(Apologies, as I am not (yet) formally design/typographically educated.)
A simple straightforward question:
A ‘book’ variant of a font is designed to be more effective in a situations where there is heavy or continuous text, as in, in a book?
Yes/No/Maybe?
Are there generic similarities in terms of the difference between normal and book variants? For example, is the tracking on book variants generally less/more?
Thanks for your drips of knowledge.
To me a book version should be optimized for a optical size of 9pt. So it will work in a range from 7 - 10pt. It should be wider and a bit bolder than the common 12pt Design. But some designers and foundrys use the term book in a very lax way and made minor changes compared to the 12pt design.
Most text types are issued without optical sizes, such that a good deal of the type’s structure is determined by the requirement that it work well enough at 9 pt and 96 pt. A book version - not really a weight so much as an optical size - should work better at the normal sizes for immersive reading - 10 to 14 pt, say.
The word BOOK refers to the weight variant and nothing else. Very few typefaces have optical sizing. However, that’s not to say people aren’t working on this. More and more you will find DISPLAY, SUBHEAD, TEXT, and CAPTION in PRO versions of fonts. In such typefaces as Adobe Garamond Premier Pro and other typefaces, not OT, but their designer’s are aware of the needs of today’s users.
From the Wiki - http://typophile.com/wiki/weight …
The visual darkness or lightness of the strokes in a character: ultralight, light, book, medium, regular, semibold, black, ultrablack, extrablack, etc.
…although I think there was some recent debate as to where book should fall in the spectrum.
Or regular coming between medium and semi-bold?
ultralight, light, regular, book, medium, semibold, black, ultrablack, extrablack
Tim
Captured from web.archive.org on 5 Jan 2007. view this capture