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I find, though that full-hung punctuation is a bit much. When I was publishing Serif in the 90s, I did half-hung punctuation where punctuation at the beginnings
by dhosek 3y ago
I find, though that full-hung punctuation is a bit much. When I was publishing Serif in the 90s, I did half-hung punctuation where punctuation at the beginnings and ends of lines extended just half the width of the character. Most software makes this pretty much impossible,¹ although there are sneaky ways to do it manually: I wasted some time making a nice title page for the manuscript of the novel I’m writing,² titled, We, the Rescued and I set the “We,” on its own line, centered, but it looked off that way. putting a white comma before We helped, but now the off-centeredness went the other way, so I changed the type size of the white comma to half that of the black comma and boom, everything looked much better.³
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1. I did it in TeX. I had to make modified versions of the fonts that had a separate hyphen character which went past the margin and insert manual \penalty0 points after en- and em-dashes since they no longer automatically were breakpoints since the hyphen was not the hyphenchar.
2. Despite my typographic background, I generally try to avoid spending time on manuscript formatting beyond the absolute basics.
3. Still not exactly half-hung punctuation with this trick. The exact hung fraction is left as an exercise to the reader.
- crazygringo 3y agoTotally agreed. You never want it to stand out, you just want everything to look balanced. A slight amount of hanging looks like it's not hanging at all -- it just looks right. The same way the top and bottom of an 'O' are higher/lower than the top and bottom of an 'X', even though it doesn't look like it. It's all about visual weight -- how the eye perceives it. Fully hanging punctuation is just way overdoing it.
- zestyping 3y agoOvershoots are an unfortunate holdover. In many fonts, "C"s and "O"s are too big and "A"s are too tall. I mean, just look at this: https://typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2020_01/overshoot.thumb.png.daaf421910bb62e86e56e457cf8b0e24.png https://typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2020_01/overshoot.th... Or this: https://ilovetypography.com/img/2015/03/Caslon-overshoot-500x2501.jpg https://ilovetypography.com/img/2015/03/Caslon-overshoot-500... Or this: https://ktla.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/06/GettyImages-1166667354.jpg?w=2560&h=1440&crop=1 https://ktla.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/06/GettyIma... Or this: https://live.staticflickr.com/5300/5482446696_1fa1ff2b45_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/5300/5482446696_1fa1ff2b45_b.j... Hideous. Try to follow that baseline with your eye. It's a roller coaster of chaos. Type designers like to add overshoots merely out of habit, not aesthetics. They might have made sense in the lead type era, but simply look like mistakes today.
- trealira 3y agoThey're not hideous. Overshoots sage there because at normal reading sizes sizes, or on poster sizes read from far away, if letters like o, n, O, A, etc. don't have overshoots, then they'll look too small compared to the other letters, even though they're technically the same size. It's an illusion that type designers work around using letter overshoots.
- zestyping 3y agoYes, everyone says that. It's parroted so often that people think it's true. But have you _seen_ it? Please show me an example of type that looks more _uniformly sized_ with overshoots than without, and I'll agree with you.
- dhosek 3y agoLook at sequences of capital letters in Kabel a typeface which doesn’t use overshoots and you will see that you’ve been ignoring overshoots all over the place.
- zestyping 3y agoI don't understand. I'm looking at Kabel and it has lots of overshoots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabel_(typeface)#/media/File:Kabel_new_specimen.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabel_(typeface)#/media/File:K... https://www.freefonts.io/kabel-font-free/ https://www.freefonts.io/kabel-font-free/ Are you thinking of a different typeface?
- trealira 3y agoI have tried to resize letters in FontForge and realized that the letters looked too small when I got rid of the overshoot. Sorry for the late response. I didn't see your reply.
- CharlesW 3y ago> Most software makes this pretty much impossible… I've definitely gone through similar machinations to achieve something less extreme than full "Roman Hanging Punctuation". If you ever need to do this again, Adobe's "Optical Margin Alignment" and Affinity's "Optical alignment"¹ are worth checking out. ¹ https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/opticalAlignment.html?title=Optical%20alignment https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=...
- zestyping 3y agoAny amount of overhang is too much. It makes the edge of the container look bumpy and messy. Even if you think it looks stylish, it nonetheless creates a semantic distraction: it makes paragraphs that start with quotation marks look different from paragraphs that don't, when there is no intended difference in meaning. It costs the reader effort to remember that things that look different are actually supposed to be the same, and reduces your dynamic range for visually conveying meaningful differences. If you want to stylize a quotation mark or draw attention to it, make it a special graphic element, clearly outside the container. Be deliberate. But don't violate the container boundary by misaligning a quotation mark that's part of the text flow; that just looks like an error.
- DemocracyFTW2 3y ago> Any amount of overhang is too much. It makes the edge of the container look bumpy and messy Quite the opposite. When you look at most fonts in detail, the topmost parts of e.g. AEO will differ slightly; this is because visually, the pointed top of the A has much less 'mass' than the flat bar that is the top of E; the O will be higher than the top of the E bar as well. The same applies to the left and right edges; it's not a matter of taste, it's physiological. In so far a truly 'optical margin' or whatever Adobe chose to call it would have to take into account the shape of each singly glyph, not only punctuation. Quotes are only always mentioned because they're the most obvious application; full stops, commas, hyphens—all of these dittels have a minimum of 'flesh' and should therefore be pushed further than, say, an X or an M. But I agree that putting a double quote 100% outside the left margin is a bit too much of a good thing; my guess is that it should be more like 50% or somesuch to avoid the "bumpy and messy"ness that you rightly dislike.
- zestyping 3y agoThe variation in topmost parts that you're describing is called an "overshoot". See the examples in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38449636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38449636 The idea that overshoots are necessary to create the appearance of equal height is a myth; you can see for yourself that they are clearly visible as irregularities when you run your eye along the baseline, mean line, or cap line.