Tag Archives: oldstyle figures

What we need in a font family for books

Skilled Workman Posted on by

As typographers and book designers, we need a minimum three-font family—regular, italic, and bold: Italic is necessary for periodical names and emphasis. Bold is used for proper names and headers. As you saw at the start of this paragraph I used a bold through the colon to emphasize an important point. In my books I use my Bold Sans Serif. But regardless of which font family you choose it must satisfy several basic requirements of book design. … Continue reading →

The use of small caps is required

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Use small caps. Small caps are a specialized letterform. They are a smaller set of capital letters (often a bit larger than the x-height), used in place of the lowercase letters, which are designed so they have the same color as the rest of the font. Many of the OpenType Pro font families have real small caps. Faux small caps One of the typesetting options in most professional software (and many word processors) has been the use … Continue reading →

Creating OpenType Fonts: Simplified

Skilled Workman Posted on by

OpenType Simplified In two words, it’s confusing. FontLab has good, professional tools for developing OpenType fonts—but it is certainly not simple or easy. Fontographer really does not deal well with OpenType at all. Having said that, if you have a feature file, you can use it in Fontographer 5.1. You link to it in the font info dialog box on the Encoding page. Fontographer will use that feature file to build your OpenType font when you generate … Continue reading →