Thoughts Made Visible

Everything you need to know about typography, language, and thought

"Typography is an extension of our thinking; an extension that allows us to make our thoughts visible, not only through the meaning of the words themselves, but through the their shape, size, color, and individual personalities."

All images and information in this chapter was edited in full

by Alisha Denomme with information gathered online from www.ilovetypography.com, www.fonts.com and Wikipedia.

Chapter 1

Ligatures Glyphs An Introduction to Ligatures and Glyphs in Language Today

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of written letters and characters. Its meaning is conveyed in words like hieroglyph (Egyptian “high holy writing”) and petroglyph (aboriginal markings made on rock).

Gorgeous Glyphs

The word glyph has many different applications throughout time and across many subjects. Usually it means to put a mark on a surface to convey a message or to contribute to an overall meaning. In typography, it is refers to a single piece of a typeface; it is also—sometimes incorrectly—referred to as a “character.” A glyph is a single representation of a typographic character in a typeface, regardless of what that typographic character would otherwise be called. For example, an italic letter ‘a’ and a Roman letter ‘a’ are two corresponding but different glyphs of the same character, these are sometimes referred to as alternates.

A language with a large alphabet or complex writing system will have more alternates, where one character may correspond to several glyphs, or several characters to one glyph­—as in the case of accents, which are also called diacritics.

The roots of the word glyph comes from the Greek word gluphein meaning: a symbolic figure that is engraved or carved, which was the beginning

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In most Latin languages the dot on a lower-case ‘i’ is not a separate glyph because it does not convey any distinction, and an ‘i’ in which the dot has been accidentally omitted is still likely to be read as such. However, in Turkish, it is a glyph because the language has two distinct versions of the letter ‘i’, with and without a dot.

In Japanese syllabaries, a number of the characters are made up of more than one separate mark, but in general these separate marks are not glyphs because they have no meaning by themselves.

However in some cases, additional marks fulfill the role of diacritics, to differentiate distinct characters.

Such additional marks constitute glyphs, as do punctuation marks.

In general, a diacritic is a glyph unto its own, even if it is “joined up” with the rest of the character like a cedilla in French, the ogonek in several other languages, or the stroke on a Nordic ø. Some characters such as ‘æ’ in Icelandic and the ‘ß’ in German are sometimes regarded as glyphs; they were originally ligatures, but over time have become characters in their own right,

and these languages treat them as separate letters.

However a ligature such as “ffi ”, which is treated as a single unit, is arguably not a glyph as this is just essentially an allographic feature. In normal handwriting, even long words are often joined up in cursive writing, without the pen leaving the paper, and the form of each written letter will often vary depending on which letters precede and follow it, but that does not make the whole word into a single glyph.

English is one of the few European languages that does not have many words that contain diacritical marks. Exceptions are unassimilated foreign loanwords, including borrowings from French and Spanish that frequently appear with the diacritic like café, and résumé which is critical to distinguish it from the verb ‘resume’.

One character may correspond to several glyphs, or several characters to one glyph—as in the case of accents …

Lovely Ligatures The root word ligature comes from the Latin word ligatus, which means to tie or bind. In medicine, a ligature means: a filament or thread used to tie something, like a blood vessel to prevent it from bleeding, such as stitches. So it is no surprise that in typography, a ligature means to bind two or more characters into one. However, a ligature is not simply two letters arbitrarily glued together, the two letters are crafted into a single letter or— technically speaking—a single glyph.

Ligatures were first invented for metal printing presses in the 15th century. The metal character pieces of the machine did not allow certain character such as the ‘f ’ and the ‘i’ to be placed close enough together. Ligatures also flourished because they turned out to be a great time saver

fi fi Ligature

Not Ligature

when setting type on a printing press; for example, instead of having to set an ‘f ’ and an ‘i’, a single ligature block could be used instead.

The most common ligatures are ff, , , ffi and ffl, and they are referred to as f-ligatures. Other letter combinations in a regular ligature palette include, but are certainly not limited to: ae, th, st, tt, ct, AE and Th. There are also unique decorative ligatures that are not standard in the typical 256 character typeface layout, and are usually located in alternate and extended fonts or expert sets.

Sometimes decorative ligatures are found in nonstandard locations within a font and can be located only in the character map.

Today, modern type designers create ligatures because they look better than setting the same character combinations individually, and also to solve the problem of characters that crash into each other when set in adjacent positions. Learning when and how to use ligatures—and when not to—is an important typographic skill. Ligatures should be used with extreme care (or avoided entirely) if you plan to adjust the overall letterspacing of the text containing these combinations. Since a ligature is a single character, its internal spacing won’t change when you tighten or loosen the letterspacing. If the ligatures’ letters do not match the spacing or

[Typophiles] have grown so attached to beauty of ligatures that it definitely would be heartbreaking to lose them entirely.

tracking of the rest of the text, use non-ligature characters. It is almost always unnecessary to use ligatures for sans serif type faces as there is typically little conflict between letterforms. And it is especially important to watch or otherwise avoid ligatures when creating type to be read on screen.

Letters that touch on-screen can create lumps that are impossible to read, so you want the letters to be as separate and distinct as possible, sometimes to the point of adding a bit of extra tracking.

While ligatures are certainly in all aspects beautiful letterforms, the most basic problem with them is that they were a technological solution that is simply no longer needed. However, it would seem that typophiles and traditionalists have grown so attached to the beauty of ligatures that it definitely would be heartbreaking to lose them entirely.

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A ligature is not simply two letters arbitrarily glued together, the two letters are crafted into a single letter or­—technically speaking—a single glyph.

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The body copy font used in this chapter is Bell MT in Regular, Italic, and Bold.

Bell is a modern typeface with vertical stress and a wedge serif. It was designed

by Richard Austin in 1788 while working in John Bell’s British Type Foundry.

å é î ò ü ñ Common Keyboard Shortcuts for Glyphs and Diacritics in Apple

In Adobe products there is usually a window called “Glyphs” that will open up the glyph palette for any given font. However it can be time consuming to search through a pallet when writing in a foreign language. There are quick keyboard shortcuts that will give you the most common diacritics in any typeface. For Apple, often you will type “option+glyph” followed the letter that needs the diacritic, however some diacritics respond only to certain characters. And sometimes pressing the “option+glyph” will give you just the singular glyph without the diacritic option.

Option+e inserts the acute accent é as in café, limóne, and está.

Option+s inserts the German eszett double-s ß glyph as Maßstab and makes the sz sound.

Option+` (the character above ~ on the key below esc) inserts the grave accent ò as in Voilà!

Option+o inserts the streg stroked ø glyph as in the Norwegian nevø.

Option+c inserts the cedilla ç as in façade and curaçao. This creates the glyph, to insert the diacritic (¸) use: option+shift+z.

Option+shift+? inserts the Spanish ¿ and option+1 inserts the ¡ as in ¿Comprendes? and ¡Sí!

Option+n inserts the tilde accent ñ as in España and São Paulo. In Spanish the ñ is considered a separate character in the alphabet.

Option+a inserts the bolle å Nordic glyph.

Option+i inserts the circumflex î in huître and fenêtre.

Option+u inserts the umlaut ü as in Übermensch and Götterdämmerung.

Option+- inserts the en-dash (–) which often replaces the word to as in Green Bay beat Chicago 31–30.

Option+shift+- inserts the em-dash (—) which often indicates a parenthetical thought or some similar interpolation replaces a comma or colon, or a interrupted, unfinished sentence.

Option+g inserts the copyright symbol © that is used to mark a copyrighted idea.

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generally, just a glyph. The Latin phrase et cetera (meaning: and so forth) usually written as etc. can be abbreviated to &c. The & is the only ligature that is represented on English keyboards.

And Per Se And The word ampersand is comes from of the phrase and per se and meaning “and–of itself–and”.

Traditionally, it was common practice in English to end the alphabet with &, thus it would be recited as: X, Y, Z and per se and. This last phrase was routinely slurred to ampersand, and the term crept into common English usage around 1837. The glyph originated as a ligature in the first century a.d in old Roman cursive from the word et—the Latin word for and. Today it is now technically considered a monogram, or more

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The ampersand is now rarely used when writing paragraphs. The main surviving use of the ampersand is in the formal names of businesses.

If it is a registered name it should never be replaced with the word and. The ampersand is also commonly used for book and movie titles, such as“Harry & Tonto”. In these cases, the & is interchangeable with the word and and the distinction between them is mostly aesthetic.

However, in film credits, the & indicates a closer collaboration than and. The ampersand is used by The Writers Guild of America to denote when two writers collaborated on a specific script, rather than rewrote another writer’s work. Today, with mobile phone usage and text messaging, the ampersand is gaining new life in SMS language both as a representation for the word and, and in rebus form, such as pl& in place of the word planned.

[The ampersand] originated as a ligature in the 1st century a.d in old Roman cursive from the word et—the Latin word for and.

Pretty Punctuation There are nearly thousands of glyphs that are not characters that we use everyday, and not know their true meaning. Some are seen often, and some are seen rarely, or never at all. Most of them are on the keyboard, but sometimes they can only be found in the glyph pallet. The number of glyphs in a typeface is set by the typographer. Some glyphs may have more than one use, and may mean one thing when used literature and have a completely different meaning when used, say, mathematically.

The commercial at @ is its true typogrographical name but it is more commonly known as the at sign or at symbol. It is simply an abbreviation of the word at. The symbol developed as shorthand for each at—the symbol resembling a small ‘a’ inside a

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Hervé Bazin’s “love point” is featured in his 1966 book Plumons l’Oiseau

small ‘e’. Its most common modern use is in e-mail addresses, where it stands for located at. The symbol was included on the keyboard of 1885 American Underwood, the first typewriter, and remained largely obscure until Raymond Tomlinson, an American programmer, used it in 1971 as the natural division within the first e-mail message.

The asterisk *, commonly known as the star, is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often pronounce it as star. The asterisk is derived from the need of a symbol to indicate date of birth for the printers of family trees in feudal times. The original shape was a seven-armed star, each arm like a teardrop shooting from the center. For this reason, in some computer circles it is called a splat.

In math it is often used to represent multiplication.

In literature it is used to call out a footnote.

The caret ^, also called a wedge, up-arrow, hat, control character, or chevron, refers to the spacing symbol in proofreading. The caret was originally, and continues to be, used in handwritten form as a proofreading mark to indicate where a punctuation mark, word, or phrase should be inserted in a document. The term comes from the Latin caret meaning it lacks. In mathematics, the caret signifies exponentiation.

The ellipsis … or more commonly referred to as dot dot dot is indeed a glyph of its own with its own unique spacing. It can indicate an intentional omission of a word in the original text, often in a pull quote. An ellipsis can also be used to indicate a pause in speech, an unfinished thought, or—when used at the end of a sentence—trailing off into silence. An ellipsis may also imply an unstated alternative indicated by context. For example, when Count Dracula says “I never drink ... wine,” the implication is that he may not drink wine but does drink something else.

The interrobang—or quesclamation mark— is a nonstandard English-language punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of the question mark,

also called the interrogative point, and the exclamation mark, also known in printers’ jargon as the bang. The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks. A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question. American Martin K. Speckter invented the interrobang in 1962.

Irony punctuation: Though in the English language there is no standard accepted method to denote irony or sarcasm in written conversation, several forms of punctuation have been proposed.

Among the oldest and frequently attested are the percontation point, also known as the ironicon, invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s, and the irony mark, furthered by Alcanter de Brahm in the 19th century. Both of these marks were represented visually by a backwards question mark. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’Oiseau (“Pluck the Bird,” 1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the doubt point , certitude point , acclamation point , authority point , indignation point , and love point

!

Sometimes they are used to strike out portions of a word to avoid offending by using the full form of a profanity, commonly seen as f*ck.

Often, a special ornate glyph is used to mark the end of an article magazine or spread.

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