Typography

[vtk]

It seems several forum participants have opinions and/or technical knowledge about typography, and I suspect this is not limited to fonts used on road signs.  So here's a thread for such conversations.  Have a strong opinion about a font and where it should or should not be used?  Has anyone (besides myself) actually created any fonts they might like to share?  Well here's the place.

[vtk]

My fonts on DaFont.com

It seems a few of my fonts have enjoyed tepid popularity on that site.  The font I'm most proud of is String Literal, which contains over 300 glyphs.

I had intended to release [String Literal] with manually-coded hinting, but a program crash and resulting partial data loss zapped my enthusiasm...

Partial data loss?  Considering I can't seem to find any copies of String Literal with any hinting whatsoever, I think I lost all of the hinting work in that crash, and possibly the last several glyphs I had drawn, which was probably the missing Greek letters.  The version on DaFont.com seems to be even older, though I'm not sure what's missing...

[sammi]

Hmm, that page has your full name, David K█████████.

Also, I like Engineering Plot the best. It looks like the Hershey fonts. I love those.



A few months ago there was a discussion of the Philippines re-adopting Baybayin as the national script. A few fonts of it already exist on the Internet, but none suitable for road signs. Most, if not all, of them were stylized versions, e.g. brush, handwriting, etc. Naturally, I decided to make one. I don't remember how much I did, or if I even exported one. I might make one again.

I was trying to design British-style signs at the time, so the font I designed was based on Transport, and if I could find it in my hard drive I will show you. I might make another one now, but based on the Standard Alphabets (and the Thai sign font). We'll see how it goes.

EDIT: This is what the Thai sign font looks like. Baybayin has similar features to Thai, but with a lot less characters, so my font would turn out a lot like this one.

[vtk]

Hmm, that page has your full name, David K█████████.

Also, I like Engineering Plot the best. It looks like the Hershey fonts. I love those.

It's not that difficult to find my full name, really.  Just one click in the right place on any of my forum posts would reveal it.  As for DaFont.com, I figured I might as well use my full name, since I put it in the copyright field of all the fonts I make.

Glad you like Engineering Plot.  It's based on the ideal lettering style I was taught to use in my drafting classes at Ohio State.  I frequently referred to one of my textbooks from the class while making the font – a textbook for whom one of my professors was a co-author. 

[hbelkins]

What's the aversion to full names? Mine's been known to everybody since I first got active on MTR. A few here on the forum even know what the initials stand for.

[Duke87]

Those of us who were children in the 90s were all taught "never tell anyone your real name, your age, where you live, etc. on the internet". The key intent was to protect us from child predators, but many adults also followed the same advice, insisting on remaining anonymous as a matter of personal security. Today, thanks to social media, sharing your real name over the internet is now normal and "what's the aversion?" is perhaps a valid question.

But nonetheless, some people may choose not to reveal certain information to certain groups - if someone posts a link to something which contains their full name as a minor detail that could have been overlooked, and they have not ever visibly revealed their full name here, I can see the courtesy of alerting them to that fact in case it is a situation they wish to remedy.



On topic, though... I must admit that fonts are probably something I would never have thought too much about were I not a roadgeek or a railfan. The discussion about fonts on road signs has been the biggest thing fueling my interest in the subject, second is the discussion of fonts on NYC Transit signage (and Massimo Vignelli's map that everyone loves or hates).

[Scott5114]

Those are some pretty nice fonts, Vid. I downloaded a couple of them. What program did you use to create them?

My favorite type of fonts are traditional serif fonts, suitable for running text. Decorative fonts are a dime a dozen and are often of such limited utility that they don't hold my interest much. My favorite is probably Electra, which has gone out of fashion and isn't seen much anymore:


Caledonia is a similar font that I like quite a bit:


As for sans-serifs, my favorite (after FHWA Series!) is most likely Futura, which I use for all of my small business's product, packaging, and branding design. I'm sure you've seen it before:

[sammi]

You know what Futura reminds me of?



Of course it's not the same typeface, but you could see the resemblance. And when they released the subway font for computers, the lowercase (which previously didn't exist) was based on Futura.

[1995hoo]

I'm in the practice of law and I'm a bit of a stickler for the typography in my written work product to the extent court rules allow for it. The Virginia Supreme Court has a bizarre rule requiring submissions be in either Courier, Arial, or Verdana and no other font, so there's not much you can do there (you use Arial if you have much sense). Otherwise, for printed stuff like briefing and the like I'm partial to a font called Equity published by Matthew Butterick, who is the author of an excellent book called Typography for Lawyers (which, despite the name, is an excellent volume for anyone who does a lot of written work; he even uses a highway sign as an example of the importance of typography at one point).

I have a document due this coming Monday that's bumped right up against the page limit....all the typography tricks will come into play on this one, like using "Exactly 24-point" spacing instead of MS Word's "double-spacing" that's actually not double-spacing, turning on auto-hyphenation at the ends of the lines, etc. I much prefer the way the federal courts of appeals do it: If you use a proportionally-spaced font, you have a word count limit rather than a page limit. Makes it much easier, and you can also do things like using larger margins than one inch so there's less text on each page.

One of my real hang-ups is when people use a hyphen instead of an en dash or a spaced en dash when an em dash is required. MS Word's autocorrect is part of the problem here: A lot of people type two hyphens surrounded by spaces to get a dash. Word changes that to an en dash. 99% of the time the correct character for the context is an em dash, however.

I also hate seeing how many people get the leading apostrophe backwards, using an opening single quotation mark when they need an apostrophe. I thought I had a picture of a sign showing this error, but I can't find it, so here's a link. I see this error even in newspaper headlines, which is just embarrassing: http://practicaltypography.com/apostrophes.html

Edited to add: I found the picture. The character before the word "HOOS" is incorrect.




Here are the two signs mentioned earlier followed by a link to the website. The pictures appear on the page titled "What is typography?"





http://typographyforlawyers.com/index.html

[formulanone]

I would figure Courier would be the required font in all legal cases. It just seems entirely official, concise in appearance, without pretense, and quite legible...meant to be read slowly.

On that note, I prefer Georgia when writing emails and letters. I know it has really long serifs and you either love or hate the numbers (drop cap? I forget the term for those), but it has a certain charm without being over-played nor illegible.

[1995hoo]

I would figure Courier would be the required font in all legal cases. It just seems entirely official, concise in appearance, without pretense, and quite legible...meant to be read slowly.

....

Thankfully, almost nobody except the New Jersey appellate courts requires Courier anymore, and good riddance. It's an old-fashioned outdated font from the typewriter era. It also wastes huge amounts of space in legal writing due to the format used for legal citations. For some reason, the legal citation guides (with the exception of the University of Chicago's "Maroonbook") require lots of periods and extraneous symbols. Three examples:

"28 U.S.C. § 1292" instead of "28 USC 1292"

"Klayman v. Obama, 957 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2014)" instead of "Klayman v. Obama, 957 FS2d 1 (DDC 2014)" <----The use of "F. Supp." and "F. Supp. 2d" is particularly annoying because in some other situations they call for the abbreviation "S." for "Supplement." It's unclear why the extra three letters are needed in this instance.

"State v. Bellar, 217 P.3d 1094, 1110 (Or. Ct. App. 2009) (Sercombe, J., dissenting)"–what I find annoying here is the unnecessary abbreviation "Ct." called for by most legal citation guides. "Or. App." alone is sufficient to tell you it's the Oregon Court of Appeals because it wouldn't be published in P.3d if it weren't from a court! There is no reason to include "Ct." in these sorts of abbreviations.

The reason this matters in the context of the typography is that in a monospaced font like Courier, you waste massive amounts of space because every character has the same width. A period takes up the same amount of space on the page as a capital "M." If you're up against a page limit, using Courier costs you a lot of space. You automatically gain a bunch of room simply by switching to a proportionally-spaced font. This is one reason why the federal courts of appeals now prescribe a word limit if you use a proportionally-spaced font but a page limit if you use a monospaced font. (Note they also require text that is at least 14 points.)

When I was in law school, the legal writing professors were concerned about people playing games with the fonts and getting too much space, so they set a page limit (the idea of word count limits had not occurred to them) and they required the use of Courier. But it backfired–they found that some printers output a different number of lines on the page than others, so they then passed a rule that said you were entitled to have 27 lines of text on a page and if your printer output fewer than that when you used 10 cpi Courier with double-spacing, you could adjust the spacing only to the degree needed to give you 27 lines.

Most attorneys nowadays default to Times New Roman. I've even heard some people say you are foolish to use anything else because that's the font judges are "used to" seeing. Rubbish. The key is to use a font that makes you work easy to read and legible. The US Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit actively admonish people NOT to use Times New Roman because it is too narrow. It's ideal for newspapers, where text is in narrow columns, but it's less optimum for larger-format text. See the Seventh Circuit's guidelines on page 140 of this document: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/Rules/handbook.pdf

That's not to say Times New Roman is BAD, of course. I wind up using it frequently, even though I prefer other fonts, simply for compatibility reasons. I know if I use that font that it will display properly when I send a document to someone else and the pagination will be the same.

[vtk]

Those are some pretty nice fonts, Vid. I downloaded a couple of them. What program did you use to create them?

An ancient piece of abandonware called Softy has been my tool of choice.  It's very primitive, maybe a step and a half above authoring a TTF file directly in a hex editor.  I coded a custom utility for calculating intersections and performing other operations on quadratic Bézier curves to assist in my outline editing.  For hinting work (which is not present in any of my DaFont.com offerings) I use a beta version of TTHMachine, which is similarly primitive.

Potential future font projects which involve drafting letterforms in CAD will probably be coded as SVG fonts using Wordpad and some custom software I write to help automate the translation, and then automated conversion to other formats using tools found on the Internet.

One of my real hang-ups is when people use a hyphen instead of an en dash or a spaced en dash when an em dash is required. MS Word's autocorrect is part of the problem here: A lot of people type two hyphens surrounded by spaces to get a dash. Word changes that to an en dash. 99% of the time the correct character for the context is an em dash, however.
...
I also hate seeing how many people get the leading apostrophe backwards, using an opening single quotation mark when they need an apostrophe.

I wrote a blog post on this issue.  I believe the leading apostrophe problem is a Wordism as well; Word will convert every apostrophe to either an opening or closing single quote, even if it's semantically supposed to be an apostrophe.  (I may be guilty of surrounding em dashes with ordinary word spaces, though if I'm really making a point to do it right I know I need a nonbreaking hair space before and a hair space after.)

And then there's the misuse of quote marks as generic decorative sprinkles.  To me it's exactly the same as that episode of Friends where Joey didn't know when to use the air quotes gesture.  For example:

DESICCANT
"DO NOT EAT"

Safety
Do It
"Right"

And let us not forget every last on-screen label on The Bernie Mac Show...

[sammi]

And then there's the misuse of quote marks as generic decorative sprinkles.  To me it's exactly the same as that episode of Friends where Joey didn't know when to use the air quotes gesture.

Reminds me of when I went to use the washroom restroom in the body shop in Ann Arbor, MI.



OT: The door said this:

[briantroutman]

I also hate seeing how many people get the leading apostrophe backwards...

I've gotten into the practice (on my Mac) of entering two single apostrophes to get an open/close pair, then deleting the first one.

Leave it to Beaver is an artifact of the '50s. Not the "˜50s, 50's, or '50s.

I'm also starting to get annoyed by the neutered Selectric-style straight quotes that default on my iPhone. But the workaround (holding down the quote key until the palette of alternates pops up) gets old quickly.

[vtk]

Leave it to Beaver is an artifact of the '50s. Not the "˜50s, 50's, or '50s.

According to my high school grammar textbook, 50's is correct. When a word is meant to express instances of the word itself and not the word's actual meaning, the plural uses an 's ending, and apparently this rule overrides the contraction usage of the apostrophe.  On the other hand, my high school textbooks might not have presented the majority opinion on obscure rules like this.

Also, semantically, I contend that an apostrophe should always be the codepoint 39 apostrophe, not the codepoint 8217 closing single quote.  Graphically, the two characters should look about the same.  (Is there a codepoint for ambiguous single quote, distinct from apostrophe?)

[1995hoo]

Most style guides I've seen call for not using an apostrophe in usage like "1950s" or "'50s" (example: "Eisenhower was president during much of the 1950s."), but I've also seen a couple that acknowledge that in the past the apostrophe was standard. I wouldn't be surprised if one were to see something of a generational difference on things like that.

I wish the computer keyboard had maintained the cent sign ¢ that appears as Shift+8 on a typewriter. You seldom see the cent sign these days because people don't know how to type it, and I've even seen highway signs that omit it–the ones that most readily come to mind are in the Orlando area on Route 417, where some signs say things like "PAY TOLL $.75" (which, from a pedantic point of view, is incorrect because it omits the zero before the decimal point). I don't see why they can't use "PAY TOLL 75¢." Maybe they figure when they raise the tolls, ".75" is less text to "blue-out" than "75¢" is (the dollar sign would remain, as I presume they'd raise the toll to at least a dollar). Funny thing is, it's easier to type the cent sign on an iPhone or iPad as long as you're using the on-screen keyboard (simply hold down the dollar sign key) than it is on a PC (Alt+0162).



I'm curious how you guys feel about one space between sentences versus two. I use one except in the rare instance where I have to use Courier. There's no real need to use two spaces with a proportionally-spaced font. But I know for some people it's an ingrained habit they learned in their high-school typing classes. I never took such a class, though for a long time I did use two spaces because my parents had always taught me that was the standard and because I was required to use Courier at various times in school (as noted previously in this thread). I broke myself of the habit about 10 or so years ago.

I can see from looking at the other posts in this thread that "vtk" uses two and the others appear to use one.

[DaBigE]

Most style guides I've seen call for not using an apostrophe in usage like "1950s" or "'50s" (example: "Eisenhower was president during much of the 1950s."), but I've also seen a couple that acknowledge that in the past the apostrophe was standard. I wouldn't be surprised if one were to see something of a generational difference on things like that.

Ditto. Same thing my electronic publishing prof said in college. Even our firm's style guide (not that anyone else has taken the time to read it ), forbids the use of the apostrophe when using acronyms, filetypes, and dates, unless they're showing ownership of something. PDFs not PDF's

I'm curious how you guys feel about one space between sentences versus two. I use one except in the rare instance where I have to use Courier. There's no real need to use two spaces with a proportionally-spaced font. But I know for some people it's an ingrained habit they learned in their high-school typing classes. I never took such a class, though for a long time I did use two spaces because my parents had always taught me that was the standard and because I was required to use Courier at various times in school (as noted previously in this thread). I broke myself of the habit about 10 or so years ago.

I can see from looking at the other posts in this thread that "vtk" uses two and the others appear to use one.

Unless you're using a manual typewriter, one space only. The afore-mentioned prof joked/threatened anyone caught using two spaces would, at the very least, fail the assignment. Two spaces causes "rivers of white space" to form when using full justification.

That class was arguably one of the most useful in my college career (in addition to civil engineering, I minored in technical communications). Rarely a day goes by where something from that class appears in my regular work. It was also the same class I learned Adobe InDesign (MS Word on steroids).

[sammi]

I'm curious how you guys feel about one space between sentences versus two. I use one except in the rare instance where I have to use Courier. There's no real need to use two spaces with a proportionally-spaced font. But I know for some people it's an ingrained habit they learned in their high-school typing classes. I never took such a class, though for a long time I did use two spaces because my parents had always taught me that was the standard and because I was required to use Courier at various times in school (as noted previously in this thread). I broke myself of the habit about 10 or so years ago.

I can see from looking at the other posts in this thread that "vtk" uses two and the others appear to use one.

Unless you're using a manual typewriter, one space only. The afore-mentioned prof joked/threatened anyone caught using two spaces would, at the very least, fail the assignment. Two spaces causes "rivers of white space" to form when using full justification.

My mom always types with two spaces between sentences. I had a piece of text that I had her check once, and she replaced all single spaces with double spaces. Good thing I just had to sed -e 's/  / /g'.

That class was arguably one of the most useful in my college career (in addition to civil engineering, I minored in technical communications). Rarely a day goes by where something from that class appears in my regular work. It was also the same class I learned Adobe InDesign (MS Word on steroids).

I think InDesign is a lot more like Publisher than Word. Adobe doesn't really have word processing software.

[KEVIN_224]

It really bugs me when a local sandwich shop or store sticks an apostrophe where it doesn't belong:

ALL YOU CAN EAT! WILD WEDNESDAY'S!!

Probably the same people who think your so special!

[formulanone]

I was taught the double-space after a period in typing class many years ago. Thanks to HTML's refusal to understand multiple continual spaces without the use of "&nbsp", I managed to wean myself off that practice.

Apple makes use of the double-space on the iPhone by (in)conveniently adding the period, if desired.

(Personally, I'm not enough of a stickler to care which post-period style is used...there's so many other annoyances out there, and half my own sentences barely make sense, anyhow.)

The incorrectly-used apostrophe does bug me. Other than pluralized possessive goofs, I don't remember such widespread usage of  the "pointless apostrophe" (that is, added for no reason at all) until comparatively recently.

[1995hoo]

It really bugs me when a local sandwich shop or store sticks an apostrophe where it doesn't belong:

ALL YOU CAN EAT! WILD WEDNESDAY'S!!

Probably the same people who think your so special!

How about Christmas cards? For years, my cousin and her husband have sent out those family-photo cards. They'd be fine except they say "Merry Christmas from the Swanzey's." None of us wanted to be the dick who pointed out the error, of course, so now they've continued to send those cards for years....and then maybe two or three years ago my cousin's brother and his wife started sending out a family photo card....you guessed it, "Merry Christmas! The Costagliola's."

[vtk]

I use one except in the rare instance where I have to use Courier. There's no real need to use two spaces with a proportionally-spaced font.

How the flying Frutiger does that make any sense?  I type two spaces between sentences because there should be more space between them.  Simply using a proportional font doesn't accomplish this.  In a monospace font like Courier, the spaces are already a bit wider than in a proportional font, and the period takes up way more space than it needs; really, this is the one case where one doesn't need an extra space between sentences!

[sammi]

How the flying Frutiger

I love this.

[txstateends]

Seeing this thread reminded me of a newspaper at the home of a relative east of Dallas many years ago.  A car dealer there would run ads in it with their address as

Henderson, Hwy.

instead of Henderson Hwy.  This was despite the fact that the car dealer wasn't outside the city limits; it had a city address.  I don't know why they'd use the generic (and incorrectly punctuated) one.  I'm not sure how much of that was the fault of the car dealer, and how much fault rested with the newspaper.  I'm guessing the newspaper had the most to do with it.  They were always misspelling and pulling other printing stunts like the car dealer's ad.

(uhoh, just read the 2-spaces thing, shades of typing class I guess )

[1995hoo]

I use one except in the rare instance where I have to use Courier. There's no real need to use two spaces with a proportionally-spaced font.

How the flying Frutiger does that make any sense?  I type two spaces between sentences because there should be more space between them.  Simply using a proportional font doesn't accomplish this.  In a monospace font like Courier, the spaces are already a bit wider than in a proportional font, and the period takes up way more space than it needs; really, this is the one case where one doesn't need an extra space between sentences!

In professionally-typeset material, there are never two spaces between sentences. Never. People did that with typewriters because typewriter fonts do not use the same proportions as the fonts generally used by professional typesetters. People seldom use typewriters anymore and most people don't use typewriter fonts (such as Courier) unless forced to do so, although there are some oddballs out there who are exceptions. I am a strong proponent of the position that material one creates using one's computer should look as professionally typeset as possible within the constraints of whatever rules govern what you're doing (for example, a court rule requiring double-spacing).

The extra space is not needed between sentences with a proportionally-spaced font. With a monospaced font, the period being the same width as everything else makes it less apparent when the space is between sentences as opposed to between words, especially when the work you're doing involves the use of lots of periods in other places that may not be the end of a sentence–for example, a common short citation form for the Klayman case cited in my earlier comment might be "Klayman, 957 F. Supp. 2d at 14" (denoting the cited material appears on page 14 of Volume 957 of the second series of the Federal Supplement). In this case, there are multiple instances of a period followed by a space at a location other than the end of a sentence, but if you're using Courier, it's less apparent.

Thankfully, I almost never use Courier nor any other monospaced font except very rarely in a table if I need numbers to line up a certain way.

The discussion on this web page (excerpted from the book I mentioned earlier) addresses the issue.