8/13/2023 0 Comments Ff info display typeface historyWe will look at these challenges in more detail over the course of the book. Some of these challenges can be overcome through developments in the technology some of them will need to be worked around. At the same time, it highlights a common challenge for the type designer working with global scripts, which is to find ways of usefully mapping the computer’s Latin-centered model of baselines, bounding boxes, and so on, onto a design in which these structures may not necessarily apply. We can understand the historical reasons behind why this situation has come about. So even if you’re not a history fan, please don’t skip this chapter - I’ll try and make it as practical as possible.įor example, then, in the case of the wonderful Nastaleeq script above, we can understand why this is going to be difficult to implement as a digital font. At the same time, the history of digital fonts highlights some of the challenges that designers and implementers have needed to overcome, and will equip us with some concepts that we will get further into as we go through this book. This is one of the reasons why I’m starting this book with a description of digital font history: the way that our fonts have developed over time also shapes the challenges and difficulties of working with fonts today. The move from Gutenberg’s rectangular metal sorts to rectangular 9x14 digital bitmaps ensured that computer typography would be dominated by the alignment of rectangles along a common baseline - an unfortunate situation for writing systems which don’t consist of a straight line of rectangles. Much has changed since the early bitmap fonts, but in a sense one thing has not. The choice of bitmaps for each character, what we would now call the font, was hard-wired into the mainframe, and could not be changed. 3 The mainframe computer would generate the video signal and send it to the terminal, pixel by pixel: each character was 9 pixels wide and 14 pixels tall. In 1964, the IBM 2260 Display Station provided one of the first text-based visual interfaces to a computer. The idea was revived with the advent of digital typography. With the advent of hot metal typesetting, which combined casting and compositing into one automated activity, the idea of a font of type fell out of fashion. Next, the printer would cover the face of the metal with ink and impress it onto the paper. The font on the top left is a 14pt Greek typeface by Eric Gill.Ĭomplete fonts of type would be placed into type cases, from which compositors would then select the sorts required to print a page and arrange them into lines and pages. A complete set of type sorts in the same size and style was collected together into a font of type.Ī box of fonts cast by the Australian Type Foundry. The typemaker would then use the matrices to cast individual pieces of type (also known as sorts). Punches would then be struck into a mold called a matrix. To create type for printing, engravers would work the images of letters, numbers and so on into punches. 2 Two hundred years later, Johannes Gutenberg came up with a similar system for creating metal type that would spread rapidly over Europe and continue to be the most common means of printing until the 19th century. In 13th century, banknotes were printed with anti-counterfeit devices printed using blocks of bronze 1 the first metal type books were produced in Korea around the same time. The first recorded use of metal type for printing comes from China. Once upon a time, a font was a bunch of pieces of metal. PostScript Fonts, TrueType and OpenType.
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