again and again because I think your rejection of the term is unfortunate, because this spacial relationship is crucial to bouma construction and good notan. At its simplest level, the distinction between the rhythm of letters within words and the rhythm of word spacing (which you have elsewhere insisted should be even, i.e. rhythmic) is key to identifying what constitutes a word. But if word recognition does indeed involve bouma recognition, then regular, i.e. rhythmic, spacial relationships are also important at the sub-word level because it is only in these relationships that role architecture can define recognisable shapes larger than a single letter.

It seems to me, as I write this, that we have spent a long time talking at cross purposes, because you've jumped on the word rhythm with the statement that 'There is no rhythm in reading because there is no flow'. We don't disagree about their being no flow (although, discounting regressions, saccades have an average length, and when they skip words they do so in a predictable fashion, and periodic pulse is the very stuff of rhythm; in fact, if there were smooth flow then that would really be a lack of rhythm). But has anyone actually been talking about rhythm in terms of reading physiology? No, we've been talking about rhythm in terms of spacial relationships of letters in word formation. And my 'contrived' illustrations, have shown how word formation falls apart if you mess with the rhythm of the letter relationships. I've never understood why you have taken so strongly against this commonly understandable and accurate terminology. As soon as you recognise that there needs to be a relationship between the white space inside a letter and the white space between the letters, you are moving in the area of rhythm. This is what rhythm is: a proportional relationship. If you are not going to call that rhythm, then you'll have to come up with another term, because the phenomenon is real, demonstrable, and important to the matters that concern us both.

Give some serious thought to the nature of proportional spacial relationships in the way letters form words, and tell me why it doesn't make sense to talk about rhythm in letter spacing. I've adopted 'notan' and even 'bouma', and I think you should reconsider a term that accurately describes a phenomenon that we need to be able to talk about. And that's not terminology for its own sake.

> I’ve been demonstrating precisely that rhythm does not imply flow

Why is it so hard to accept that I think you haven't?

I've said this before: to me we're talking about Pattern, and
there's no reason to encumber our terminology, especially not
with such a misleadingly overloaded term. Just because I repeat
that every time doesn't make it false.

hhp

Why is it so hard to accept that I think you haven’t?

Because you have never once addressed the specific points of the argument. This is what I'm saying: you don't engage with the criticism, you don't make counter demonstrations, you just keep repeating your original assertion.

We agree on pattern, and I have explained why 'rhythmic' is an accurate description of the kind of pattern. It isn't an 'overloaded term', it is just a common and accurate term. By itself, the word pattern, doesn't tell us what we need to know, since patterns can take many different forms, requiring only repetition to qualify as patterns. What matters is the spacial relationship within the pattern, which we have a need to describe.

Just because I repeat that every time doesn’t make it false.

The repetition doesn't make it false, but it does nothing to demonstrate why it might be true. You just don't make any counter demonstration at all.

One could also argue that 'pattern' is a misleadingly overloaded term. When I talk of 'a pattern of salient whites' in a bounded map, I don't mean pattern in the sense that a tartan has or is a pattern. If I did, you would have to say an orthographically meaningful cluster of letters doesn't have a pattern.

A literal notion of flow is not intrinsic to the uses of the term 'rhythm' that we invoke when applying it in the context of descriptions of visual material. In it's deployment of salient whites and vertical blacks a normatively spaced cluster of letters has a phasal structure of discrete pulses (like the discrete pulses of consonantal sound in speach) that hovers around a phasal mean. When we talk of rhythmn in optical-grammatical contexts, it is conventionally that characteristic, or something like it, we wish to evoke. When I hear talk of rhythmn in optical-grammatical contexts, it is typically that characteristic, or something like it, that comes to mind.

It seems to me that Hrant's misgivings about rhythm have to do with the fact that in visual wordform resolution role-architectural subcomponents of a bounded map are not processed sequentially but parallelistically, and sequential processing associations are hard to supress, because of how we learn about rhythm.

Please pardon the intrusion of my lingo in this thread, but what I'm trying to convey with it seems to need to be gotten out of the way or cleared up.

Hi Nick,
Thanks again. Looking with a magnifying glass would allow access, as you imply, to information that scans cannot provide - the shape of the metal's indentation into paper, as opposed to ink absorption. Unfortunately there is no way to measure these indentations accurately enough to inform, except in very general terms (like "ink tends to overextend indentation at this point on that letter"), the positioning of digital outlines, once one accepts the aspiration to preserve intentions on Griffo's part of which one is not aware. As Hrant says of Baskerville, Griffo's intentions will have altered during his work - that's consciousness for you - making any theory of his intent reductive.

I accept that I would learn more about type design from your method than from mine (in whatever its final form is) but that's not the primary goal here. My final result should be something that I can learn from - and if I've done my work properly then its interpretation should be interpretation of Griffo's letter design, and so should remain arguable.

A further note on "bite": the swerves in direction of interior and exterior outlines will in my version be much more similar to those of the punches than in most instances from the original 3D page; since a good deal of bite comes from these outlines working against one another, as they do in Griffo's but not in, say, Garamond's work, some of the bite that comes from the 3D impression will be made up for naturally (though I wouldn't begin to pretend that it's a tradeoff any sensible typographer would welcome).

I'm very interested in your outline filtering - how did you do it? It'd be best to apply it to the PDF rather than the beziers, of course.

As for a trial of averaging from known punches, one would have to ensure that the process of printing was very similar to Aldus' for the results to be useful. That means matrix engraving, type cast from historical alloy, repeated impression at slightly varying angles and depths onto uneven rag paper, a small amount of ink of totally different consistency and composition to the modern stuff... Hard, as well as time-consuming and expensive, but not quite impossible: I think that we (not I!) know a surprising amount about Aldus' methods. I agree that it would be worthwhile. Let me ponder - but probably No, and certainly Not yet. Good doctorate though!

Thanks for your buttressing, Hrant!

John, thanks for your comments. The averaging method does take into account the relative lightness and darkness of parts of the image. Thresholding was done only at the end, to give a potentially traceable outline; but, following Raph, I have abandoned it even there. I think you and Nick might underestimate the variation of these printed characters, and so not see that one cannot, as Nick has it, "Look at the original specimen(s)" and see any outline to draw at all. The averaged p, the fourth in my initial post, contains more useful information than any single original character image (eg concerning damage to the spur), and is a more trusty basis for interpretation than any selected subset of printed originals. Here are four; and they're by no means unrepresentatively varied.

What the averaged master does lose is the coexistence of features in single original images; that's why some detailed analysis through software modelling of what's going in terms of terms of inkpress, off-centre impressions and so on would be desirable. I just don't know whether it's possible.

George, couldn't you run a "control" test of averaging just using ordinary letterpress type -- made from a digital master, even? It wouldn't be a perfect simulation, but you might uncover some useful information/principles nonetheless.

Outline filtering: I've only ever done it in Illustrator, using that app's "pre-built" filters.
I haven't used the Brush filter, which i suspect could be the most malleable and useful.

Sorry about your internet connection, Raph; I look forward to the code.

John might be reassured by the output from my software tweaked such that there is no thresholding for any reason at any stage. It's rather beautiful:

Peter, thank you very much for giving fresh form to the discussion about rhythm, and saving Hrant and I from going around in circles again.

It seems to me that Hrant’s misgivings about rhythm have to do with the fact that in visual wordform resolution role-architectural subcomponents of a bounded map are not processed sequentially but parallelistically, and sequential processing associations are hard to supress, because of how we learn about rhythm.

Yes, but supress them we must if we want to talk meaningfully about 'rhythmn in optical-grammatical contexts'. This is why in the various threads that touch on this subject I have insisted on the all-at-onceness of perception of visual rhythm, stressing that it is not sequential. It seems to me that simply surrendering to associations of rhythm with sequence or flow is to accept a kind of phenomenological blindness. It impoverishes both discourse and experience, not only in understanding of typography and reading, but in a broad range of visual experience.

Everything you need to know about the non-sequential nature of visual rhythm is embodied in this painting, and by the same token this painting cannot be understood without suppressing 'sequential processing associations' of the word rhythm even though, brilliantly, the painting alludes to several different kinds of sequential rhythm: jazz music, traffic, street noise.

Peter, I think the strategy you're talking about is the most attractive kind of reductionism I can think of. Are you recommending in practical terms that I get to the punch outline if possible, and if not that I take an outline derived with consideration for inkpress in corners and blunting at spurs from an averaged image like the one two posts up, write a fixed-front ductus over it, see where the ductus doesn't match and how the metal departs from it, assess the consistency of those modifications, and of second-order variation in manipulation (going on potentially ad infinitum but really it wouldn't be, not with humans), and then redraw the font appropriately, making further alterations until the result is intuitively satisfying and perceptually authentic?

It might help if I say that, though the primary purpose of this project is merely scholarly, a secondary purpose is in the production of fine digital books. I will Multiple Master for optical size, probably from 10 to 15 point, the maximum range for which I suspect MM is going to work effectively and manageably. Titling and photopolymer/matrix engraving versions might eventually follow, as might a set of sans titling caps (the 1499 caps would make an absolutely gorgeous very lightly modelled sans).

Thanks for the new images, George, especially the last which is, as you say, rather beautiful.

My concern, looking at the variation is as stated much earlier in this thread: it is the variation itself that contributes to the look of the letterpress Aldine page, so averaging the variation to produce single letterforms seems to me not to be a very good way to produce a 'faithful revival' of the type. To a very large extent, what you are averaging is not letterforms per se but printing artifacts affecting letterforms. Consider, for example the scan of the third p from the left in the four examples a few messages back. In this specimen, the spur is very clearly present as a part of the letterform: it is really there in a very clean and structural way. Looking at this occurence of the letter, one knows for certain that this feature of the letter is Griffo's design. But in other examples, perhaps even the majority of examples, this feature may not be so clear. But lack of clarity does not imply lack of presence and certainly doesn't imply lack of design. It just means that the impression was very often bad or that individual sorts were worn or broken, such that the design cannot be ascertained from those examples. This means that you have to apply judgement about which samples display the design and which obscure the design through printing artifacts. Looking at that beautiful combined image, we can see that what is a clear design element in one example is, through averaging of printing artifacts, made to disappear: the averaged form embodies the lack of clarity.

To me, this suggests that the averaging methodology has merit relative to the careful selection of input. There needs to be an analytical process to determine which specimens show forth the design, and which are simply poor specimens.

I sort of agree. But that third p is very unusual in the length and solidity of its spur, and I think it shows some perhaps unknowable degree of merely random ink-press. We need something to sway us besides aesthetics - Griffo might chosen to make only a little spur. So we turn to the averaged master and see that, as one might anticipate knowing the properties of softish metal, beyond the spur and also to the right of the descender serif there are darker pale-greys - ie more than background-random cases of ink impression in these regions, implying that yes, these projections have been blunted and should be restored, according to judgement. On the other hand if one chose to believe that the splurge on the bottom of the second p of the four was a ravishing example of Griffo's real intent, lost in too many instances by blunting, then one could check this aesthetic choice against the average and see that the progression from darkest to lightest is much quicker moving vertically down from the serif than to the right of it, so that the descender of the second p is simply botchy.

Almost all the impressions are visibly poor in some part or other, and when errors coincide it can be hard to see them as such - in other words two 'p's can both look convincingly perfect but be wholly unlike. Thus in selecting good material one must be careful not to exclude too much, though in moderation I'm sure it's sensible, and I have done so in previous runs of the software.

Nick, I could run that control test, yes - and when my overdraft is less booming I'd like to, but what I expect to see is that the averaging gives inkpress radiating to equal distances from the metal, except when inkpress is forced against ink coming from another direction, when the inkstreams would combine in an averaged direction and possibly travel further: ie, gumming up the crannies more than proportionally.

Outline filtering: it would have to be postscript then? Beowulf no longer works on Mac OS X, I hear.

> it is the variation itself that contributes to the look of the
> letterpress Aldine page, so averaging the variation to produce
> single letterforms seems to me not to be a very good way to
> produce a ‘faithful revival’ of the type

The problem with this is that the variation can't come from the
type anyway. It has to come from the printing process (which can
be attempted here via photopolymer letterpress, although it's no
piece of cake when you throw in issues of paper, etc.) and this
makes the arrival at the "source shape" the only way, really.

But of course there could always be more
than one source shape per character.

> what you are averaging is not letterforms per
> se but printing artifacts affecting letterforms.

Which is exactly how you get at the letterforms! :-)
That is in fact the beauty/power of averaging:
it removes some of the arbitrary interpretation.

> one knows for certain that this feature
> of the letter is Griffo’s design.

Not really - it could be an artefact too! :-)
Our minds can play tricks on us, and averaging can help tone that down.

So there are no "true" Griffo forms in the results; they are ALL
imperfect instances; and the more instances you average the
more you remove the arbitrariness.

(I remember once having a similar discussion with you concerning
what pairs to kern; somebody advocated using Google to form lists
of pairs, but you pointed out that that would include pairs from
incorrectly spelled words; at which point I put forth that there
really is no "wrong" or "right": if the pair happens, it means
it exists, and that's all a type designer needs to know.)

> the averaging methodology has merit relative to the careful selection of input.

So this becomes exactly what's anathema to the whole concept!
If you apply selectivity, you're introducing an arbitrary
judgement of what's "correct", which can only be one's own
idea of what's correct, not Griffo's. So instead of selectiveness
of input, what you really need is simply more input.

You exclude nothing, because you just don't know. You can
only feel, and that has little place in this type of effort.

> averaging gives inkpress radiating to equal distances from the metal

Note however that ink spread can be asymmetrical, and for more reasons than one. One reason is the paper: it can hold/spread ink differently in each dimension; see this example from a low-grade Armenian newspaper:

http://www.themicrofoundry.com/other/armnews2.gif

Another issue is slur: if you might end up using a cylinder press (something Aldus of course didn't use) to reproduce/test these forms, the looser your makeready the more your gain will be greater in the vertical direction than the horizontal. This is especially if you apply extra pressure (see below). In the end, every little thing affects the results; maybe even the use of ink rollers instead of what they used then: ink balls.

BTW, something I've been meaning to point out:
One serious problem with the method of using a magnifier to see the "3D"* effect (that a scanner can't show**) is that the more impression pressure a piece has the less faithful it is to the type! Which is sort of self-defeating. Quite often in fact (Fleischmann comes to mind) a designer's intentions seem to have been squashed -quite literally- by bad presswork, leaving us with an even harder job of extracting intent.

* Actually, 2.5D, in CAD-speak.

** Except of course if you use some fancy
image-processing and 3D glasses. :-)

hhp

The problem with this is that the variation can’t come from the
type anyway.

I'm not actually convinced of that. I need to go and read Peter Burnhill's book again (George, do you have this? it is invaluable for understanding the Aldine types).

But of course there could always be more than one source shape per character.

Yes. We know this was true for Gutenberg's fonts, and when I see apparent differences in the proportions of letters, e.g. one p looking narrower than the others, I really wonder how much variation is actually explainable in terms of inking and impression.

I think when looking closely at specimens of printed type, you have to make reasonable assumptions based on the competency of the punchcutter. The more a specimen looks like a complete letterform, like a well balanced and resolved design, the better a specimen it is. You have to assume this if you consider the punchcutter to be good at his job, and you can most often confirm this by looking at his larger sizes of type. If these look well designed, you can be reasonably sure that his smaller sizes were also. So if you are looking at fragmentary specimens in which the design seems weak and unbalanced, and you compare these to specimens in which the shape is clearly defined, then you have to consider that the latter show forth the design better. Yes, this requires a judgement call, but I don't think it is arbitrary: it is reasonable. Also, it is often easy to tell what are the prestige publications of a particular printer, those that have been printed with more care and attention, and these will provide a better quality of specimen than cheaper editions produced with less care.

I don't think pre-selecting specimens is anathema to the averaging concept: it is a methodological modification. In fact, a useful exercise would be to perform averaging of both pre-selected and of randomly selected specimens, and compare the results of these. You might also have different people perform pre-selections, and combine the resulting set of forms. There are lots of ways in which one might play with the methodology. I think it is too soon in the day to say that it has to be done in one way only.

I agree with you that one should not presume equal inkspread, even on a flat bed press. Letterpress impression displaces paper mass, and since paper is not of perfectly uniformly density, the displacement from one letter may be more than from an adjacent letter. Also, type was being inked using balls, not rollers, and even inking was virtually impossible. So one part of a letter might have more ink on it than another.

(I remember once having a similar discussion with you concerning
what pairs to kern; somebody advocated using Google to form lists
of pairs, but you pointed out that that would include pairs from
incorrectly spelled words; at which point I put forth that there
really is no “wrong” or “right”: if the pair happens, it means
it exists, and that’s all a type designer needs to know.)

I think that must have been someone else, because my approach to kerning involves using test words that, for Latin at least, include examples of every possible combination. Including Exxon :)

[John] "Yes, but supress them we must..."

Exactly.

... surrendering to associations of rhythm with sequence or flow is to accept a kind of phenomenological blindness.

Nice.

[George] "Are you recommending in practical terms..."

Yes, since even the most mechanical of methods interprets (contra Hrant?), you are looking for the place where the various methods converge. In the best of all possible worlds the methods will crosstalk as they proceed.

But the possibility exists that, because the glyphs are cut, the tuning of contrast is at least as much feature-awareness-based, as chiro-referential (or deliberately chiro-paraphrastic). It isn't out of the questio--probably it's likely--that Griffo engages in a more or less deliberate or overt process of 'geometrical-feature' evaluation of or play with inner and outer form. Punch cutting seems to me to encourage a more feature-analytic relation to form than the writer's learned repitition of ductal or gestural routines.

How can it be determined whether character specimens are from the same mould?

1. Statistically, by analysis of a large sample.
2. By eye

In averaging, how do you allow for the fact that fragile features are more likely to be damaged? If you want to produce a full-featured, good-looking final result, surely you would have to exclude damaged specimens from your sample selection, on a "by eye" subjective basis?

***

Should there be a constraint that specimens are always culled from the centre of a page, to minimize prining distortions?

>> The problem with this is that the variation
>> can’t come from the type anyway.

> I’m not actually convinced of that.

OK, let's think about this a little bit more deeply and with open minds.

If you want to make offset output that comes as close as possible to this particular source (ignoring for the sake of argument the factor of impression depth*) you would have to incorporate the irregularity into the letterforms/type. The ways I can think of doing this are: 1) Have a base glyph stucture and apply pseudo-random irregularity to it (render-time), in a way that mimics the original. This is not possible in current generally available font technology. 2) Choose a finite number of instances of the source glyphs and deploy them pseudo-randomly. This is doable with OpenType. 3) Create a finite number of variants pseudo-randomly (as in #1) and deploy those pseudo-randomly using OT.

* Which however you've said -rightly- is an integral part of the way Aldine typography looks/feels.

Well, #1 and #3 require averaging. And #3 has the advantage over #2 that it removes a selection process that cannot be informed by the true intentions of the original designer. Basically, #2 is the furthest from replicating the original.

The thing is, impression depth is very important here. If you want to get really close to the original, letterpress variance takes care of the irregularity inherently and "naturally". At which point the type doesn't need to exhbit irregularity (which is a good thing, because technically it can't) and that makes averaging useful here as well.

Multiple glyphs per character in the original:
That's different than irregularity. It's certainly useful to be able to group various instances of a letter as different original designs, but here again there's no reason to introduce the reviver's preconceptions (in a literal revival). What you would do instead is algorithmically decide on an instance-by-instance basis which variant of a character an instance is, and then average them separately. You might do this by determining thresholds within which an instance is a certain glyph and outside which it's another; and these thresholds might be determined by some iteration with models for which perhaps we do know the "punch history". Yes, it's error prone, but at least it's a "neutral" error, one that becomes absorbed if you process enough specimens (unlike personal interpretation, which just gets amplified).

> Yes, this requires a judgement call, but I don’t
> think it is arbitrary: it is reasonable.

Maybe arbitrary was a bad word. My point was that -no matter how
good or bad the punchcutter was- there's no safe assumption about
what he intended - not in a literal revival.

One could say that a literal revival cannot benefit
from intent; instead it spawns directly from matter.

> it is often easy to tell what are the prestige publications
> of a particular printer, those that have been printed with
> more care and attention, and these will provide a better
> quality of specimen than cheaper editions produced with
> less care.

But the punchcutter is almost never the printer,
so you can't know if he agreed with the results,
or he intended them (assuming he even cared to get
involved in the results, which is not the same thing
as not having any intent).

This business of extracting intent really seems
to make a horde of romantic assumptions that to
me are counter to the intent of design, at least
in the case of a literal revival.

> I think it is too soon in the day to say that it has to be done in one way only.

Like has been repeated, averaging is a tool. And yes, tools can be used differently depending on what the desires results are. I think in the case of a literal revival like this one, interpretation should be actively limited (not the same thing as saying it can be completely avoided). And in any case averaging shouldn't be shunned - that's what mainly motivates my own participation in this thread actually.

> type was being inked using balls, not rollers,
> and even inking was virtually impossible.

Not only that, but the necks of the sorts got more ink
than they do with rollers, and this affects ink gain.

> I think that must have been someone else

Well, Typophile's search is really cruddy now, so I can't find it.
But I wasn't thinking you'd use Google that way yourself anyway.
I just remember that as your reaction to the idea of doing so.

hhp

> In averaging, how do you allow for the fact that
> fragile features are more likely to be damaged?

You could certainly do it algorithmically.

> surely you would have to exclude damaged
> specimens from your sample selection

Why? They form part of the original!

> Should there be a constraint that specimens are always culled
> from the centre of a page, to minimize prining distortions?

Do people only see the center of the page?

Do you see what I've been getting at? In a literal revival,
intent is moot. In an interpretive revival though you would
indeed use the tool that is averaging differently, including
things like refining the source.

--

I guess the primary question really is:
What is the original? Exactly what are you reviving?
Why are you doing what you are doing? What is YOUR intent?

hhp

Do you see what I’ve been getting at?

Yes, but I thought George already decided that issue. He said that he is doing an interpretation that will be a "good" version of Griffo's type (or words to that effect), so my comments are to do with him clarifying what can be decided by eye, and what automated.

> a “good” version of Griffo’s type

That "good" contains a world though...

BTW, I think you're using "automated" too broadly.
Averaging isn't really automation, it's analysis.

hhp

it can hold/spread ink differently in each dimension
One of the few things about 15th C printing which makes my life easier is that hand-made paper will on average receive ink equally in all directions, because the fibres lie randomly.

Essentially I agree warmly with Hrant that more input is better than selected input, with the qualification that I would recognise some obvious classes of impressions as plain misprintings, like the initial on verso and final on recto letters of lines. These I have left out. One other class worth excluding is letters the variance of which from the norm built up in the first round of averaging is bizarrely high: I think this probably implies a different punch (only one case from the 2 sides and 61 examples which were picked out to produce the averaged image you've seen). Punch variation is rare and inconsistent in Aldine printing so, contra Mardersteig, I doubt that it was intentional. It'd be hard to justify on any grounds the Lascaris interlopers among the 1499 caps in the Hypnerotomachia, for instance: they're fat lumps compared with the new letters; still more obviously wrong is the appearance of Roman caps among Greek, and vice versa. Punch variation is in any case much easier to spot with software that can quantify variation than by eye; and because the distribution of extent of variation is bell-curve normal there really aren't any samples which could plausibly be considered exemplary. But paper shrink is a problem which might make taking samples only from some arbitrarily limited central region of the page, where shrinking is least, a good thing.

I have to say that I think Hrant's straw-man method #2, the choice of a finite number of instances of source glyphs, pseudo-randomly deployed, would produce (and is) just embarrassing junk.

I have Burnhill's book, John; it's main relevance to my project is in making me doubt the propriety of altering vertical proportions (for the original roman, o is 5 units tall, H 7, h 8, y 8, with 1 unit of interlinear space) through MM. Note that o is as usual slightly taller than x, such that one cannot quite accurately say that x-height is five sevenths of cap height. Can these proportions work at 10 point, I wonder? As for deciding by eye what impressions look good: the software numbers show clearly that the eye is no judge, because of the misleading attractiveness of errors in successful combination.

Peter, once one makes one's reduction of Griffo's extant work to principles of construction sophisticated enough to incorporate "feature-awareness-based" analysis, one is giving oneself too much room for interpretive manoeuvre. The method ceases to be a method at the very moment it becomes justifiable.

George, it sounds like you have thought this all through very thoroughly. I look forward to seeing the results, which is when I think I may have more to say on the method.

Thanks John - I can't wait to get started in October, assuming I get on the course. I have absolutely no training in any related field, and a year ago didn't know what an ascender was, but the pull of this sinister spiral is very strong. Hrant asks "Why are you doing what you are doing?", and the answer is that I think that there's powerful magic in this roman of which Garamond only caught a whisper in his own Griffo revivals, and which was never found again before Baskerville called the search off; I want to isolate it at original strength. The Soncino italic is just exceptionally pretty icing.

One last picture:
On the left is the output from software partially rewritten to reduce the impact of normalising colour while maintaining accuracy in superposition. On the right is an automatically produced image in which thickening of the outline signifies blunting/breakage to the type.

Edited to make this clearer: this outline is nothing to do with the eventual drawn outline for the glyph.

Your outline seems to wrap to the outer egde of the grey zone around the letter, and this seems to produce a blobbier form than I perceive when I look at the composite image.

I've been watching this thread for a while now and I can't imagine how one could expect to faithfully reproduce a typeface from a letterpress printed specimen.

There are a legion of problems. First of all it is difficult to find an Aldine specimen that hasn't been cleaned over the years. Cleaning takes out the impression. While this may resolve a certain discrepancy caused by the camera interpreting slope as 2-D it allows problems such as ink spread to be misinterpreted.

Wooden common presses were not a manufactured item and differed greatly one to another. And any publisher with the printing capacity of Aldus would likely have had many, many presses working on different sections of the same book.

There are other problems, variance in the paper, not only sheet to sheet but within the sheet causing characters to print lean or fat without reference to inking. Dampening the sheet (required with handmade papers) also introduces variance in the way the letterforms will appear due to the way the ink is accepted by any particular sheet (there is no way to make dampening standardized sheet by sheet).

There are inking problems not only as the result of ink spreading beyond the letterform (due to problems in proper visconsity and application) but in the technique the pressman used in applying the ink. As someone mentioned previously ink balls were used rather than rollers (first use of rollers was 1812). There is a significant difference (not better nor worse) in the way letterforms respond to these differing tools.

Variance in impression, due to makeready or wear on type or problems in composition or lock-up will also effect the look of the letterform.

And there is often the likelihood, in earlier printed work prior to standardization, that multiple punches were used to create the "letters."

The search for some form of standardization is wrong simply because there is no initial form of standardization. There is only variance, and to some extent, particularly with the early printers, that was the whole point of it, whether there was a choice in the matter or no.

The only true way to capture a letterform from the past would be a carbon proof from the punch itself or find an exacting way of capturing the letterform directly from the punch.

Once it goes to print, all bets are off. While I can applaud the interest and research I cannot imagine that any result could be satisfactory. If the intent is to be "faithful."

Gerald
The Bieler Press
http://BielerPress.blogspot.com

Hi John, yes, the 'outline' in the picture above is nothing to do with the outline of the glyph as it should be drawn in fontlab. It just colours in a narrow band of grey-values from the averaged master to show up the presence of large minorities of samples with unusually strong inking at various points - most notably beyond the spur and serif, but to a lesser extent above and below the left edge of the descender's bulge. The slight thickening on the exterior outline where the bowl meets the upper stem is just inkpress increasing as it is forced against itself coming from two directions.

I’ve been watching this thread for a while now
But apparently not reading it.

All the variance will be averaged, and to some extent averaged out. Quoting myself, I want to get at the forms Griffo can most reasonably be conjectured to have predicted (not necessarily to have wanted - that's unknowable). It's true that I can't be certain how much inkpress I'm incorporating, though from the smoothing in crannies I can make a pretty good guess.

The search for some form of standardization is wrong simply because there is no initial form of standardization. There is only variance, and to some extent, particularly with the early printers, that was the whole point of it, whether there was a choice in the matter or no.
Can you show me a single record of any early printer or reader admiring the variety in impressions from a single apparent punch? They boasted rather of the printing's fidelity to the coherence of the pen-made letter. Variety in printing is quite unlike pen-made variety.

The only true way to capture a letterform from the past would be a carbon proof from the punch itself or find an exacting way of capturing the letterform directly from the punch.
If you know where Griffo's punches are I'd be delighted to use them.

"I take an outline derived with consideration for inkpress in corners and blunting at spurs from an averaged image like the one two posts up, write a fixed-front ductus over it, see where the ductus doesn’t match and how the metal departs from it, assess the consistency of those modifications, and of second-order variation in manipulation (going on potentially ad infinitum but really it wouldn’t be, not with humans),"...

(this is the type speaking) Help me, Help, me. please, , , they are talking my headspace off.

My experience with this, is that the best way to revive from metal, is to do the first part of what you've done well. Examine large, a wide variety of letters. But when I do this, I've already got a list of things that go wrong, from the punch, to the paper, and from then to now (if it was a long time on the paper). So, I have a growing "typographic dictionary of errors", like "Dumb Struck" (a pack of letters with a distortion as if a punch head were too far from the user for the position of the punch face at time of strike. Or some of my other favorites like "Cat Walked", "Dropsies" or "Secret Filing" ('twixt chase and slug). My modern favorite, "Full Page Variouching", occurs, when faxing a full newspaper page to plate, burping, sometimes repeatedly, causes letters to change width and weight (variations at last!) in a typographically painful narrow strip from head to foot of an entire page, (see NY Times, (only if outside metro area???)).

Fortunately, the subset of errors in the metal of your project, limits the possibilities to the point where you can match errors with examples, and actually, (nearly factually) "find" the "right" letter but getting your eye on a particular, or a few particular letters (if you suspect intelligent design in the composition), and not use a "program" to "assume" what an "error" is. Metal type, after all, was not VooDoo. More often than not, as cited above and sited at the time of the metal men, by the metal men, it was sometime DooDoo. You just need to learn to track type scat.

"and then redraw the font appropriately"
i.e. find" the "right" letter with your mind (ooh). It is especially effective to do it this way, because, any program trying to make decisions on these kinds of letterforms, from this period, without the Error list of type, and without intelligent error thinking, like you have, on an intra-letter basis, will...I dunno, Not make an alphabet?

Thanks David; to clarify, the method you quote is not the one I have or will adopt, but my translation of Peter's thinking on revival into a practical process. As it happened, Peter rightly thought that this process didn't take into account the feature- rather than ductus-based thinking which presumably goes into punchcutting, and I responded that no method could be formulated which could do so.

But more importantly your “typographic dictionary of errors” sounds fascinating and very important to my project. Could you tell me more, do you think? I'd be perfectly happy to increase the limited pre-averaging selection I've already done to take out the scat. On the other hand, averaging of the scatless forms will stay. There is almost certainly no single “right” printed letter (and even if there were one couldn't know which it was) because, as I've said, the extent of variation is, in the technical sense, normally distributed: it follows a bell curve, such that zero or minimal variation is actually much, much rarer than substantial variation. When drawing a monochrome glyph based on the soft and lovely averaged form, my mind, for all my protests, will have plenty of use.

>avoiding the potentially banalising effects of human interpretation

I think you are coming around to see that avoiding human interpretation was a misconceived goal. Admitting that, then I think the really important questions become clear: What are you going to use the revival for? What is the revived font going to be used for by other people?

Now you are back in the boat with other revivers of Griffo, perhaps armed with some additional tools. But it is your decisions, talent and skill, and not any "objective" program that will make the difference as to what this looks like, and what it is good for.

I made, after reading Nick's and Raph's first posts, two changes to my position. First, having been undecided, I accepted that autotracing of the averaged form is unhelpful because, in preserving equally emolliating and merely emboldening inkpress, it misprepresents the perceived bite of the original. Second, I accepted that the averaged master image contains information which should be preserved and analysed in making decisions about the drawn glyph - information about likely features of the punch which are misrepresented in most impressions, because cast type degrades in predictable ways. Finally, I was culpably unclear in phrasing my initial post. Avoiding those acts of interpretation which are potentially banalising remains a goal: I dislike the fatalism surrounding interpretation (of which I don't accuse you): the repetition of truisms like "you've got to interpret", or, with more relativist conviction, that one's work is "just your interpretation", because the usually unstated assumption is that all interpretations are alike in the merit of the hypotheses they imply. But this is untrue, doubly so with newly available tools providing new kinds of evidence, but always so with the application of knowledge of the printing process (on which I'd love more detail, or recommendations of books on Aldine or incunable printing). What produces banal results is the kind of thinking that goes: Griffo was presumably a sensible man, and should have been if he wasn't; and sensible men know that typefaces are best when they're like this, or when they are consistent in this. As Justin Howes wrote, "In our own time, the result of redrawing is, unavoidably, type design which edges ever closer to this period’s dominant letter form, Times New Roman". He tried to resist that with a method which was clearly, as he knew perfectly well, unconvincing in one respect (its variation is frozen), but nonetheless he succeeded better than almost any reviver in providing as fully as possible, given current limitations, what his model had provided to an ealier generation. I'll take a different path in pursuit of the same ideal. And I shan't mind if it's never used at all; I'd be perfectly happy if it were only something for me, and I hope others, to study. As I've said, though, a secondary purpose for it is in fine book work, for which sized variants will be provided.

For now this stands out:
> I think you are coming around to see that avoiding
> human interpretation was a misconceived goal

Why so absolute? Design is pragmatic, and a pragmatic
approach is to TAME human interpretation (where it
needs that); not wallow in it, and not shun it.

Also: I don't think it's a goal, just a means.

(More on the rest soon hopefully.)

hhp

Letterpress is an inconsistent process. From a sharp original, it produces images which retain sharpness in some areas, but lose it in others.

There is some logic to this, in that the "protected" areas of the type, eg hairlines at joints, are more likely to retain fine detail than "exposed" parts of the type, such as serifs on stems, which tend to blobbyness. (There is more pressure here, as the paper is stretched over the neck of the type.)

This variety of image quality, with its slight unpredictability, is a pleasing effect.

Back in the day, type designers took this into account, which is why vertical stems on M, N, V etc. were able to be so fine, and the letters proportioned accordingly.

One way to "parse" the effect of letterpress is to mix sharp and soft detail.
In fact, Goudy did this for his pseudo-incunabula faces such as Kennerley, which were designed for letterpress anyway.

I've done this mixing on several of my faces, but here are some examples by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly, Adobe Caslon, Jenson, and Minion.

This is very interesting and useful: thanks. And the effect will of course be caught in the average image too.

But one of the things about most incunable printing as opposed to even, say, de Colines' stuff, is that inkpress is so substantial and erratic that even counters typically have rounded outlines, rather than just being formed by the intersection of black strokes, and I think this is a very good thing: it makes the counters as robust as rubber pillows, with their own independent shapeliness. Two printers who were too good technically for this to be so much the case are Jenson, of whom I think you have most experience, and, most obviously, Ratdolt.

How I hate the Minion e.

Yeah, you are probably right, I have not carefully read the entirety of the thread. Way beyond my comprehension.

Out of curiousity though I did go through this and try to find where you mention the source for your Aldine. Since as you say, Griffo's punches are not available. If you did mention it, I have missed it.

A reason for asking this is I had talked to Sergei maybe a year or so ago about what he was doing and I remember being a bit surprised that one of the sources for one of the Aldine italics he was working on seemingly came from a trade book on printing history. So the image he was working from was an offset halftone reproduction of a photo of one of the letterpress printed Aldine pages. Which, of course, is much further afield in terms of fidelity than working directly from an original.

Gerald
The Bieler Press
http://BielerPress.blogspot.com

Hi Gerald, sorry for my earlier testy response. The Aldine italic source is two facing sides of Aldus' 1519 Cassius Dio, scanned at 2400 dpi by Sergei. Long before 1519 Griffo had cut a replacement for this p; he constantly rethought and improved his types (such that only 40% of the 1495 De Aetna lowercase remained unaltered by the time the roman was completed with its new set of caps in the 1499 Dioscurides); it seems the typefounder simply got into a muddle, and cast this older version by accident. Next year I will probably be using the UCLA copies of the 1499 Aldine Scriptores Astronomici Veteres and the 1503 Soncino Petrarch.

Here's an additional note on my choice of italic for revival. For a long time I wanted to get at the finest prize of all: Griffo's third italic, made for his own use as a printer at Bologna. Imagine it: finally, in 1516, the greatest genius type design has ever produced* is free from all constraint. He can make the letters he wants, and print them how he wants them. He would die almost immediately, but first produced at least two editions, a Boccaccio and Bembo's Gli Asolani - the latter appropriately, since Griffo may well have known Bembo personally from the time when the future cardinal was taking a keen interest in the production of De Aetna, for which Griffo cut his first mature alphabet.

I finally tracked down that third italic. The reproduction's ghastly, but what a disappointment! It looks like a Tony Stan ITC Aldine! Having said that, it should have been very readable with that astonishing x-height to line-increment ratio, and it's unmistakably Griffo in, amongst many other things, the low-slung lowercase a, a readability master-stroke that appears in all his italics.

Nick, I think there is one further quality of the original which justifies alterations in the digital revival: I mean the characters' apparent similarity of weight, which comes from the very irregularity of weight in each printed instance. One can't get a strong sense in seeing the Aldine page that one character is heavier than another, because even if there were such a relationship in the punch, it would be lost among the inequalities of weight that come from the printing process. Griffo may even have chosen to cut variety of weight into his punches knowing that in printing these differences would have been greatly diminished. So the weight, and perhaps contrast, of characters could be tweaked upon inspection of the first draft of the digital alphabet until these seemed as harmonious as in the original. This would prevent a repeat of the major problem with Poliphilus.

As promised, here is the averaging script I mentioned above:

http://levien.com/type/avg.tar.gz

It's for Unixy systems, but it shouldn't be too hard to get running on OS X, and a sufficiently determined person can probably make it work on Windows as well.

Here's a screenshot of the script in action:

The top row is three impressions of the 'a' glyph, set in Times Roman 10.5pt, from the Letterproef 1967 specimen book of the Koninklijke Drukkerij Van de Garde, Zaltbommel. I scanned these at 2400 dpi using my Epson Perfection 4870. The next line shows the raw output of the script, a composite of 129 impressions, followed by a sharpened version (Gimp 2.0 Enhance>Sharpen, set to 90), and finally lightened through gamma adjustment (2.5) to show more clearly the contour of the metal inside the halo of ink spread.

Raph, very impressive.

Thanks Raph, this looks wonderful: I'll play with it this afternoon.

Raph,

Your images are very impressive, but can you be sure that the "inner outline" visible is not simply the effect of the sharpening? I'm not very familiar with Gimp, and even less with it's sharpening, but this appears to be exactly the effect I would expect to see when sharpening has been applied to an image.

I sincerely hope this doesn't come across as a parody of your work, but to demonstrate what I mean I've attached an image I prepared in Photoshop. It's a digital Times New Roman 'a', rasterised at 85% grey, with sharpening (Unsharp Mask) applied and then lightened. Despite the crudeness of my sample there are distinct similarities in the "inner outlines" which clearly cannot be explained, in this case, as the contour of the metal.

This may be just that I am mis-interpreting your images. My experience is in manipulating images for aesthetic purposes rather than data, so I could easily have missed something important.

Ed.

Incidentally, if anyone wants to get hold of an Aldine leaf, here is a company selling them from the same book Sergei used for $4 each. Rather more expensive is an early leaf of 1499 roman or 1503 italic: I've just bankrupted myself with one of the Scriptores Astronomici Veteres.

George, let be a little more clear on the danger of aiming at a 'faithful' or authentic revival.

First, you have yourself said you are not going to do this fully, in the sense that you are not trying to revive the look of the aldine page, with all of its variations. So what you are in fact doing, despite protestations of striving for authenticity, is trying to revive features of the typeface that you regard as good or desirable ones. And, as David Berlow pointed out, using a computer does not remove your personal choices as you are telling the computer what to do--to average in a certain way, rather than to pick out the 10 most common shapes of a given glyph, for example.

Like you, I do think that there is much worth reviving in old typefaces. But my point is that reviving the worthwhile is a process of hypothesis testing. You can identify a feature, and then draw it in various ways, and see if it is actually responsible for what you liked in the typeface. It may be, or it may not be. Once you are aware that you are engaged in a creative process of guess work and trial and error to get the effect you admired in the original, then you free your imagination and intellect to create a lot of hypotheses, and test them. If your goal is 'authenticity', you can easily limit your hypothesizing, thinking that one tool, whether it is scanning or averaging or something else give you the 'authentic' result.

You are already engaged in that creative hypothesizing, of course, so my urging is just to not let the goal of 'faithfulness' limit yourself to your first hypotheses, or one method--averaging or whatever--to such a revival. Such methods are valuable tools, but in the end your creative ideas about what is good in the typeface and your testing of your ideas will make your effort fruitful.

Incidentally, in another thread you I think rather underestimate the power of graphic design compared to type design. The look of a page is as much or more influenced by layout as by the typeface. So the way the Aldine page was laid out--the size of type, the leading, the measure etc. may well be a part of the impression you admire. Especially as Peter Brunhill found it worth the effort to figure out the system of proportions Aldus was using, it is likely this is in fact important.

Also, size matters. Some of the much admired old text samples--including yours?--are at rather large size. You cannot scale these down and get the same visual feel. So if you are aiming at a typeface family that can actually be used in a practical way--or in gaining knowledge that you or others can use for such a purpose--you will be faced with scaling issues.

Thanks for your amplifications William.
you are not trying to revive the look of the aldine page, with all of its variations. So what you are in fact doing, despite protestations of striving for authenticity, is trying to revive features of the typeface that you regard as good or desirable ones.
This doesn't follow, and as it happens it isn't the case. I'll revive features of the typeface that I regard as bad or undesirable too: I just hope I don't find too many. And I doubt I'll find any features that I can't learn to accept in reading extended text set in the revival. Choosing a body of work to revive should involve a commitment to that work, which reaches us battered by history but capable of being restored by a diet of soft gruels and attentive kindness: I have more to learn from Griffo than his work does from mine. I wouldn't have made the h in the 1503 italic so rounded, but I can see that it demonstrates a difference between humanist and mannerist ideals, and I anticipate the broadening of my own ideals to accommodate both possibilities.

I'll tell the computer what to do, and control the inputs it receives, only insofar as each choice can reasonably be expected to get me closer to the newly cast type plus average inkpress. What I hope to revive is a combination of very subtle features, varying from letter to letter, which could not but be bulldozed by any heuristic process of feature identification and redrawing. The time for heuristically developing my judgement is, in this project, afterwards, in choosing how much emolliating inkpress should consistently be removed, and, if necessary (as I hope it will not be), how much the weight of characters should be made similar, in order to get a combined effect resembling the original in bite and harmony, while preserving intact the combinatorial effects of the initial draft.

The look of a page is as much or more influenced by layout as by the typeface. So the way the Aldine page was laid out—the size of type, the leading, the measure etc. may well be a part of the impression you admire.
Sure, but satisfying and appropriate page, margin and textblock proportions aren't, with Bringhurst to hand, rocket science, and Aldine leading (1/12th of the line increment) will be incorporated into the fonts, as it was by Griffo. As for size, the horizontal and vertical proportions of the originals will be exactly replicated at ~15 and ~12 point for roman and italic respectively, and horizontal proportions and relative size of irregularities will be modified for optical similarity at other sizes using MM.

George asked a very good question: can you be sure that the “inner outline” visible is not simply the effect of the sharpening?

I wish I had some kind of definitive test to show that it's real, but right now what I mostly have to go on is a very strong hunch, developed from studying hundreds of glyph images from a half dozen or so pages. The halo I'm attributing to ink spread varies from page to page, mostly dependent on the paper - it's quite a bit stronger on coated stocks.

So the question remains open: what kind of experiment would test the null hypothesis that what I'm seeing is nothing more than a sharpening artifact? A good answer would most certainly be worth an academic paper, in my opinion.

Hi Raph, I think printing digital type onto a number of different papers from photopolymer, making averages from the results, and comparing each sharpened and unsharpened with the original glyphs, as Nick suggests, would pretty much do it. But you're too kind in attributing such a good question to me rather than to Ed! I think the first thing to find out is what these sharpening algorithms actually do.

I've just managed to convert my PNGs to PGM so I look forward to being able to try out your software. Meanwhile I've sharpened up my average - I think my two-pass blending routine is fractionally more accurate with such messy samples -

Another use for image averaging.

http://salavon.com/PlayboyDecades/PlayboyDecades.shtml

Another use for image averaging
I'm afraid they're mixing punches there.

It would have been more interesting if that guy had stuck to faces: in one study, averaging images of the faces of participants in a female beauty pageant gave an image which was found more attractive than any of the originals. Something like the same effect might be operating in my average above (depends whether you like the punch, I suppose; as I mentioned, Griffo apparently didn't).

Me: "You are in fact doing ...is trying to revive features of the typeface that you regard as good or desirable ones."

You: "This doesn’t follow." [from the fact that you are not trying to revive all features.]

Your objection to my argument is valid. My mistake.

However, the underlying issue I think remains a question you should consider, to make your projected year's work most productive: What purpose are you doing this for?

Is your decision not to revive variation but to do everything else capricious? It being not capricious, what are your guidelines? If your purpose is simply to learn, not produce a typeface to use, then what specifically are you trying to learn? What questions are you trying to answer? Producing different revival versions that revive different features might be more informative than trying to revive everything but a few features. This is just from a research point of view. The general point about research (which was made by Popper) is that the more developed and articulated your theory is, the more informative your testing and your results will be.

It is for you to say of course, but I find it a little hard to believe that you are willing to spend a year on a project reviving a typeface and are indifferent to whether anyone will use it. I say this to reinforce my question, which many of the best type designers say is always their first one: What is your brief?