Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Path: news.cinenet.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!newsfeeds.sol.net!europa.clark.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in3.uu.net!uucp4.uu.net!world!kibo From: kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) Subject: Re: Font design question Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself) Message-ID: X-Kibo-Equipment: a distributed Lego robot (distributed by accident) Date: Sat, 17 May 1997 09:00:01 GMT X-Battlestar-Galactica-Date: 9581 centons, 71 microns, .04 mugars Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 References: <5leekh$cnt$1@nnrp01.primenet.com> Nntp-Posting-Host: ppp0a003.std.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: welcome datacomp X-Newsreader: Yet Another NewsWatcher 2.4.0 Lines: 142 Xref: news.cinenet.net alt.religion.kibology:29864 [WARNING: BORING SERIOUS POST] mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) wrote: > > nickb@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema) wrote: > > > > The lowercase letter "g" can be rendered one of two ways. Either it > > can have a cute little cat-tail descender like most of us use when > > writing print, or it can have this huge ugly descending lasso-type deal. > > > > Where did the lasso come from? I suspect it comes from cursive writing > > where everything's a loop, but that seems far-fetched considering this > > only seems to occur in Roman-type fonts which don't seem to take after > > cursive at all. > > If I understand Kibo correctly, the lasso is the original descender of the > lower-case g, and the cat-tail descender is a quite recent innovation. Not really. They were using it by 1500 in chancery cursive, although the tail was usually more or less closed (what we think of now as that shape of 'g' was actually a 'q'; a closed 'g' can be found in some modern fonts, such as Galliard Italic and some of the styles of Poetica.) Both forms of the 'g' evolved hundreds of years after the 'G' had reached its final form. (The Roman capitals have not changed at all in 2000 years, except we've added a couple.) > [...] > It was transformed into the modern "print g" by whoever designed Futura, a Paul Renner. And other people had used it in sans-serif fonts before then; for instance, a lot of American nineteenth-century gothics had it. Italics for many "modern face" romans had it (some versions of Century, for example.) > 20th-century German sans serif typeface whose lower case is in some ways > abstracted from those old German styles. The open g descender was A more obvious derivative of German lettering is Kabel, designed by Rudolf Koch at the same time as Renner's Futura (1927ish). His 'g' was the same shape as many blackletter ones, which was the intermediate stage between the two other forms. > apparently considered to be a very weird-looking, radical innovation when > it appeared in Futura. I think that Futura also introduced the "one-story > a" without the hook on top, another abstraction from the German lettering. That probably did originate with Futura. Renner's original designs for the "a" were considerably weirder. Note that Koch came up with a very different solution to the same design problem in Kabel. (I'm talking about the original Kabel, not ITC Kabel, which is different.) Futura's other real innovation was putting most of the tail of "Q" on the _inside_. > Then some educational authorities in the US decided that a modified > version of Futura would be the canonical alphabet taught to little kids, Modified? I've never seen a modified Futura used as an educational font, except on Sesame Street (Sesame Street uses a different "4" and "9", and they hook the "j".) In kindergarten I remember being puzzled when they insisted that we must write our "j" like the Futura Medium model, which was the straight one. > so Americans are taught to print in something like Futura, and they tend > to think of the Futura alphabet as being very close to the Platonic > essence of a letter's form. (One exception is that the school version often > adds a hook to the lower-case j; the Futura version has a straight Ah, you had a less Cubist school system than I. I was also in New York State the year that "w" was a vowel. > descender.) They internalize the Roman g from books and newspapers, but > don't think about it much and don't print it. So when Americans look > closely at a real Roman g, they suddenly realize that it looks funny. > > I posted the above to provoke Kibo into talking about the subject just to > correct the mistakes I made. You're a bozo. > It's especially fun to get him talking about the abomination that is > Palmer Method cursive. You know, the illegible, butt-ugly script that > graduates of American elementary schools have been brainwashed into > calling "good penmanship," with the capital Q that looks like a 2 and the > capital T and F that are well-nigh indistinguishable. I sort of believed > the party line myself, until I heard Kibo point out the absurdity of it. > (He knows more about where it came from and how it came to be adopted. He > points out that it looks OK Not OK, but you can tell the letters apart. But it still looks yucky. > if you use a pen with a real nib, that makes > thick and thin lines. But today almost everyone in America, in and out > of the schools, uses pencils, ballpoints, or felt-tip or roller pens > that don't work that way.) > > American preschools and elementary schools (and educational books, toys, > and TV shows like "Sesame Street") first teach three- to six-year-old kids > to read and write modified Futura, a geometric-looking sans serif font. > There is exposure to other sans and Roman typefaces in reading material, > but not to script lettering. > > Once the kids almost have that down cold, they tell the kids that that's > baby stuff and that to be a big kid you have to write in Palmer Method > cursive. This is as unintelligible as Linear B to someone brought up on > pseudo-Futura. So they teach them to read and write *all over again*. From > the age of about seven or eight onward, there are harsh grading penalties > for writing the way they were originally taught to write. No wonder some > of them never get the hang of it. > > The ones that do get the hang of it grow up, get out of school, abruptly > stop using Palmer Method, and evolve a sort of roll-your-own italic style > with some connected letters, that comes from writing pseudo-Futura > rapidly. Occasionally they read an anguished letter to the editor from a > Palmer Method stalwart, equating the unwillingness to write in cursive > with some sort of bid for eternal infancy, and they feel guilty that they > have handwriting that human beings can read. Just about all calligraphers (in any country) espouse teaching kids to write chancery cursive. (I have books on the subject of school lettering reform from England, Germany, and the USA.) It's incredibly legible, is as fast to write as printing (faster than copperplate script, of course), is easy to learn, and looks great. And depending on your ambition, you can leave all the letters disconnected or start linking them up. This is the form of lettering most people who "print" naturally evolve over time. I keep promising Matt that next time he's around when I have a 2mm calligraphy marker to destroy I'll teach him chancery cursive in about five minutes. And part of the fun of it is you can draw the 'g' either way. Or several other ways. Same for 'G'. No matter how you do it, it looks better than any sort of Palmerish 'G', and is obviously a 'G'. Unlike Palmer, you can do it properly with a ballpoint pen or pencil too. Anyway, if you think we're stuck in the Dark Ages, you should see what they teach in Russian schools. In Germany thankfully nobody in recent generations writes in blackletter or writes cursive with the "writing-hook" over the "u" to distinguish it from that letter it separated from in the Renaissance. (Ever notice that in many printer's type cases the capitals weren't in alphabetical order, because typographers never got around to moving the compartments around to make room for the new letters?) -- K.