Chapter 8
Vintage Type: The Corkscrew, Please
In This Chapter
Fonts that you can install in Windows XP and Windows Vista
How to install, manage, and print fonts
Typeface styles and how to buy them
A short lesson on typography and the use of type in design
How to create special, fancy first letters: Drop caps and raised caps
Choosing fonts for your publication is like decorating your house: It’s great fun, and it’s important in giving your publication a personality. Just as some people like Scandinavian and others like Southwest decor, different designers prefer different fonts. Although you can decorate your house with purple velvet wallpaper (don’t look in my daughter’s room, please!) or alternate orange and black paint on the bedroom walls, chances are that you want to choose more conventional design themes. The same is true in your publications.
In this chapter, I tell you how to buy (if necessary), install, and use fonts. Part of this chapter deals with the common practices that most desktop publishing experts recommend, and some sections give you the technical details, such as how to work with fonts, what font files are, and how best to use them.
About Type and Fonts
I was doing some consulting work at a client’s office recently when I saw the most amazing sight: The client’s secretary was busy typing a letter on an old IBM Selectric typewriter. Okay, I know — that isn’t so amazing. The amazing part is that the typewriter was sitting next to his brand-new computer! Let’s see . . . type a letter on this typewriter and choose any typeface as long as it’s Courier, or type the letter on a computer and choose from hundreds of typefaces? Tough call! Of course, I smugly informed him of the superiority of the computer’s technology over the typewriter. His response? “That old typewriter never locks up on me when the boss wants something typed in a hurry!”
Don’t get me wrong: I like Courier. The widespread use of this extremely attractive font is a testament to its durability. I think that Courier’s main problem is that it’s overused. And, certainly, using the same typeface every day gets old fast, no matter how great the typewriter.
The point of this typewriter story is to introduce a basic typographic term: font. A font is one typeface, in one style. The print ball for that typewriter contained one font: Courier.
Of course, you can go out and buy other fonts for the typewriter I mentioned. When you need another font in your document, you simply replace the ball at that point and carry on. Compare that time-consuming process with creating text on your computer: On a computer, you can have as many fonts as you want, and switching to a different font is as simple as making a menu selection. Until you print your document, you can go back and reformat your document to your heart’s content — something that you would need gallons of correction fluid and unending patience to do on a typewriter. No wonder that those old IBM typewriters have been relegated to museums.
Font styles
The fonts used today come in four main styles:
Serif: A serif is a small line that hangs off the upper and lower ends of the strokes that make up a text character. Serifs help guide the reader’s eye, which is why serif fonts are typically used in body copy. (Body copy, or body text, makes up the majority of the paragraphs in a publication.) Examples of common serif fonts are Benguiat, Bodoni, Bookman, Courier New, Galliard, Garamond, Goudy, Jenson, Palatino, and Times New Roman. Many of these fonts are named after the designers who either created or inspired them.
Sans serif: Sans serif fonts don’t have serifs (sans is French for without) and are typically square and plainer than serif fonts. In earlier days, these fonts were described as either gothic or grotesque faces. They’re more commonly used in headlines, in which a limited number of characters need to be read. Examples of sans serif fonts in common use are Arial, Helvetica, Optima, Tekton, and Univers. (And, if you’re wondering, it really is spelled Univers, without the e at the end.)
Decorative: Decorative fonts are used to present letters in stylized form. Usually, they’re thematic; a set of fonts may be created from pictures of jugglers and clowns or use cowboy motifs, for example. These fonts are appropriate for kids’ birthday party invitations, and not so appropriate for your annual report to the Board of Directors.
Symbol: This font style presents symbols as a character set. Chapter 6 shows examples of the Symbol and Wingdings fonts that are installed in Windows XP and Windows Vista. Vendors also sell symbol sets for maps (Adobe Carta) and for music (Adobe Sonata).
Fixed fonts
The first computer fonts emulated those found in older typesetting equipment or in typewriters. Each font was a single typeface designed for a specific size. Most of these fonts were designed as bitmapped descriptions (composed of a collection of dots), so they were called bitmapped fonts. You could install Courier 8, 10, and 12 on your computer in plain (roman), italic, bold, and bold italic styles, with one font file apiece for your screen and for your printer. You would therefore install 12 files altogether for these three sizes. What a mess!
As time went by, type vendors produced font descriptions that let you create a fixed font in any size from a single description. Now the use of fixed fonts is extremely limited.
Fixed fonts are usually sold in pairs that contain a screen font (used to display the font on your computer screen) and a printer font (used to print your text). In Windows XP and Windows Vista, an A icon in the Fonts folder indicates a fixed font. Choose Start⇒Control Panel⇒Fonts to see the fonts installed on your computer.
When you use a fixed screen font at the size it was designed to be used, the results look as good as with any font you can use. You get the added performance advantage of not having to have the font description rasterized (converted to a bitmap for display or output), which isn’t much of an advantage in these days of very fast computers.
If you use a fixed font at a percentage that divides evenly into the size the font was designed for — for example, at one-half or one-fourth size — you also get perfect results. You can even get reasonable results when using a fixed font at two or four times its intended size. Your screen font looks distorted at other sizes, however, even though your printed material often looks perfect.
Some printers come with their own printer fonts. If Windows isn’t familiar with your printer’s printer font, it substitutes another font to display the document on-screen. Although you don’t see a realistic display of how your document prints, it prints just fine by using the fonts contained in the printer. Most people have given up on fixed fonts at this point.
Sizing up your font
You can make a font virtually any size you want. The size of a font is normally measured in points. A point is approximately 1⁄72 of an inch but varies somewhat from typeface to typeface. The normal font size used in correspondence is 12 points, but 8, 10, and 11 points are also common.
Remember that the size of a point depends on which font you’re using. The size of 12-point type in one font can differ substantially from 12-point type in another font, for example. (The
figure shows you samples in various faces at the same size.)
Not only do fonts have different vertical dimensions, but their widths are different as well. Font height is usually gauged by the height of the lowercase x, whereas the width is usually gauged by the width of the lowercase m. For this reason, a font’s vertical dimension is referred to as its x-height, and its horizontal size is referred to as its m-width.
TrueType fonts
TrueType is one of two popular font formats. (The other is PostScript, discussed in the next section.) Unlike fixed fonts and PostScript fonts, TrueType fonts don’t require separate screen and printer font-description files — Windows can use the same description file to display the font on-screen and to print your publication. Because the font information is contained in one file, you have half the file management chores as you do with fixed fonts and PostScript fonts, which is a major benefit of using TrueType fonts. In Windows XP, an O icon in the Fonts folder indicates a TrueType font. In Windows Vista, an O icon in the Fonts folder indicates an OpenType font. OpenType fonts contain TrueType and PostScript font data.
PostScript fonts
Adobe PostScript fonts have been available since the mid-1980s. Most print services and professional designers favor PostScript fonts because of their high quality and large library of available font descriptions. An estimated 10,000 typefaces are available in PostScript form. (Sorry, but my editor won’t let me list them for you.)
PostScript fonts come in two types: Type 1 and Type 3. The difference between the two types is that Type 3 doesn’t contain special instructions (hinting) — that alter the appearance of fonts at small point sizes (11 point and smaller) to make them more readable both on-screen (if you have Adobe Type Manager installed) and in printed matter. Type 1 fonts (an TrueType fonts) come with hinting built in to their descriptions.
PostScript fonts require a special font rasterizer to convert them to bitmaps that can be displayed on the screen or printed by your printer. For a long time, PostScript fonts required a PostScript printer in order to print properly. PostScript printers contained a ROM chip which stored the PostScript interpreter that did the bitmap conversion for output. In 1989, under pressure from other vendors who finally cracked the technology of Adobe hinting, Adobe released Adobe Type Manager and published the specifications of PostScript type encryption and hinting.
Adobe Type Manager (ATM) displays PostScript fonts well and makes printing fonts to non-PostScript printers possible. Your computer’s processor takes the place of the processor in a PostScript printer. Thanks to ATM, you can get great-looking output even from inkjet printers.
Choosing between TrueType and PostScript fonts
In regard to performance and quality, no one has yet been able to show me to my satisfaction that there’s much difference — or, in fact, any difference — between TrueType and PostScript fonts. Of course, you get some TrueType fonts for free with the installation of Windows and other Microsoft products, such as Publisher. You can’t beat that.
Here’s the best advice I can give you regarding fonts: If you’re an occasional desktop publisher, choose either TrueType or PostScript, but try not to use both. If you use both, pay particular attention to making sure that you don’t use a font with the same name in both styles. In other words, if you set certain body text in TrueType Times Roman, don’t set other body text in PostScript Times Roman. (It’s easier said than done.)
If you’re a professional desktop publisher, you might have no choice other than to use both typeface descriptions (TrueType and PostScript). The people who are my Gurus of Type favor PostScript type, largely because of the extremely large library of high-quality fonts available in PostScript, the fact that many print services prefer to work with PostScript, and the bias of many years of use. Desktop publishing professionals collect type like some people collect wine and toss around the same nonsense about flavor, bouquet, body, and other terms.
I remain unconvinced. I like the convenience of TrueType and think that PostScript is not worth the additional trouble of installing and using Adobe Type Manager or printing only to PostScript printers, except in those cases where a typeface exists in PostScript and doesn’t exist in TrueType.
A primer on buying fonts
You buy fonts in sets. Fonts are sold, at minimum, as a single typeface, usually in different sizes and styles. Fixed fonts are sold as individual font files. TrueType and PostScript fonts are sold without regard to font size.
Initially, font vendors sold fonts in a general package meant to serve a variety of needs. The first Apple LaserWriter collection of 35 fonts in seven typefaces was this kind of package. A movement has been afoot for the past few years to sell fonts in related families for a related purpose. Now you can buy packages meant for newsletters, faxes, correspondence, or decorative purposes, to name just a few. Typically, these packages offer three or four typefaces in several styles. If you’re font-minded (and who isn’t, these days?), you can buy many vendors’ entire font libraries on CD-ROM. The fonts on the CD-ROM are usually encrypted, and you need to obtain a serial number from the vendor to “unlock” the fonts so that you can install them. The vendor gives you the serial number for a particular font when you buy that font.
Buying fonts in families is an effective way to add to a collection. Most designers recommend that you be conservative in your use of fonts, so a collection of fonts in the same family makes sense. It’s better to collect one typeface in many styles — even to collect special character sets such as Small Caps for a font such as Times — than it is to have an incomplete collection of several faces.
Without a doubt, font technology has undergone an explosion since the introduction of the personal computer. More and better fonts have been created in the past ten years than in all the previous five centuries of type design. I won’t say that the best type designers are alive now, because that would be presumptuous, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. And, certainly, the most prolific designers are now out there working in their studios.
I want to mention some recent developments in font technology because they’re important and valuable. First, several typefaces have been created that contain both sans serif and serif members. My favorite of this ilk is the Adobe Stone family, designed by noted type designer Sumner Stone.
Another development is the introduction of “intelligent font technology.” Adobe has introduced the Multiple Masters typeface family. These fonts can be varied infinitely over a range through three or four axes so that you can have a single font description yielding plain, condensed, expanded, italic, bold, or different-size characters. These fonts require Version 2.6 or later of Adobe Type Manager.
Most computer stores and computer direct-marketing catalogs sell fonts in packages from one vendor or another. What you can find in these mass-market outlets are the most well-known and commercial font packages. These sources are adequate for the occasional desktop publisher.
For more complete collections of fonts, contact the font vendors themselves. Each vendor in the following list publishes attractive magazines with samples of all their fonts. Adobe’s Font and Function appears quarterly, for example. The magazines also highlight new fonts that appear:
Adobe Systems, Inc.: www.adobe.com; 345 Park Ave., San Jose, CA 95110-2704 USA; phone 408-536-6000
Bitstream, Inc.; www.bitstream.com; 215 First St., Cambridge, MA 02142-1270; phone 617-497-6222, 800-522-3668
Esselte Letraset USA: www.letraset.com; 40 Eisenhower Dr., Paramus, NJ 07653; phone 201-845-6100, 800-343-8973
The Font Bureau, Inc.: www.fontbureau.com; 326 A St., Suite #6C, Boston, MA 02210; phone 617-423-8770
MiniFonts.com: www.minifonts.com
ParaType, Inc.: www.paratype.com; P.O. Box 3617, Saratoga, CA 95070-1617
PrimeType GmbH: www.primetype.com; Boxhagener Strasse 52, 10245 Berlin, Germany, +49 (0)30 53 09 71-10
Suitcase Type Foundry: www.suitcasetype.com; Tomas Brousil, Sobeslavska 27, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
If you still don’t have enough fonts or haven’t found just the right font for your publication, try searching the Internet. Use your favorite search engine (such as Google, Yahoo!, Dogpile, Excite, AltaVista, InfoSeek, or Lycos) to search on the word fonts. You will find more font resources than you can shake a stick at.
The Bézier versus the spline
TrueType fonts are outline fonts based on the mathematical B-spline quadratic curve. These curves are similar to the Bézier curves on which Adobe PostScript fonts are based. Unlike PostScript fonts, TrueType fonts don’t require separate screen and printer fonts. The rasterizing software in Windows contains the necessary interpreter to output the same file description to your printer as it does to your monitor — with excellent results to both. This is TrueType’s major advantage; you have less file management to worry about with TrueType fonts.
Selecting fonts in your publication
In Chapter 7, I explain that you set the attributes for selected characters and paragraphs from either the Font drop-down list on the Format toolbar or the Font dialog box (choose Format⇒Font). Figure 8-1 shows you the Font dialog box again with the Font drop-down list open.
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Figure 8-1: The Font dialog box. |
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Notice that when you select a TrueType font in the Font dialog box, it offers you four different font styles:
| Regular | Bold |
| Italic | Bold Italic |
You also have access to eight different effects:
| Superscript | Emboss |
| Subscript | Engrave |
| Shadow | Small caps |
| Outline | All caps |
And, you have 17 different underline options:
| Single | Thick long dash |
| Words only | Dot dash |
| Double | Thick dot dash |
| Dotted | Dot dot dash |
| Thick dot | Thick dot dot dash |
| Thick | Wave |
| Dash | Double wave |
| Long dash | Thick wave |
| Thick dash |
You can mix and match styles, effects, and line placement options. As you might have figured out by now, the TrueType font rasterizer synthesizes these various options from the single TrueType font description.
Typography 101
I don’t have room in this book to tell you everything about typography that you probably should know. Typography is a huge topic and one with a fascinating history. That history has generated more jargon than you can shake a stick at, so to speak — far too much jargon for me to explicate in any great detail. For now, though, a rundown of some basic terminology is in order. Figure 8-2 shows you a sample font with some of its features called out.
Most designers recommend that you choose a serif font for body copy. You can add some variety and visual interest to your pages by using sans serif fonts for headlines and subheads. A classic combination is to use the sans serif font Arial (also called Helvetica) for headings and the serif font Times Roman for body copy. This pairing, however, has been overused (as Courier has). For that reason, you might want to try other combinations.
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Figure 8-2: Typographic terms. |
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Consider using the 55 built-in Publisher font schemes for your publications. Each scheme uses two fonts that are designed to work well together and takes the guesswork out of it. Choose Format⇒Font Schemes to open the Font Schemes task pane.
The font you use for the body copy in a long story is of particular importance. That font colors your work and affects readability. Serif fonts have letters that are different sizes, which makes it easier for the human eye to recognize words. For this reason, italics, script fonts (elegant fonts with flourishes), and sans serif fonts are typically reserved for headlines or captions. Try taking a look at a page of body copy in several fonts to see which one works best with your piece.
The typographical size of a font varies according to its design. If you need to fit a lot of copy on a single page, select a compact font. Many leading fonts were designed for these special purposes. For example, the omnipresent Times New Roman font was created in the 1920s as part of a redesign of The Times of London. The intent was to make copy readable but very compact (the better to sell advertising space, my dear). Other fonts, such as Bookman, were created with a more open typestyle to make novels and other books easier to read. Most font catalogs offer suggestions for how to best use particular fonts and recommend fonts that go well with them as body fonts or display fonts, which are designed to grab readers’ attention.
The one overriding piece of advice that most designers give is to avoid using too many fonts on your page. Too many fonts make publications seem cheap, poorly designed, confusing, and hard to read. We’ve all seen those “ransom note” designs, where each letter is in a different font. Most people’s sensibilities are better than that — especially because we’ve been bombarded with well-designed printed material for our entire lifetimes.
You have a lot of control over the way the type on your page looks. You can use these strategies to adjust type characteristics that open up your text:
Use bigger font sizes.
Adjust letter spacing or kerning.
Add line spacing.
Add spacing between paragraphs.
Use paragraph indents.
Shorten the length of lines by adjusting the text box width.
Change the justification of text boxes.
Left-justified text (refer to the last bullet in the list) is generally considered the most readable text and is the most frequently used. Right-justified and center-justified text are much less common and are generally used for special purposes, such as headlines, captions, and pull quotes. Fully justified text works reasonably well for line lengths of about 10 to 12 words and is commonly used in dense newspaper or newsletter pages. These methods are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.
Display fonts are intended for limited use at larger sizes, to catch readers’ attention. Using display text for headlines is a great way to pull a reader’s eye to a section of a page. Often, headlines use larger and bolder fonts, display fonts, or some other special font treatment. Because the headline is the element that most people see first on a page, be particularly attentive to the selection of font and font size. Also, proper kerning of a headline is well worth the additional effort. (See Chapter 7 for details on kerning.) Be sure to adjust the line spacing of headlines so that the words clearly belong together. I like to use mixed casing in headlines unless the headline is very short. In that event, I sometimes use all caps or small caps. When I use script fonts (elegant fonts with flourishes) in headlines (infrequently), I tend to use them only in mixed case.
Another way to set off headlines and sections in your documents is to use rules. Rules are lines, either horizontal (for headlines) or vertical (for columns). The use of rules is very effective, and they don’t even have to be thick. A single-point rule suffices in most cases except for separating the headline of your page. (Rules are also discussed in Chapter 5.)
No matter how much time you take in designing your publications, you can always learn something from other people’s work. When you’re working on a project, take a look at the best examples you can find of similar pieces and see which fonts were used, and how.
WordArt
Microsoft WordArt enables you to create especially fancy text objects, called — pause for effect — WordArt objects. Publisher provides WordArt frames for the very purpose of creating and holding WordArt objects.
To see how easy it is to create WordArt objects in Publisher, check out these steps:
1. With your Publisher publication on-screen, click the Insert WordArt tool on the Objects toolbar.
This step opens the WordArt Gallery dialog box.
2. In the WordArt Gallery dialog box, select a WordArt style and then click OK.
This step opens the Edit WordArt Text dialog box.
3. In the Edit WordArt Text dialog box, type the text that you want to use as the WordArt object.
If you want multiple-line text, press Enter to create new lines.
Notice that the Edit WordArt Text dialog box lets you select the font and font size and specify whether you want the WordArt text to appear in Bold or Italic format.
4. Click OK to close the Edit WordArt dialog box.
The WordArt object on your publication page now displays the text you typed, as shown in Figure 8-3.
5. Use any or all of the WordArt toolbar tools (see Figure 8-4) to “fancify” your WordArt object.
As you use each tool, the WordArt object automatically changes to show the effect you set.
This step closes WordArt and returns you to Publisher. The WordArt toolbar disappears, Publisher takes back control of the menu bar and the top toolbar, and the WordArt selection handles go away.
6. When your WordArt object looks the way you want, press Esc or deselect the WordArt object.
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Figure 8-3: A sample WordArt object. |
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Figure 8-4: The WordArt toolbar. |
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Take the time to explore all the tools on the WordArt toolbar. Table 8-1 gives you an overview of those tools and what they do. For more information about using WordArt, search for WordArt in the Publisher Help system.
| Tool | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Insert WordArt | Opens the WordArt Gallery dialog box so that you can |
| choose a WordArt style | |
| Edit Text | Opens the Edit WordArt Text dialog box so that you can |
| edit the WordArt text | |
| WordArt Gallery | Opens the WordArt Gallery so that you can choose a |
| different style for your WordArt text | |
| Format WordArt | Opens the Format WordArt dialog box, in which you |
| control how your WordArt text looks | |
| WordArt Shape | Displays a menu of shapes that enables you to fit your |
| text to a specific path or shape | |
| Text Wrapping | Opens a menu that lets you specify the way the text in a |
| text box flows around a WordArt object | |
| WordArt Same | Changes your WordArt text so that all letters are exactly |
| Letter Heights | the same height |
| WordArt Vertical Text | Converts WordArt text to a vertical orientation |
| WordArt Alignment | Displays a menu that lets you specify the alignment of |
| your WordArt text | |
| WordArt Character | Displays a menu with character spacing (kerning) options |
| Spacing |
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Other Special Text Effects
Many publications use special large letters to start a text block. When this letter extends below the top line of the text, it’s a drop cap. A large letter that appears above a line of text is a raised cap. Figure 8-5 shows you an example of each letter: The top W is an example of a drop cap, whereas the bottom A is an example of a raised cap.
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Figure 8-5: A drop cap (top) and raised cap (bottom). |
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Many people use drop caps in place of smaller headlines. Spread out these effects on the page, and don’t put them on the same line as the headline. Typically, I try to use only one of these caps on a page at a time.
To add a fancy first letter, follow these steps:
1. Click the paragraph that will contain the fancy first letter.
2. Choose Format ⇒Drop Cap.
The Drop Cap dialog box, shown in Figure 8-6, appears. Notice that the styles under Available Drop Caps include drop caps and raised caps.
3. Select the Drop Cap style you want and click the Apply button.
You can see the effect immediately because the choice you made is applied to the selected text in your publication. Apply as many styles as you want before making a final selection.
4. Click OK when you’re happy with your choice.
To create a Custom Drop Cap, click the Custom Drop Cap tab in the Drop Cap dialog box to open that tab, as shown in Figure 8-7. Publisher offers many options for creating your own drop caps, including font, font style, and color; the size and number of letters you want to stylize; and drop cap or raised cap options.
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Figure 8-6: The Drop Cap tab in the Drop Cap dialog box. |
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Figure 8-7: The Custom Drop Cap tab in the Drop Cap dialog box. |
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Creating an electronic watermark
If you hold up to a light some expensive typing paper or foreign currency, you sometimes can see a watermark, an almost transparent image of a company logo, a dead king’s portrait, or whatever. It’s a very cool effect!
You can use Microsoft WordArt to create a similar effect electronically. Use WordArt to create an attention-getting message, such as Confidential or Important Notice, and then format the message the way you want. Then click the Format WordArt button on the WordArt toolbar. In the Format WordArt dialog box, select the Colors and Lines tab. Set the transparency to 70 percent or higher, depending on how dark you want the watermark to be. (You probably have to experiment with this setting. It varies, depending on the WordArt style you select.) Click OK to close the Format WordArt dialog box. Lastly, right-click your WordArt text and choose Order⇒Send to Back. That’s all there is to it! If you want the watermark to appear on every page of your publication, you can save yourself some time by creating the WordArt text on the master page. Choose View⇒Master Page from the menu or press Ctrl+M to view the master page. (If your publication has more than one master page, click the one you want to use.) Now create the watermark as just described. Click the Close Master View button on the Edit Master Pages toolbar when you’re done.
If you do everything just right, you should be able to see the electronic watermark behind your other objects. Way cool!