Design notes: essential high punctuation ( – — ‘ ’ “ ” )

a
i

( )
.
,
' "
-

[ ] { }
&
@
?
!
: ;
*
_ = +
/ | \
– —

‘’ “”
^ ` ~
< >
% # $

Many amateur type designers are unaware that the punctuation marks that fontforge shows by default in the ASCII block (or the Latin Supplement block right after it) are not the only punctuation characters in common use. High punctuation marks—characters like the dashes ( – — ) and curly apostrophes and quotes ( ‘ ’ “ ” )—live in another Unicode block (glyph encoding scheme) called General Punctuation, buried beneath a myriad of Vietnamese glyphs and Polytonic Greek letters.

General Punctuation encodes about a hundred assorted punctuation characters that couldn’t be fit into the original ASCII block. Most of them are whitespace characters (we’ll get to those) and obscure glyphs like ‘※’. About a third of them however are commonly used in professional typesetting—including but not limited to the aforementioned dashes and apostrophes, the primes ( ′ ″ ), the ellipsis ( … ), the asterism ( ⁂ ), the daggers ( † ‡ ), and the permille sign ( ‰ ). Any decent font should eventually include these characters (though the primes and asterism are often overlooked), but the essential members are the dashes and curly apostrophes.

To jump to the General Punctuation block, you have to change your font’s encoding to Unicode ( Encoding → Reencode → ISO 10646-1 (Unicode, BMP) ) and go to View → GoTo and select General Punctuation from the dropdown menu on the dialog (or just scroll down until you see punctuation marks). Once you touch the slots you want to create, you can reencode your font back into the regular Latin-1 encoding and fontforge will remember the extra glyphs and include them at the end of your glyph table.

Dashes

Dashes ( – — ) should not be confused with hyphens. They have a different grammatical meaning, even if they are often misused. Dashes come in two lengths—a short dash called a nut or en dash, used for ranges (120–145 miles), conflicts (Iran–Iraq war), scores (54–7), and occasionally as an abbreviation for the word “to” (the New York–Albany train)—and a long dash often simply called a dash or more specifically, an em dash. The em dash is a pause mark that has a meaning somewhere between a semicolon, comma, and colon. Many people who don’t know how to type these characters—or are using a font that doesn’t contain them—replace the en dash with a hyphen (-) and the em dash with two consecutive hyphens (--). Which is wrong. Others simply don’t use dashes, which is just silly. Look in any professionally typeset publication and you will find an abundance of dashes.

The em dash is almost one em long. The en dash is about half as long, and the hyphen about a quarter as long.

Dashes are almost always perfect rectangles, with no beveling or other calligraphic traits. Historically, the em dash got its name because it was supposed to be one em long (the width of a letter ‘M’, in the old days). The en dash was half as long (the width of a letter ‘N’ back then). Of course, just as the ‘M’ and ‘N’ are no longer bound by such strict proportions, neither are the dashes. Em and en dashes in most fonts are about ten percent shorter than a perfect em square and 1:2 em rectangle, respectively. In Floribunda, the en dash is 0.42 ems (420 font units) long, and the em dash is 0.9 ems long. Dashes sit at the same height as the hyphen does, but are often somewhat thinner. Thinner dashes tend to look more elegant.

Design notes: The first punctuation marks

a
i

( )
.
,
' "
-

[ ] { }
&
@
?
!
: ;
*
_ = +
/ | \
– —

‘’ “”
^ ` ~
< >
% # $

There are about seventeen punctuation marks in common use in prose:  . , ; : ? ! ' " - ( ) ‘ ’ “ ” – and —. The nine simplest will be covered in this post.

The period and the comma

• The period is basically the same as the tittle (dot) on the ‘i’, though often slightly larger.
• Periods and other very small baseline-dwelling punctuation marks require padded sidebearings so that they are legibly distinct from the letters before them. Their sidebearings are twice as wide as a typical rounded letter’s.
• Periods sit on the baseline, with a very small undershoot.
• The comma is a period with a tail. The tail extends about one period-height below the baseline.
• The head of the comma is usually a bit thinner than the period, since the comma is longer. It is also a good idea to have the head of the comma be somewhat evocative of the terminals in its typeface.
  

Testing your font in print

We’ve made test texts before, but those were all at the sentence or the paragraph (at a stretch) level. Now that I have a full upper and lowercase glyph set, spaced and all, and some rudimentary punctuation marks, I can set entire passages of text in Floribunda. (Since the last post, I’ve spaced the capitals and added some basic punctuation marks— ‘.’ ‘-’ and ‘,’ . Spacing capitals is done basically the same way that the lowercase letters are spaced; punctuation will be covered in a later post).

Producing test pages is not hard. Just grab some text from a random Wikipedia article (preferably one that contains few numbers or special characters), and format it into columns set in your font. Throw in different-point-sized and ALL CAPS text generously—the capital text in mine is set in faux small capitals (the most bearable of the four typographical ‘faux’s, in my opinion anyway)—and you might want to include some knockout and grayscale type as well. Then just print it out on paper (please be kind to the environment and reuse some computer paper that’s been printed on on the other side—type design does not require blank new paper). Here is the page I used; the passage is taken from the Wikipedia article on Auroras.

Note that the ideal body text font size to use is much smaller than you’re used to specifying. For most typesetters, 12 point type is clumsily gargantuan, and generally reserved for headings and other display text. Most body text in magazines and textbooks is set in about an 8–9 point font (this corresponds to about a 10–11-pixel em square). Don’t believe me? Print out some nine point text and compare it to a copy of TIME magazine. The type will probably be about the same size.

Design notes: The capital R and K

s
o
z
i
v

S
I
V

O
Z
H J
U
X W A Y

G Q
C
E F L T
M

D P
K
N

B
R

The last two letters to design are the ‘K’ and the ‘R’. The ‘K’ should be made first, since the tail of the ‘R’ inherits from it.

K

• The capital ‘K’, like its lowercase version, is built from a stem (‘I’) and the letter ‘X’. The lowercase ‘k’ itself can also be helpful for modeling the tail. ‘K’ is about the same width as the ‘X’, sometimes slightly thinner.
• Inner serifs, of course, are shortened, and the serif on the upper arm expanded, just like with the lowercase ‘k’.
• Often times the arm is extended back past the vertex, so that it connects to the stem (covered in the lowercase ‘k’ tutorial). Here, I made a disjointed ‘K’, where the arm and leg meet at a point.
• If you make a disjointed ‘K’, an optical correction may be in order to prevent the vertex from looking bent down. This involves adding a slight upturn to the vertex. Shown below is an uncorrected ‘K’ (left) and a corrected ‘K’ (right).

Design notes: miscellaneous capital letters ( U B S )

s
o
z
i
v

S
I
V

O
Z
H J
U
X W A Y

G Q
C
E F L T
M

D P
K
N

B
R

At this point, I’ve covered almost all of the “hard” letter forms, and by now, you should be familiar with many of the subtle and mundane rules of type design. So it makes more sense now to just release a few design notes on each of the remaining letters pointing out some oft-overlooked features of their letterforms.

U

• This letter is about the same width as the ‘N’ and the ‘V’.
• Like the ‘M’ and ‘N’, the ‘U’ defies the typical calligraphic stress rules. While some typefaces such as Cambria follow the rules strictly, making ‘U’s with two thick stems, it is overwhelming convention to make the upstroke a hairline, just like in the ‘N’. In fact, the stems are often exactly identical.
• While this varies somewhat, usually the bowl of the ‘U’ is a hairline as well, with stress only appearing left of the letter’s minimum. In other words, as you trace the letter from left to right, the stress disappears at the minimum, just as you’d expect calligraphically, but when the curve comes back up to finish out the letter, the stress never reappears.
• The left stroke is usually identical to the top half of the ‘I’ glyph.
• Curve onset usually occurs about a two-thirds the way down the letter. The bowl usually occupies a rectangle with sides in a 2 : 1 ratio.

Glyph design: zigzag capitals ( M N )

s
o
z
i
v

S
I
V

O
Z
H J
U
X W A Y

G Q
C
E F L T
M

D P
K
N

B
R

There are two letters in the capital alphabet composed of diagonal strokes contained between vertical stems—‘M’, and ‘N’. Because of the letters’ architecture, they violate the typical rules of stress. Strictly, the ‘M’ should go thick–thick–thin–thick (from left to right), and the ‘N’ should consist entirely of stressed strokes. But just like with the ‘z’ (which, strictly, would be entirely hairline), some strokes in the ‘M’ and ‘N’ are arbitrarily made thin so that the stress alternates with each stroke. Owing to the pointed-nib calligraphy pen, which stresses in part based on the direction the stroke is drawn in—up being thin and down being thick—the usual convention is to make the ascending leg of the ‘M’ and both stems of the ‘N’ into hairlines.

Sabon and Minion Pro have slanted stems, while Proforma has vertical stems on its ‘M’.

 The ‘M’ can be made either from the ‘W’, or from the ‘I’ and ‘V’. It depends on the slant of the outer stems. Some typefaces, like Sabon and Minion Pro (and a few sans serifs, like Futura) have slanted stems, others like Proforma have vertical stems. Floribunda will have an unslanted ‘M’, so this tutorial will use the ‘I’ and ‘V’ method. The two ‘I’ glyphs should overlap with the ‘V’ just enough so that their intersection points lie at roughly the same height as the lower edge of the ‘I’ brackets. The left ‘I’ should also be thinned to the hairline thickness.

Glyph design: letters with bowls, part one ( D P )

s
o
z
i
v

S
I
V

O
Z
H J
U
X W A Y

G Q
C
E F L T
M

D P
K
N

B
R

The ‘D’ and ‘P’ are perhaps the most difficult letters of the uppercase alphabet to nail. They require you to blend straight letter forms, like the arms of the ‘E’,  into a round bowl, like the one on the ‘C’.

The ‘D’ can be made by taking the left side of the ‘E’, and attaching it to the bowl of a ‘C’, rotated 180 degrees (never reflected horizontally!).