I am going to start studing some type faces so I made a specimen wich groups main glyphs by familiar shapes, shows the vertical proportions and three different paragraph settings, one of them helping to measure type space efficiency (do = 1000 glyphs).
I would like to have some commentaries about how could I improve this tool for the study of a type face. The lower case glyphs are about 2 picas height and the upper case about 3.I
This is really useful. I mean really.
You can add a lot of stuff, but start with the basics, like you have. I'd have to think what non-alphanumeric characters to add (eventually), but some quick observations for now:
- Have a regular alphabet setting too (at least a-z).
- Use the cap height as a secondary vertical measure, instead of using it to determine the percentages.
- Show the percentage of "internal leading" too.
And on subsequent pages you might have:
- Some key words (like "the") set large.
- Width calculations.
- Many other wonderful things! :-)
> spanish linguistics on type design improvement.
Hey, there's really nothing written about that for English. You've got yourself a superb topic.
hhp
> width measurements
The simple one is lc alphabet length.
But a smarter one takes letter frequency into account, but then that gets language-specific.
Internal leading is the sum of the space above the ascenders plus below the descenders, and it's a big determinant of the face's apparent size (for a given point size). In some designs (mosly script faces with small x-heights) it can actually be negative! But usually it's about 10%.
hhp
Captured from commoncrawl.org on 25 Apr 2015. original URL