Typophile

The design of punctuation

ebensorkin

When I showed my monospace at the Typecon typecrit one of the items that was brought up was the punctuation. The suggestion was made that I more fully tune the shapes to the letterforms. I am realizing Now I am starting to reconsider it’s design and I am interested in:

- which fonts’ punctuation you admire and why
- things you may have noticed or learned about the relationship between the design of letters and of punctuation
- the way in which a font being a monospace impacts the design punctuation - things like the need for a mono’s punctuation to fill a little bit more space than normal and the need for it to be a bit heavier than normal as well.

‹ Pair for Officina Serif what is this font? ›
ebensorkin

I did find these links as well

http://www.typophile.com/node/35639

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/punc.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/punc2.htm

chuck

I don’t know what your intention for the font is, but as a programmer, who uses monospaced fonts daily, I’ll put my two cents in. I feel most monospaced fonts fail bacause of their punctuation. One of the reasons I think Monaco works so well is it’s punctuation is clear but not overpowering, it’s well balanced with the alphanumeric characters. ProFont’s punctuation is too dark, it overpowers the characters, although it does have a large following. I would like the new Microsoft programming font by Luc(us) de Groot except for the double bowl “g” which bothers me. The punctuation marks have a nice balance but I feel they need a bit more height.

Chuck

ebensorkin

I will have to look at Monaco punctuation again.

ProFont’s punctuation is too dark
Agreed.

I have some questions if you don’t mind:

the double bowl “g”
Are you against them in general, or just in mono’s? Also, can you imagine one that you could like or not really? Why?

What size do you use your mono at & at what screen rez? What OS? With or without smoothing?

Do you care about print at all?

Carl Crossgrove gave me some great tips today and pointed me at the punctuation in the Adobe Pro sets. Very Useful!

I am still interested in hearing more.

Captured from web.archive.org on 20 Nov 2008. view this capture