fonts: background A short introduction to font characteristics

Almost anyone who develops an interest in fonts is bound to be overwelmed by the bewildering variety of letterforms available. The number of fonts available from commercial suppliers like Adobe, URW, LinoType and others runs into the thousands. A recent catalog issued by FontShop [Truong et al., 1998] alone lists over 25.000 different varieties.1 And somehow, although the differences of the individual letters are hardly noticable, each font has its own character, its own personality. Even the atmosphere elucided by a text set from Adobe Garamond is noticably different from the atmosphere of the same text set from Stempel Garamond. Although decisions about the usage of fonts, will always remain in the realm of esthetics, some knowledge about font characteristics may nevertheless help to create some order and to find out why certain design decisions just do not work. The main aim of this paper is to provide such background by describing the main aspects that might be used to describe a font. keywords Typefaces, design, font classification The outline of the remainder of this paper is as follows. First I will discuss some basic font characteristics. Next some elementary, numerical dimensions along which properties of a typeface design can be asssessed will be discussed. A next section elaborates on those measures and some additional aspect of ‘contrast’ will be discussed. The final two sections briefly present a font classification along the dimensions discussed in the previous section and some implications. Some elementary differences Proportional and monospaced. A first difference between typeface designs that can be recognized is the spacing of fonts. Monospaced or typewriter fonts in which each character occupies the same amount of space can be distinguished from proportionally spaced fonts. Computer Modern typewriter (monospaced): Winmvw Computer Modern Concrete (proportionally spaced): Winmvw Hardly anyone will dispute the statement that proporionally spaced fonts are more beautiful and legible than monospaced designs. In a monospaced design the letter i takes as much space as a letter m or W. Consequently, some characters look simply too compressed, whereas around others too much white space is found. Monospaced fonts are simply not suited for body text. Only in situations where it is important that all characters are of equal width, e.g., in listings of computer programs, where it may be important that each individual character can be discerned and where the layout of the program may depend on using monospaced fonts, can the usage of a monospaced font be defended. In most other situations, they should simply be avoided. Romans, italics and slant A second typeface characteristic that will hardly be new for any TEX-user is the difference between Italic, Oblique (slanted) and Roman fonts. The difference between Italic fonts and the Roman fonts lies in their history. Italic fonts are the descendants of handwritten letter shapes, whereas the Roman fonts were originally chiselled in stone. Consequently, the romans look more rigid; the italics on the contrary show more elegance and are more ‘curvy’. Furthermore, the shapes of some individual characters differ; this difference is most apparent when we look at a, g and a, g (here in the Italic and Roman variant respectively). The origins of the italics being in handwriting, they are usually slanted, whereas the romans are typically typeset upright. This, however, is not strictly necessary. Italics can theoretically be typeset upright and Romans may be slanted: An upright Italic and a slanted or oblique Italic An upright roman and a slanted or oblique Roman Generally designers agree that text set in Roman is more legible than text set in Italic, although the readability of Italics accompanying different fonts may differ considerably, 1. This enormous variety is partially made possible by the introduction of electronic typefaces, which allow for worldwide distribution without exceptional cost. In 1950, that is before the advent of electronic typesetting Groenendaal could still attempt to list all typefaces readily available to an ordinary typesetter.