Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did spend at least 1-2 weeks at the beginning of my thesis solely tweaking the typography. ;)
Doesn't everyone spend a couple weeks figuring out their latex template?
And "cleaning up the bibliography" as well...
A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#62What I wish for is rather than encoding the wavy imperfections in the font, they should be procedurally generated at rasterization time. This way, the graininess can stay at the same resolution regardless of the font-size. As it is now, if you have a 120pt font, the rough edges are magnified. Is there a way to specify something like that in the font language? Or does the rasterization engine have to implement that?
Anything procedurally generated is antithetical to professional font design. Fonts at different sizes are carefully fine-tuned exactly for the reasons that you mentioned, i.e., small features at larger sizes start looking wrong.
Usually, yes, but this font tries to reproduce the imperfections of text printed centuries ago (or, to quote the article, "look badass with its kinks and nicks"), so having two glyphs of the same type look exactly identical feels a bit jarring. Same as with other "rough" fonts which try to emulate stencils, handwriting etc. All of these would benefit from some randomness...
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#63[deleted]
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#64What I wish for is rather than encoding the wavy imperfections in the font, they should be procedurally generated at rasterization time. This way, the graininess can stay at the same resolution regardless of the font-size. As it is now, if you have a 120pt font, the rough edges are magnified. Is there a way to specify something like that in the font language? Or does the rasterization engine have to implement that?
I was already writing a comment about procedural generation before I saw yours. I was thinking about placing shapes on the boundary of a basic character shape, and placing random points within those shapes which then have lines/splines drawn between them. You could change the size of the shape depending on how much you want the shape to vary. That way you can still exercise control over what specific features are preserved. I'm sure someone can come up with something better.
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#65I'm usually a fan of Windows-style font rendering that snaps on-screen text to the pixel grid. But for this typeface it seems to heavily exaggerate the roughness as the different serifs snap all over. The pictures of the print pages look much nicer. How does it look on a Mac monitor?
https://imgur.com/a/93x1FZu non-retina How does it look on windows?
https://imgur.com/a/5UebhP4
Something about taking a screenshot on a scaled display makes my first image (at 125% scaling) look bigger than it should be; at 80% magnification it looks about the same size as it does in my browser, so edges may not come across quite right. (100/125 = 0.8, so that’s probably not a coincidence.)
I set scaling to 100% for the second image, and that one looks true to life size, so it’s probably the better reference.
Edit: On comparison, it’s not the serifs. Maybe it’s the lighter overall color on the page, or maybe it’s the way that autohinting exaggerates the contrast between thick and thin strokes.
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#66This is some top grade dissertation procrastination.
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#67The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').") Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially…
anglo-centrist take of quotation rules
It's an article in English, being discussed in English.
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#68For someone so deeply into typography, they sure seem to have trouble distinguishing a single open quote (‘) from a grave accent (`).
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#69The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').") Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially…
anglo-centrist take of quotation rules
Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
#70The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').") Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially…
That's really informative! Funnily enough, I picked up the habit of using graves for my opening quotes from working with old Unix software like ELisp without any context. I think it's a fine practice, particularly when used as markup that's transformed into curly-quotes on the user-faceing side, and it's even seeped into my handwriting as exaggerated opening quotes. I'll still draw nice curly quotes or mirrored ticks…
> I find the clear distinction between opening and closing delimiters to be more readable than using just single quotes.
The correct characters to use are ‘/“ and ’/”. There is a clear distinction between opening and closing delimiters. I think you're falling for a false dilemma brought on by outdated software that is limited to ASCII (i.e., stuck in the 1960s).