274 tugboat, volume 38 (2017), no. 2 - tex274 tugboat, volume 38 (2017), no. 2 review and summaries:...

274 TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 2

Review and summaries: The History ofTypographic Writing — The 20th centuryVolume 2 (ch. 1–5), from 1950 to 2000

Charles Bigelow

Histoire de l’Ecriture Typographique — le XXiemesiecle; tome II/II, de 1950 a 2000. JacquesAndre, editorial direction. Atelier Perrousseaux,Gap, France, 2016, ISBN 978-2-36765-006-7,http://tinyurl.com/ja-xxieme-ii. 364 pp.,391 figures (illustrations, photos, diagrams, etc.),illustrated end papers. Also available as an ebook.The book is in French. Volume 1 (reviewed inTUGboat 38:1) covers the years 1900 to 1950.

Occasional commentary below by the reviewer isplaced in square brackets; the main text summarizesthe original writing.

a æ Ɵ Ɩ Ǳ A ū Ǝ Ǫ ȉ ȩ ǒ ȵ Æ ˅ ˲ ϵ Ɂ ɝΈ ω b ˟ ǜ B Ŭ Ȋ ˆ ɂ Ή ϊ c Ǿ ǿ C ŭ ǋ ǌ Ƀ Ί ϋ d ˠ ǝ Ɨ ǲ D Ů ȋ Ȭ Ⱥ ȿ ˈ Ʉ ό e Ƙ ǃ Ǆ ȁ E ư ů ǩ Ȍ ˉ Ʌ Ό ύ f ˡ Ž ƙŊ�ŋ�Ō�ō Ŏ ŏ Ő Ƌ ƌ ƫ ˻ ˼ Ʊ F ȍ ȥ Ȧ ȳ Ȁ Ɇ ˊ ώ g ž ƚ ǳG Ʋ ǫ Ȏ ȭ ȷ Ȼ ȴ ˋ ɇ Ύ Ϗ h ˢ Ǟ ƛ Ǵ ȼ H Ə Ƴ Ǭ ȏ Ɉ ˌ Ώ ϐ i ƜI Ȑ ɉ ˍ ΐ ϑ j J ˎ Ɋ Α ϒ k ˣ Ȯ ſ Ǧ ǟ K ű Ƶ ǔ ȑ ȸ Ȯ ɋ ɞ ˏΒ ϓ l ˤ Ɲ Ƕ Ȳ ő Ȃ L Ų ȶ Ɍ ː Γ ϔ m ƀ ƞ Ƿ M ų ƶ ǭ Ȓ ɍ ɟ ˑΔ ϕ n Ɓ Ơ Ǹ Ƚ N Ʒ Ƒ Ŵ Ǘ Ɏ ɠ ˒�Ε�ϖ o œ ƪ ǅ ǆ O Œ ǂ Ǩ ɏ ɴ ˓ ˸ Ζ ϗ p ˥ ȯ Ƃ Ȟ ơ P ŵ Ƹ ǘ Ȕ ȫ ˔ ɐ Η Ϙ q Ƣ ǀ ȟ ƹ ȕ Q ɑ ɡ ˕ Θ ϙ r ƃ Ƞ ƣ ǹ R Ŷ Ɗ ƺ Ǚ Ȗ ɒ ɢ ˖ Ι Ϛ s Ƅ Ǻ Ǉ ǈ ��ǉ ȃ Ȅ ȅ Ȇ Ȩ S ŷ Ǎ ǎ Ǐ ɓ ˗ Κ ϛ t ƅ ȡƤ Œ œ Ŕ ŕ Ŗ Ř ř Ƭƭ T ƻ ȗ ɔ ˘ Λ Ϝ u Ɔ Ȣ ƥ ǻ U Ș ɕ ˙ Μ ϝ v Ƈ ɣ ǡ Ʀ ƒ Ƽ ș ɖ ɣ ˚ Ν Ϟ w ƈ ɤ Ǣ Ƨ W Ź Ɠ ƽ Ț ɗ ɤ ˛ Ξ ϟ x ƨ Ǽ ǣ ɥ X ǯ ǚ ɘ ˜ Ο Ϡ y Ȱ Ɖ ȹ Ʃ Y ź Ɣ ƾ ǰ ə ɦ ˝ Π ϡ z ȱ ǽ Ⱦɧ ȇ Z Ż ƕ ƿ ɚ ˞ Ρ Ϣ Ǒ ȁ Ȉ & Ū Ʈ�ɀ ɜ

End paper (fragment): Apple Chancery typeface andtypography both by Kris Holmes.

Jacques Andre: IntroductionThis is the last volume in the series created by YvesPerrousseaux, on the “History of Typographic Writ-ing” from its beginning to the end of the 20th century.

In the 20th century, the powers of social andinformational functions of writing, previously distin-guished in part by their modes of production — forexample, public inscriptions and signage, book andnews publishing, and personal handwriting — wereexpanded by technological advances. Commercial,governmental, political, and educational institutionsused typographic media to ever-greater extent andeffect, although individual expression remained, fora time, limited to handwriting and typewriting. Bythe end of the century, however, new technologies oftypography vastly enhanced the power, extent, andgraphical range of personal written expression.

This second volume of the history of 20th cen-tury typography is intended for general readers in-terested in the history, art, and technology of thecentury, as well for specialists and students in thefield. It has been written by ten different authorsand thus reflects as many different perspectives andstyles. In addition to text and copious illustrations,it includes an extensive bibliography.

1. Alice Savoie: Typography transformed:the era of photocomposition (La typographieen pleine mutation: l’ere de la photocompositions)“Photocomposition before 1945: false starts and earlyexperiments.”

In the early decades of the 20th century, sev-eral inventions applied photography to type setting.Despite clever mechanisms and novel names, theBawtree, Photoline, Rotofoto, Thothomic, and Uher-type proto-phototypesetters proved less efficient, lesseconomical, and lower in quality than establishedhot-metal composing machines and hence failed tobecome commercially successful. This first phase ofphotocomposition was followed by the so-called “firstgeneration” photocomposers — the Intertype Foto-setter and the Monophoto, which adapted hot-metalmachines by replacing the casting unit with a photounit. These machines produced commercially ade-quate output, but were not widely used.

“Second generation” photo-electronic systems,especially the pioneering Lumitype invented in Francein the 1940s by Moyroud and Higonnet but devel-oped in the U.S. as the Photon (sold in France as theLumitype), revolutionized text composition in the1960s and 1970s. Third generation phototypesetterswere based on cathode ray tube (CRT) imaging andcomputer control, and fourth-generation machineswere based on laser imaging.

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TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 2 275

The phototypesetting revolution was not merelytechnical but also social. Fast typing abilities onQWERTY keyboards (AZERTY in France) coupledwith quick learning of computer mark-up codes andcommands replaced the mechanical skills learnedfrom long apprenticeship in hot-metal type technol-ogy. “Photocomposition enabled the type-compositorto trade the blue collar laborer’s shirt and noisy,heavy machines, for the white collar office shirt andprecision knives and photochemical processes.”

[CB: Thus began a trend toward higher educa-tion and social mobility for typographers, womenand men, reflected academically, first in the award-ing of Bachelor’s, then Master’s, and most recently,Ph.D. degrees in typography, supplanting the exclu-sively masculine apprenticeships of older generationsof typographers.]

2. Alice Savoie: The creation of newtypefaces for photocomposition (Concevoir denouveaux caracteres pour la photocomposition)The designs of Adrian Frutiger and Ladislas Mandel.

Phototypesetting machines transformed not onlythe process of composing texts but also the processof making type. Type fonts ceased to be miniaturemetal sculptures and instead became abstract photo-graphic images, requiring new techniques and often,new designers.

In 1953, Charles Peignot, director of the De-berny & Peignot foundry in Paris, hired a youngSwiss designer, Adrian Frutiger, and assembled ateam that included Ladislas Mandel and LucetteGirard, to produce high-quality photo fonts for theLumitype photo-typesetter. The team first adaptedpopular metal faces like Garamond, Baskerville, andTimes Roman to the strictures and distortions ofhigh-speed optical imaging, but then Frutiger per-suaded Peignot to support development of a totallynew family of sans-serif types based on Frutiger’sstudent studies at the Zurich School of Arts andCrafts [where he was taught by Walter Kach andAlfred Willima].

The result in 1957 was the astonishing Universfamily. In the metal type era, extensive font familieslike those of P.-S. Fournier and M.F. Benton hadbeen cut incrementally in various sizes and stylesover years or decades, but Univers burst forth fromDeberny & Peignot all at once in 21 variations ofweight, width, roman and italic, and all photograph-ically scalable to many sizes. Typography wouldnever be the same again.

[Univers was enthusiastically embraced by mod-ernist graphic designers and over ensuing decades,its basic concepts were adopted by later generations

of type designers. There is hardly a new family ofsans-serif types today that does not owe a debt toUnivers, whether overt or unacknowledged.]

As phototype achieved commercial success inthe 1960s and 1970s, more firms commissioned anddeveloped original typefaces for photocomposition.At Monotype, John Dreyfus commissioned new phototext faces by Frutiger, Jose Mendoza, and ChrisBrand. At Linotype, Mike Parker commissionednew script faces by Matthew Carter and HermannZapf, as well as new types for Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew,Greek, and other non-Latin alphabets.

Foreseeing typeface piracy in the photo era,Charles Peignot, with Stanley Morison, Jan vanKrimpen, Hermann Zapf, and others, formed the In-ternational Typographic Association (l’AssociationTypographique Internationale, ATypI) to promoteintellectual and artistic property protection for type-face designs. Several American photocomposing ma-chine manufacturers prospered by developing cheaperand faster machines but plagiarizing typefaces, rely-ing on lack of American copyright for type designs[still the case] as well as weak or absent protectionsin other countries.

Beginning in the 1970s, the International Type-face Corporation commissioned new types and mod-ernized versions of traditional types for photocom-position. New ITC types by designers Ed Benguiat,Hermann Zapf, and others were licensed by manyphoto and digital composing machine manufacturersand found wide popularity, especially in advertisingand display typography.

Christian Laucou: First interlude:Classification of typefaces and catalogingof fonts (Premiere pause: classification descaracteres et catalogage des fontes)As typeface variations multiplied, type classificationbecame a perennially fascinating intellectual exercise.Classification systems were proposed by, among oth-ers: Thibaudeau in 1921; Audin in 1929; Duville in1931; Tschichold in 1951; Vox in 1952; Turner, Berry& Johnson in 1953; and the German DIN standardin 1962. Most of these shared, to varying degrees, asmall set of core classes denoting text typefaces ofhistorical eras, supplemented by stylistic variationsmainly produced in the 19th century. Differencesbetween classification systems were partly due tolumping or splitting of a few classes, like the gothicscripts, the numerous sans-serifs, and multitudinous“fantasy” display faces.

The Vox classification was adopted by ATypIin 1962 and remains widely used and useful, butnew classifications continued to be proposed, in part

Review: The History of Typographic Writing — The 20th century; vol. 2 (ch. 1–5)


because increasing multiplicity of type forms ren-dered older classifications incomplete, and partlybecause perceived flaws in the logic or concepts ofprevious systems spurred new efforts. Bringhurst,in 1992 and later, utilized art historical nomencla-ture as well as biological taxonomy to articulateaesthetic-conceptual relationships of type forms. Incommercial type sales, marketing and advertising,categories based on usage, context, and emotion haveappeared in type catalogs, specimens, and web sites.Classification of non-Latin typefaces, such as Chineseor Arabic, posed additional difficulties because of cul-tural and historical distinctions not always sharedwith Latin typography.

[In the classification systems cited above, thenumber of different classes ranges between 5 and 22,with average and median both around 10. Becauseof the vast proliferation of type forms in the digitalera and type usage by billions of computer and smartphone users, type classification has become a nexusof modern Internet culture, inviting further analysesof font features and classes, whether logical, semantic,or pragmatic.]

3: Jacques Andre: Office typography:typewriters, printers, and “strike-on” fonts(Vers la typographie de bureau: machine a ecrire,imprimantes et caracteres a impact)Following their invention in the 19th century, type-writers proliferated in the 20th century. Keyboardlayouts varied by manufacturer until standardizationof a few layouts according to country or language,like QWERTY in the U.S. and AZERTY in France.For ease of use and mechanical simplicity, typewritertypography was graphically simplified. Most type-writers had monospaced fonts and a single type size.Only a few sizes were available.1

When a key was struck, a character image on amoving type bar impacted an ink-impregnated ribbonand squashed the character image onto paper.

Because of wear on type from the very highnumber of repeated impacts and coarsening of let-ter images from ribbon squash, typewriter typefaceswere usually monoline and based on sturdy designs,particularly slab-serif faces. Typewriters became so

1 [CB: Also called "fixed-pitch" or "fixed-width"fonts, as used in this footnote. All characters haveidentical widths, for example, the letter ‘i’ in itsspace has the same set width as the letter ‘m’ in itsspace. In the U.S., the most popular standard sizewas traditional English "pica", with a height of sixlines per inch when single spaced vertically, and 10characters per inch horizontally. The smaller "elite"size set at 12 characters per inch but usually at thevertical "pica" line spacing.]

popular that traditional type foundries created print-ing typefaces to imitate the typewritten look. Thepopular Courier, designed for IBM electric typewrit-ers at IBM in 1956 by Howard Kettler, was based ongeometric slab-serif printing types. Sans-serif, italic,and all-capital typewriter faces were also produced.

A deficiency of the typewriter was that it pro-duced “one-off” documents that were not easily repro-ducible. A few carbon paper copies of lesser qualitythan the original could be made while typing, butmimeography, offset lithography, and photocopyingwere used to reproduce typewritten documents ingreater quantities.

The ubiquity of the typewriter, its conceptualsimplicity, its standardized keyboard, and its vastnumber of users led to adoption of typewriter-likeinput for other systems including Telex, Teletype,Varityper, and Justowriter, as well as computer in-put using paper tape perforated by keyboard typ-ing. Computer output also predictably producedtypewriter-like printing. When CRT monitors andkeyboards began to be used for computer input, thedot-matrix characters displayed on screens resembled,more or less, monospaced and monoline typewriterfonts. Thus, the typewriter became one of the earli-est, longest enduring, and most important paradigmsin human-computer interaction.

Adoption of typewriter-like computer input alsospurred standardizations of the numerical computercodes corresponding to letters and characters, result-ing in ASCII (American Standard Code for Infor-mation Interchange), European ISO Latin, and IBMEBCDIC character encodings. Stringent technicallimitations and typographic simplicity did not, how-ever, totally suppress artistic ingenuity. Typewriterand “ASCII art”, made with monospaced typewriteror computerized typewriter-like characters, includeda plethora of often playful and ingenious images andpatterns.

Christian Laucou: Second interlude: Gameswith letters (Deuxieme pause: Jouons avecles lettres)

In the Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic writing traditions[Chinese and Japanese could be included], scribesoften played with the arrangement and shaping ofletters to make pictorial, ornamental, or scholarlyarrangements of text. This tendency continued intoEuropean typography with the HypnerotomachiaPoliphili printed by Aldus (1499), an edition of Cal-limachus by Henri II Estienne (1577), and the poly-glot Bible by Christophe Plantin (1572). Rendi-tions of pictorial typography include the mouse’s tail

Charles Bigelow


in Alice in Wonderland, poetry by Stephane Mal-larme, Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire, andavant-garde compositions in several “isms”, includ-ing Dadaism, Futurism (both Italian and Russianvariations), and De Stijl.

These experiments in the early part of the 20thcentury were later followed by typo-pictorial com-positions of poetry and prose under the banners ofLettrisme, “poesie sonore”, “poesie experimental”.

[Similar manifestations appeared in works fromOULIPO (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle), in inter-national “concrete poetry”, in the playful “Typoesie”by Jerome Peignot, in many typographic works byRobert Massin, and in compositions by Bruno Pfaffliand other students of Emil Ruder.]

Following the avant-gardists, playful renderingsand distortions of letters for semantic as well as pho-netic signification often appeared in commercial ad-vertising. As mentioned in chapter 3, when computertypography was limited to single sizes of monospacedfonts in limited character sets, “ASCII art” (as above)was spontaneously generated in a kind of ad hoc com-puter pointillism and was often widely distributedbecause of the ease of text transmission.

4. Thierry Gouttenegre: Transfer lettering(La lettre transfer)Beginning in the 1960s and continuing for three moredecades, transfer or “rub-off” lettering provided ahandy and affordable means of typographic com-position for graphic designers, architects, fashiondesigners, engineers, and others needing easy accessto limited amounts of typography.

Transfer letters were based on the method ofdecalcomania (“decal” for short, an image-transfermethod invented in France and exploited in 19thcentury England for decorating pottery). The 20thcentury innovative rub-off letters of Letraset, Alfac,Mecanorma, and other firms were screen printedwith an adhesive onto a substrate from which theletters could be hand-transferred onto paper or othersurface by careful rubbing. Although rub-off let-ters began with selected traditional typefaces, the“fonts” quickly expanded into realms of bold faces,fantasy forms, shape distortions, radical expressions,and graphical explorations barely imaginable andcommercially impractical in the previous, traditionalmetal type era.

The wild florescence of rub-off display faces be-gan to fade at the end of the 1980s as digital typog-raphy increasingly provided more accessible, econom-ical, and powerful means of typographic composition.It is unclear how many of the rub-off designs transi-tioned into the digital era.

5. Jacques Andre: History of digital fonttechnology (Histoire technique des fontesnumeriques)In the 1950s, typography moved from metal type andphoto-type to the abstractions of digital computing.Newly vectorized forms of letters, numbers, and dia-grams began to be traced with computer-controlledelectron beams on phosphorescent CRT screens.

Similar information was also used to draw im-ages with electro-mechanical plotters on paper orother substrates. A noteworthy compilation of vector-defined fonts for early computer screens and plotterswas published as “Calligraphy for Computers” byAllen Hershey. The Hershey fonts, which were polyg-onal because of the technology, had many forms andvariations — linear, cursive, and gothic styles as wellas mathematical, chemical, and other symbols.

In the late 1960s, typesetting machine manufac-turers began to use rasterized letters — aggregationsof pixel elements or run-length codes — to displaytext on CRT screens from which photographic film orpaper could be exposed. The results were equivalentto analog phototypesetting but the digital typeset-ters ran much faster. Also in the 1960s and 1970s,



CRT monitors, which displayed simple dot-matrixcharacters, began to be widely used for computerdata input and programming. When this screen tech-nology was adopted for broad public usage in theFrench Minitel system in conjunction with the tele-phone service, tens of millions of customers began toread dot-matrix characters on screens.

The limitations of low resolution digital letterimaging prompted some designers, such as WimCrouwel, to devise rectilinear and polygonal letter-forms adapted to the restrictions of then-currentcomputer technology, but these novel experimentswere soon supplanted by more traditional-lookingletter forms as digital resolutions increased.

In the 1960s, in the fields of computer-aideddesign and manufacturing, there was pioneering re-search and development of mathematical descriptionsand renderings of curves for computer graphics. InFrance, Pierre Bezier at Renault and Paul de Castel-jau at Citroen adopted cubic splines for the descrip-tion and rendering of curved lines and surfaces.

The decade of the 1970s was rich in explorationof digital letter forms. Peter Karow at the URWfirm in Hamburg developed the Ikarus digital typesystem, which encoded contours of letters with cubicsplines that could be output to computer plotters tocut photo-masks for photo-optical typesetters, andcould be software scan-converted to rasters, run-lengths, and bitmaps for different kinds of digitaltypesetting equipment. Also in the 1970s, PhilippeCoueignoux at MIT and Patrick Baudelaire at XeroxPARC independently used mathematical curves andsplines to define letter contours for typography. AtStanford University, Donald Knuth developed hisMetafont system for font creation and digitization,using cubic splines. Also in the 1970s and early1980s, a few digital typesetting machines, especiallyfor newspapers, used outline formats — some basedon straight-line vectors and others on circular arcs —optimized for fast output.

Karow’s Ikarus system gained commercial suc-cess among digital typesetting manufacturers andfont developers. Moreover, URW itself digitized hun-dreds of very high resolution fonts in the Ikarus splineformat, and those, along with fonts from manufactur-ers using Ikarus, became the basis for a substantialsubset of the PostScript and TrueType fonts pro-duced in the 1980s and 1990s by Adobe, Apple, andMicrosoft for personal computers and laser printers.

The Xerox corporation played a major role inthe development of digital typography in the 1970s.At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC),bitmap fonts were developed for the screens of per-sonal computers — the “Altos” — to display approx-

imations of some traditional typefaces, and spline-defined letterforms were developed by Patrick Baude-laire. The xerographic laser printer was inventedat Xerox by Gary Starkweather in 1969 and wascommercially developed for high-speed xerographicprinting systems by 1977.

In the mid-1980s, Xerox’s innovations were imi-tated and popularized in products like the Apple Mac-intosh computer and LaserWriter printer. Xerox hadalso developed software for computer interchange andoutput of type and pages on laser printers. AdobeSystems, founded by alumni of Xerox PARC, de-veloped the PostScript page description language,which used outline fonts of cubic Bezier curves aspart of a general imaging model, to solve the problemof device-independent page interchange and render-ing. The first commercial PostScript printer was theApple LaserWriter launched in 1985.

The spline-defined font outlines of Ikarus, Post-Script, and similar systems had several advantages,including: economy in computer file size and memoryutilization, scalability to arbitrary sizes, ease of rota-tion and modification. The raster scan-conversion ofabstract mathematical outlines to arrays of discretepixels on monitor screens or page bitmaps of laserprinters raised difficult technical and aesthetic issuesat low resolutions. Technical issues involved tracingpixels along the edges of characters and filling theedge-defined shapes, with the goals of increasing com-putational speed and efficiency. [These were mainlysolved by improved rendering algorithms as well asby the increases in computing speed and memorydescribed by Moore’s Law.]

The aesthetic problems, however, proved moredifficult because they involved aspects of human vi-sion, mechanisms of reading, and expectations of theappearance of text, all less amenable to algorithmicanalysis and hardware advances. At the laser printerresolutions of the 1980s, all below 600 dots per inch,simple scan conversion produced letterforms in whichirregularities of stem weights, horizontal alignments,letter spacings, and traditional detailing producedtexts that failed to conform to reader expectations.The outputs were accordingly judged inferior, andthere was a scramble to ameliorate perceived typequality. Karow was the first to address this problem;in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Ikarus systemused software distortion of master outlines to con-form to digital grids before scan-conversion. Thiswas done off-line to produce bitmap fonts.

To its PostScript Type 1 fonts, Adobe addeddata to mark stems, curved bowls, vertical align-ments, and other features, and those data were usedto locally distort the outlines of characters prior to

Charles Bigelow


rasterization in order to impose greater regularitywhen the characters were rasterized for the digitalgrids of printers. Adobe termed these declarativedata “hints” but kept their implementations as tradesecrets. Adobe’s advance over Ikarus was that Post-Script hints were applied on-the-fly during rasteri-zation in the printer, instead of off-line to producefonts in bitmap and raster formats.

The success of PostScript and its fonts engen-dered competitors, of which the most successful wasTrueType, invented at Apple and later licensed to Mi-crosoft. TrueType used quadratic B-splines insteadof cubic Bezier splines, and procedural instructionsfor fitting outline shapes to raster grids.

[The concept of procedural hinting had previ-ously been developed in the late 1980s by the Foliocorporation for its F3 font technology and disclosedto Apple early in the design of TrueType. Sun Mi-crosystems acquired the Folio F3 technology but didnot strive to promote it as a standard in competitionto PostScript or, later, TrueType.]

In 1989, Microsoft licensed TrueType technol-ogy for its Windows operating system, igniting ayears-long commercial battle popularly known as the“Font Wars”, in which the combatants made rivalclaims of technical and artistic superiority for theirfont technologies. A partial cease-fire in the FontWars came in the 1990s when former combatantsMicrosoft and Adobe agreed on an expanded formatnamed OpenType, in which character outlines couldbe implemented in either PostScript or TrueTypeform, and which included data to support alternativeand context-sensitive forms and glyphs required incertain non-Latin writing systems like Arabic andthe Indic scripts. OpenType, however, was promotedby the Adobe-Microsoft pair against a similar, earlierfont technology, TrueType GX that had been previ-ously released by Apple, so the font wars were notentirely over with the announcement of OpenType.

Between 1985 to 2000, some of the aestheticproblems of digital type were ameliorated in twoways. First, for computer screens, the algorithmicadjustment of pixel intensities along character edges,called “gray-scaling” or “anti-aliasing” reduced theperceptibility of jagged pixels along curves and di-agonals. [This depended on the pixel resolutions ofscreens. At resolutions below (approximately) 120pixels per inch, gray scaled edges looked smootherbut blurrier and were not as acceptable as manufac-turers hoped. Screen resolutions above 220 and 300pixels per inch after the year 2000 effectively resolvedthe problem of jaggedness and irregularity of text onscreen, obviating the need for hints.]

Second, for printers, doubling of resolutions from300 to 600 dots per inch reduced the more egregiousirregularities in text rendering, while techniques fordecreasing intensity of laser beams along characteredges to reduce apparent jaggedness of curves anddiagonals, similar to anti-aliasing in which spot sizewas analogous to screen gray-scaling) made hintingless necessary or unnecessary. [Limitations on elec-trostatic printing limit the effective resolutions thatcan be achieved for mass-market devices.]

As computerized typography and document lay-out advanced, leaders in the computer documentindustry faced the problem of exchanging electronicdocuments across networks, computers, and devices,which required standardization of computer charac-ter encodings beyond the American ASCII and Euro-pean ISO Latin standards. Begun by Xerox in the1980s and supported by Apple, Microsoft, and otherfirms later in that decade or in the 1990s, a 16-bitcharacter encoding standard called “Unicode” wasdeveloped with the goal of eventually encompassingall the world’s written languages. A similar encod-ing project was begun in Europe as the ISO-10646standard. These parallel projects were merged in theearly 1990s as the Unicode standard. Among manyother benefits, Unicode brought computer characterstandardization to many of the non-Latin and non-European orthographies and writing systems thathad encountered obstacles to efficient computeriza-tion, thus spurring development of computer-aideddocument production and distribution.

[CB: Because of the length needed for the abovereview of the information-packed Chapter 5 on digitalfonts, the remaining chapters of the book will becovered in the third and final part of this review. Forreference, the remaining titles and authors are:

• “The first commercial digital fonts”,by Frank Adebiaye;

• “Interlude: On the revival of typefaces”,by Franck Jalleau;

• “Everyday working fonts from 1985 to 2000”,by Olivier Jean;

• “Hybridization, (de-)construction, andquotation in typography from 1985 to 2000”,by Herve Aracil;

• “Interlude: On the preservation of typographicheritage”, by Alan Marshall; and

• “Postface — the metamorphosis of typography”,by Thomas Huot-Marchand.

Ending with an extensive bibliography and index.]

� Charles Bigelowhttp://lucidafonts.com


274 tugboat, volume 38 (2017), no. 2 - tex274 tugboat, volume 38 (2017), no. 2 review and summaries:...

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