Tuesday 11 December 2012

Part 4: Research - Project Typesetting: General terms and rules

In addition to understand main principles in typography, I am going to further explore about basic typography components such as letter adjusment which comprises two terms: kerning and tracking.

Kerning is adjusment of individual letter pairs whose purpose is to remedy problems of uneveness which occur between specific letter pairs. Those anomalies are caused by letter shapes and they can make letters look too close together or too far apart.

Some examples of letter pairs need kerning in order to create the same sense of spacing between those characters as that prevailing in the surrounding text.

The letter pairs that most commonly need kerning are combinations of upper- and lower-case characters and pairs containing punctuation. Here are some of the most common examples that need to be kerned. There are around 600 character combinations in the list of typical kerning pairs.
In general, high-quality fonts contain between 500 and 1,000 kern pairs. Most kerning is done automatically in text composed by a page layout or typesetting program.


 

 

Along with traditional kerning - table system, there is also algorithmic kerning system which can be regarded    as a back up for this table - based one. 

Regarding body type, automatic kerning is good enough in most cases. When it comes to display sizes, white space between characters become more obvious, and even subtle variations are notable, so situation like that require manual kerning. 


So how to do manual kerning? 

  1. The first rule is not to do anything before first finishing tracking because it will throw all work that was carefully done regarding kerning. 
  2. The next step is to zoom in enough in order to kern it effectively. The smaller the pixels (relative to the size of the characters), the more closely they resemble the resolution of printed characters. If the idea of kerning is to make spacing appear even over a range of text, there have to be a view of that range in order to know when the goal is achieved. If characters are zoomed in too close, frame of reference will not be visible so the adjustment may not be done properly.
    3. The element that keys all of your hand-kerning work is the toughest, most intractable pair of letters in the whole text. This pair has to set the overall feel for the rest of the spacing. If you make all the other character pairs tighter, the loose one will stick out, as illustrated below.


The software did a fairly good job of kerning the top sample, though the spacing is clearly uneven in spots. In the correctly kerned version in the middle, the overall spacing has been determined by the vi pair, which by its nature creates a somewhat loose spacing feel. In the overkerned bottom sample, the typesetter has squeezed as much space out of every letter pair as possible, but this leaves the vi gap as an obvious hole in the line. The goal of hand-kerning is to create even spacing, not to eliminate spaces.

Having figured out the key pair, you can go about kerning the others. If it appears that nearly all of the pairs need adjustment, do a preliminary adjustment by tightening the tracking of the whole selection. When the key pair is spaced as well as it can be, stop the tracking adjustments and start kerning.

Regarding kerning, measuring won’t help, you have to rely on eyes. If necessary, step back from the screen for a different view, where you can’t see every pixel. Always verify your kerning efforts with printed proofs.

Italic - Roman character combination



Wherever an ascending italic character is followed by a tall or top-aligning roman character the collision is unavoidable which is particularly visible when characters are bigger or zoomed in.

As for the kerning numerals, the nine of them have the same character width which works fine, but the number 1 is clearly narrower than others so it appears set too far.

Tracking as an adjustment of overall space regarding group of letters, most commonly can be successfully done automatically. When working with a specific typeface, you’ll learn how it needs to be tracked. The default settings can be used as a starting point for tracking adjustments for other faces. Although the tracking demands of most individual faces don’t differ widely, they are different enough to demand your attention, as shown below.

It is clearly that there is no tracking settings that works for all typefaces. For one it can be a good solution while applied on others it can look too tight or too loose.

The situation that requires special tracking is the one when designers work with typefaces on patterned background because characters compete with noisy background. Even when type is set on solid tinted background, the problem may occur so it requires a loose tracking to be more readable. The same situation occurs with low - resolution presentations which can benefit from loose tracking. However when it comes to print standards, loose tracking is not a good idea.


In general, for onscreen reading, loosening up the tracking improves readability. Even with the smoothed, anti-aliased type shown above, the characters in the normally tracked type at left often lean against each other. By print standards, the spacing of the right-hand sample is very loose, but onscreen it’s much more pleasant to read.

Tracking the script typefaces

Generally speaks, script typeface should not have applied tracking values because this could disrupt connections between characters. Scripts are made to have that handwritten form which requires unity. Tracking and kerning can be very carefully applied only on scripts in which letters are not connected.

Text on curved baselines



Narrow characters sit better on curved lines than the wide ones. Its narrower stance allows them to follow contour better, so condensed types are good option for this kind of design. Wide characters look teeter while sitting on the convex baseline, while sitting on the concave baseline, some wide letters sink. 



Text on a curved baseline requires a lot of kerning. Nearly every character pair becomes a kerning problem when baselines bend. Comparing the type in the upper samples, you can see that what sets too loose on a convex baseline looks too tight on a concave one. In the lower samples, hand-kerning virtually every pair has resulted in relatively even spacing, although certain pairs, such as TV, remain intractable.

On convex baselines, some characters may have to be kerned close enough to touch each other along the baseline in order to bring some sense of logical spacing to their ascending parts. Letters on a concave baseline will have to be spaced farther apart to avoid collisions between ascending characters. In both cases, adjusting the tracking first and a lot of manual kerning will be necessary. So the general advice for such a design are:

  1. use gentle curves
  2. choose condensed faces
  3. hand-kerning extensively

Legibility is a degree to which characters in the text are recognizable based on visual appearance.

Readability is an ease in which text can be read and understood. It is determined by a lot of factors such as the number of words in line, the spaces between the words and lines and typeface selection. 

Measurements - Type's original measurement are based on the length of metal block on which the type was cast and it was measured in picas and points. 72 points are equal to 1 inch.

Leading or linespacing is a space between the lines of the text in text block which improves the readibility. It is measured from one baseline to another baseline and in general, the text is more readable if it is set to 1.5 x the type size.

Alignment - Text can be aligned left, right, center or justified. Left aligned text follows the straight vertical left line and it is the most legible. The right aligned text looks ragged and it is less readable because we read from left to right and eyes need to search the beginning of the text line. This kind of alignment is commonly used when dealing with menus and headings. Centered text is commonly used for titles and small amounts of information such as quotations. Justified text is the most commonly used in newspapers, magazines and books where it looks neat as a solid block. It is automatically expanded or reduced and it creates white gaps which disrupt reading. It can also stretch words so much in a case when type size is too large or column width is too narrow for the text.

Hyphenation refers to splitting long words to fit column width. However it should be avoided because makes text look messy and disrupt reading. Kerning and tracking can be used in fixing problem.


http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/8-typography/3-legibility.html
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