I think it is a case-by-case issue. What looks good for a prticular font is good but not necessarily law for all fonts.
I like #2 best in the above tlde case. For ogoneks, I make different ones for i than for wider letters and for curved bottom letters like u, I make a joining adjustment.

ChrisL

I went to the same thoughts when I was working on the accents for Calluna (not ready yet). I widened the dieresis and tilde. Scaling them made them too fat.

What about small caps Jos?
It’s there that the difference in scaling of the letter and the accent is most obvious.

Nick, I agree with Chris on this one. It can be a good idea, but it depends on your design. In your case I would opt for version #2 but with the capital accent scaled but a little less heavy. Your post is good food for thought and set me to think about my own small caps accents also. In my case I guess I’ll have to try something that lies in between U&lc.

“Is it a good idea?”
The bigger the gap between the heights and weights of the l.c. and u.c., the more likely the need for case sensitive accents. Text vs. display also plays a part, as does of course, design energy.

Cheers!

Most Adobe Originals of the past decade have at least two sizes of accents.

T

Two sizes I think will generally be sufficient, unless of course you’re going to do accents on raised characters as well (I think someone mentioned in another thread that French at least needs a raised é for some ordinal numbers maybe?).

Although this font in particular I don’t see having a full set of superscript and subscript (though I could be wrong).

More randomly, I just found a unique new capital Ñ that looks like an inverted breve, something I (seriously) hadn’t seen before untiL I saw it yesterday, so you could just go with a totally new shape for the cap and a smaller version for the small cap and then the normal version for the lowercase ;-)

In all seriousness, I’d go with whatever feels best. In this example the second one looks best to me, but in part ’cause I like all my diacriticals to be, as much as possible, vertically aligned.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Most Adobe Originals of the past decade have at least two sizes of accents.

Can you give examples of some that have more than two?
Is the third size for small caps?

I have a vague memory of seeing Adobe with ordinals having diacritics. This might only be a dream so hopefully, Thomas can give a definitive answer.

ChrisL

If there’s a *third* accent size in any Adobe typefaces, it would be for small caps, yes. I’m afraid I haven’t tracked it carefully enough to know for sure which of our typefaces (if any) do this, besides my own Hypatia Sans. I believe it would mostly be more recent Slimbach designs.

BTW, like Jos, we don’t only do scaling. In many cases the cap accent is wider but flatter (proportionally speaking) than the lower case accent.

I wasn’t counting ordinals or superiors. We have recently started doing e with grave in that size. But that’s pretty obviously going to get a different size accent!

Regards,

T

Hi,

I see the problem, depends how you’re gong to display it. I am Polish designer, working many years in the West.
We had this problem introducing many new typefaces in Poland and Eastern Europe. So called: diactric signs.

In running body text diactric signs would NOT be scaled down.

Cheers,
Lech

Lecho

Here is a sample of Weiss typeface “polonised”. See diactric signs.

Cheers,
Lech

Hi,

The only major visual difference is letter “ł” [eu] upper ca and lower case. Where diagonal slash is shorter.

Cheers,
Lech

Almost all of our designs have separate accents drawn for Uppercase, lowercase and small caps.

JamesM

Lech, could you show Weiss “E with ogonek”, comparing capital with small capital. In a setting preferably.
On a related issue, how often do the ogonek characters appear at the beginning of words?

James, could you show some of your tilde accented characters, comparing caps, lower case and small caps?

Nick,

This is from something we are currently working on.

Thanks James, that’s nicely done.
My, aren’t those small caps big!

BTW, 590 pixels wide is the widest image that won’t go into scrollbar mode on Typophile.

My, aren’t those small caps big!

Since working with Maxim on some cyrillic designs, I’ve started to make all my small caps larger so they work better with their cyrillic counterparts. And while there is currently no cyrillic counterpart to this design, who know what the future holds.

Thanks for the advice on image size, I’ll pay more attention to that in the future.

JamesM

@ gulfa

The “Ñ” in “Nestra Señora” may not be a actual accent ( a tilde); it seems to me that it is ´postizo´, false, a piece of other available character used by the typographer. Doesn’t look like a parenthesis? Some metal type doesn’t have accents, to solve the problem false ones are aligned to the character with a accent . That is what appears to me. Just a thought .

AGL: While I’ve definitely seen mistakes like that, this is consistent in the entire book (every capital Ñ uses this mark), but I find it essentially impossible to believe that the typesetter didn’t have tildes available, it’s a wholly requisite character for Spanish printing and would be like not having a Z. For reference, the book was printed in 1722 in Madrid, which, granted, is out of my general time period of study. I’m going to try to look up some other examples to see if this was a particular quirk of either the printer or the period, but most of the time a mistake with the tilde is to accidentally print it in reverse like I’ve seen a few times from Iuan de la Cuesta’s presses (which I’ve seen in New Mexico’s highway signage too!)

That said, it doesn’t look too odd to me since at that time, italic tildes actually were far more like breves (in almost all instances I’ve ever seen prior to about early 1800s). In fact, on a Spanish passport, on the inside front cover, this traditional and almost extinct form is still used (unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of it when I had the chance)

It warrants investigation whenever I can get some free time to do it.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Gulfa: Ah OK, You are aware of this practice. The question then is, why the typographer used that sign as a tilde.
I suppose the typographer while examining the manuscript realized that he did not have enough tildes to compose four pages (a possible spread back then), and so he decided to use something else, even parenthesis, and keep the style over the whole book. Is possible, I am just speculating.
A curiosity: I learned from a old time typographer in Seville that, due to the use of german, english or american mats on linotype or monotype composing machines without accents, it become sort of a ’rule’ not accent capital letters (accute accents) except the “N” , which you know is not a accented character. Cheers.

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” El que vino a este mundo, se vino a beber vino, ¿si no, porqué vino? “

- Anónimo Mejicano