Typography and typesetting.

And a little more...

http://www.typografi.org/justering/oppfatninger/syn_english.html

http://www.typografi.org/justering/gut_hz/gutenberg_hz_english.html

evening PM

Well thanks a million for that!

I was going to have an early night following insomnia from the storms last night.

Should get through it before daylight, hopefully!

Good evening David.

I hope you are well, sir.

You're very welcome AP. 

It might be wise to start with the two short articles of my second post and save that lengthy thesis for another time.

There is a 32 man quiz going o. ATM poker, knockout style taking place over a month or so.  Unfortunately, it is underway now, so no more new entries, but just out of interest, would you've entered if you'd have known?

Good evening Rob.  I hope you are well.

No, sir, I wouldn't have entered the quiz as I am only online once or twice a month.  I will, however, look in with interest to see the results next time. 

Is it the same old faces in the winners' enclosure?

It looks like PM is the font of all knowledge on this subject.

LOS ANGELES—Helvetica Bold Oblique was the big winner at Tuesday's 73rd Annual Fonty Awards, taking home 11 statues, including those for Best Sans Serif and the highly coveted 2001 Best Font prize.


Helvetica Bold Oblique designer Oliver Rudd accepts one of his font's 11 awards.

The gala event, attended by the biggest names in the publishing and graphic-design worlds, was held at the Shrine Auditorium and followed by a post-ceremony bash at the recently refurbished Linn Boyd Benton Printing House.

"A million thanks to all the wonderful folks in the font community who believed in Helvetica Bold Oblique," said an ecstatic Oliver Rudd, designer of the font, in his acceptance speech. "Without your faith in my vision, I would not be here before you tonight. I'd also like to thank Helvetica Regular designer James T. Helvetica, the giant upon whose shoulders I stand. And, of course, the designers of the Visa Card Terms & Conditions booklet, who brought my font to the forefront of the American typeface scene this year."

With its victory, Helvetica Bold Oblique takes its place in a long line of Fonty-winning Helveticas. In the awards' history, three other variations of the typeface have won Best Font: Helvetica Condensed Light in 1960, Helvetica Ultra Compressed in 1981, and Helvetica Black in 1988.

"The Helvetica font family is highly respected throughout the publishing world," said Bruce Chizen, president and CEO of desktop-publishing giant Adobe Systems. "Boasting an unequaled range of weights and widths, literally everybody wants to work with it."

The Fontys, awarded annually by the Academy Of Fonts & Typefaces, recognizes superior achievement in the field of typography. Winners receive a Fonty statue, a golden "F" elegantly styled in freeform.

Awards in 41 categories, including Best Slab Serif Font (American Typewriter Medium), Best Monospaced Font (Letter Gothic Slanted), and Best International Font (Fusaka Regular), were presented during the live, three-hour CBS telecast. Technical subcategories, such as Best Transitional Serif (Apollo Roman) and Best Mathematical Symbol (Lucida Math Symbol) were presented in an untelevised ceremony last week.

"This is the one night of the year when the entire font community, from typesetters to PostScript designers, comes together to honor and celebrate its own," said Bob Helger, legendary designer of 1990 Best Font winner Utopia Italic. "You could feel the electricity in the air."

Despite the plaudits heaped on Helvetica Bold Oblique all night, some questioned the academy's choice.

"A bold as Best Font?" said Christopher Rankley, editor of Typography Today. "They may as well have handed the award to Chicago, for God's sake. Or, better yet, Chicago Shadow Underline."

Rankley said he was rooting for the more traditionally tooled Palatino—which snagged just one award, for Best Display Font—to take home top honors this year.

"Palatino is one of the most popular Oldstyle revivals in existence, blending classical Italian Renaissance letter forms with the crispness of line needed for 20th-century printing processes. Yet it has never won Best Font," Rankley said. "I think a lot of Palatino fans out there were thinking maybe this would be the year."

A common criticism of the Academy Of Fonts & Typefaces is that it is out of touch with the cutting edge, favoring fonts with mainstream, commercial appeal. Academy members have little awareness, detractors say, of today's more challenging fonts, such as the daring, highly ornamental Blackletter.

William Perez, a lifelong font enthusiast and editor of the 'zine Lorem Ipsum Dolor, is one such critic, calling the Fontys "embarrassingly conservative and tradition-bound."

"They think they're being daring when they nominate a font like Techno or Comic," Perez said. "What about totally innovative fonts like Critter, with its cute, smiling animal faces rendered into letters, or Giddyup, in which each letter is styled out of a curling lasso? These fonts don't even exist to the high-and-mighty Academy."

Perez is not the first to note that quirky, independently distributed typefaces rarely earn Fonty recognition. In the rare instances when cutting-edge fonts are nominated, they are typically relegated to the Best Decorative Font category. Such was the case with the bitstream release Eyeballs, which was nominated for Best Decorative Font but lost out to SnowCap, a long-entrenched favorite of the bagged-ice industry.

Defending his group's choices, Academy president Jack Tolleson said: "A small, independent font like Goudy Text is masterfully rendered, but it simply does not carry enough national importance to warrant nomination. We cannot justify presenting an award to a font that is barely available for viewing by the public, showing up at only a handful of renaissance fairs across the nation."

Despite such disagreements, no one objected when this year's show closed with the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award to Times New Roman, a proportionally spaced typeface designed in 1931 for The London Times. When the son of the font's deceased designer, Stanley Morrison, took the stage, the entire room rose in a standing ovation.

"Such strength of line, such firmness of contour, such economy of space," said Tolleson, his voice wavering with emotion. "I doubt there will ever be another font like Times New Roman."

I like the old fashioned ones. Little Lord Fontleroy is my favourite.

Thank you very much Rob. I was not aware of The Fontys.  I might even attend next year.

"His voice wavering with emotion."

They missed a trick by advertising the event as a bash, though.  Surely describing the ceremony as a 'wingding' would be more fitting.

Wingding

Good evening Crisp.

I'm afraid my personal favourite is a tad boring.  I'm with Mr Tolleson, it has to be Times New Roman.

Most of my friends would rather take their own lives than attend an event such as The Fontys, but I would genuinely find it fascinating.

Evening PM

I use the commoners Arial myself but used to use Times New Roman as a youngster

Probably best off out of the chit chat cup tbf poker, knowing your luck you,d,ve been drawn against me in the first round and you,d,ve been suitably dispatched.  Either way would,ve been nice to see you take part.

You're right Rob.  I've had a lucky escape there, indeed.

Just bumping an old thread to the top.

Full Moon Pokermonster you must feel revitalised.

I do indeed, Angel.  I am a true moon child, born on the 21st July 1969.

My younger sisters 16th birthday. ^^

On the day of the moon landing Pokermonster. How about that.

Yes.  I was born so close to the actual moment, my mum cannot remember if it was before or after Armstrong's giant leap.

Also the moon landing was on a monday Pokermonster.

If your mother had a 9 month pregnancy then you was conceived around the 27th Oct 1968. Around the time when 6,000 Vietnam Anti-War protesters clash with police outside the United States Embassy at Grosvenor Square, London. These protesters were a small part of a much larger peaceful march against US involvement in Vietnam.

The School of Close Spacing.

http://www.oakknoll.com/bookexcerpt.php?booknr=79445

Youre a top bloke Poker, but by christ you are a proper obsessive type.  I will fall short of calling you boring, just obsessed.

I don't think I'm obsessed, Rob, just interested in the minutiae of things.

I thought they were the same thing, no offence intended btw.  Did I ever post up that link for the fonty awards for acheivement in the world of font making?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/helvetica-bold-oblique-sweeps-fontys,263/

Although, now I think about it, I'm a terrible perfectionist.  That's a form of obsession in itself, of course, so perhaps you're correct.

You did, Rob, it's featured a few clicks up the page.  An excellent read it was, too.

You are a perfectionist for sure.  Not a bad thing, but most people have interests in various things, but only a select few take it as seriously as you do.  And typography is a slightly unusual thing to be obsessed with imo as opposed to, say, music, sport, films etc... Like most people.

Oh so I did, clearly I am not obsessive enough to check, let alone remember.

You don't know the half of it really, Rob.  The perfect typesetting featured within those pages posted on my book thread, awkward though it was to achieve, actually proved to be the least of my problems.

The identity of fifty-two letters (and their precise positions)on the sample sheet below, for example, were determined in advance, I had to write the text around them  The 123rd letter had to be an capital A, the 293rd a lower case k and so on and so forth for every single one of the five-hundred pages.  It was the most labyrinthine of puzzles and nearly sent me loopy.

But, someday, somewhere, somebody will find the reason for my madness and we'll both be rewarded for our troubles.

Any other typography or typesetting enthusiasts lurking, perchance?

I don't care what I write in e-books like Kindle because the reader will adjust it to their own taste. I use Georgia in print-on-demand paperbacks because it's free.

A most delightful thread.

A while ago, I did have a passing interest in fonts when trying to find one that has an "a" that looked like an "a" as used in teaching reading and writing e.g. a is for apple; of course the a you've just read isn't the way an a for apple looks. In that case an o is closer to an a than an a. Never have understood why an a doesn't look like an a.

The lower case a in question is very useful for ambigrams (a beautiful example shown above) as they are often a perfectly inverted e.

Sorry Pokerm of course I was only talking about lower case a (then again should have been obvious from context). Ambigram is a word I thought I didn't know but having Googled it I think I did; where is the beautiful example above? An a doesn't look to me like a perfectly inverted e but that would depend on the font I presume. But why doesn't an a look like an a?

Hello, Charlie. 

This was the ambigram I meant, sir.  A beautiful example from the genius, John Langdon.

Apologies, sir, I got my threads mixed up.  I had posted the ambigram elsewhere! 

Hello Pokermonster.

Very impressive and it is beautiful (but has given me neck ache). Are you avoiding the a question?

You don't have to call me sir. Most people used a four letter word rather than three.

Avoiding the question, sir? 

About an a not looking like a traditional a you mean?  A little, maybe, as I don't know the answer.  Somebody morphed it into that inverted e style one day and it struck a chord with other font-makers I guess.

A very disappointing answer Pokermonster. I thought you would be the font of all knowledge on fonts. An upside down a would be easy to mix up with an e for typesetters which would surely be a disadvantage. Sorry but can't remember the technical term for the compartments that typesetters put their letters in. In evolutionary terms it doesn't scan for me.

Here we are, Charlie.

The lower-case version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children.

The ɑ you prefer is obviously based on the Greek symbol for alpha.

But when and where and who introduced the double-storey variant, I'm afraid escapes me.

Thank you Pm.
Still don't understand why the typographical a was invented, I'm assuming that the single-story a came first. Now I've said that I have no idea which one came first. It's not a preference by the way but was a problem when trying to prepare learning materials.

Ah, I have found our answer, Charlie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A

It appears the change came about in Roman times (no pun intended).

it is because of the possibility that the ink would bleed in early printing, the single story would not be as clear in the case of a, there is also a single and double story g, but with the g it is the single story that is used and not the double.

Just scanned it and seems it was the Greeks and Romans but still doesn't explain why typesetters used it.

LFC's answer seems very plausible.

lfc
Interesting, was getting on to g later but that seems to have disappeared somewhat now.

typesetters used it because the double story a was more easily distinguished from the o, it was easier to manufacture, the single story tended to become a o

That will do me for now, thanks for discussion enjoyed it. And newsflash from lfc.

That sounds plausible lfc (not sure about easier to manufacture though).

it is quite difficult to mamufacture a single story a and for it to remain clear and precise

Ah, I can see that now. Thanks. I can sleep easy tonight!

it is not any more difficult to manufacture in that sense, just that with time the single story becomes a o

early typeset manufacturers did not like the idea of the double line that comes down the side of the single story a, quite apart from the problem of the small final tail which tended to wear off

Typical printer!  Trying to save ink by leaving the e out of storey.

sorry about that poker

Did you ever see Stephen Fry's documentary on the Gutenberg Bible, LFC?  An absolutely fascinating study of early printing methods.

Here it is if anyone is interested.  It's well worth a watch, I promise you won't be disappointed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8svE2AjQWYE

yes Pokermonster thanks, i had seen it and watched it again When you saw the replica printing press that they built and the quality of the print on the page it really was better than you would think possible.
a technology that lasted 500 years.

I Kept a VHS copy of PARK ROW (1952)

brilliant newspaper film, a lot of which deals with
hot metal typesetting.

rate the film highly.

thought youtube might have it?

Fascinating thread - justification, letter-spacing, rivers etc ... must surely be a few old Hot Metal Compositors, Readers, Linotype Operators or Monotype Caster Operators on here ...?

dead industry? all desktop publishing now?

Yea pretty much zorro - still a few big printing companies producing books and magazines or specialising in very high quality print such as art catalogues etc. All the small commercial jobbing companies are pretty much obsolete along with the above-mentioned trades.

Anyone seen PARK ROW (1952) ?