![]() ![]() titling environment for a tighter appearance. in footnotes, and to decrease it in a larger, e.g. It's good practice, among those with the right tools and proper know-how, to increase tracking for very small text, to improve readability e.g. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well. One may also note that minute adjustments of the space between letters of a fount, uniformly throughout the entire text (›tracking‹), are a common way to (1) deal with type of inferior quality, such as when we have to use a fount that's simply badly spaced (or spaced with other uses in mind than your own), as in too loosely or too tightly, and to (2) adjust type for certain point sizes above or below reading size. A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. Then there's considerations of historical ›correctness‹, such as when a typographic project follows a specific model that happens to include letterspaced lowercase. Blackletter type, for example, has seen somewhat of a revival, and in that context letterspacing is a common and perfectly legitimate way of emphasising text. Plus, there's still situations where letterspaced lowercase simply has to be used. In a ›light‹ context though, such as in bibliographies with lots of abbreviations, it'll lose its emphasising effects, which allows it to be used for purposes of differentiation instead.« (Willberg/Forssmann 1997: ›Lesetypgraphie‹) In a ›thick‹ surrounding, it'll act as more active emphasis that draws attention to itself in a somewhat shady way. Its effects will vary depending on its typographic surroundings. »Letterspaced lowercase is a particularly hard-to-master way of emphasis in which only master typographers should get involved. It remains sensible to teach people to stop stealing sheep, but then again, rules are there to be broken (by those who've mastered them). PS, re: stealing at the time when the doctrine to stop letterspacing lowercase text was issued, there were good paedagogical reasons for it, and its effects - the almost exclusive use of italics instead of letterspacing for emphasis purposes - were indeed a step forward in terms of text esthetics. \lsstyle is a regular attribute in my sectioning styles when using all-caps or small caps. I've been using both fontspec and microtype in pretty much all of my documents for a couple of years now, and haven't noticed any mutual intolerances. The Renderer=Basic problem that you mention seems to have been fixed. ![]() It'll cancel the preceding, unnecessary whitespace in front of the first letter that \textls would produce in that situation. In addition to \textls, microtype provides \textls* for use at the beginning of a line. Microtype provides \textls, which you can use for local ad-hoc specification of the tracking amount. Whereas fontspec won't work outside the realm of Lua and XeTeX, microtype is compatible with pdfTeX as well, making it a lot easier to transfer a document between those two realms if necessary. ![]() Microtype's feature has been around for some 10 years now it's tried and tested, and its benefits and limitations seem well documented. However, there's a couple of reasons to prefer the functional equivalent provided by microtype ( \textls and \lsstyle). When we experience disappointment with the relationship with letters let's not be afraid to do what come naturally to us: Let's draw.Īs we say in Berlin, there are many ways to bake a parrot.As of March 2015, to my knowledge there's no reason not to use LetterSpace=. Background: 'Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep. When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful. ![]() The spoon and the letter are tools one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page. If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty. Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. Typography for the Twentieth-Century Reader A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with. ![]()
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