Read Ebook: Type: A Primer of Information About the Mechanical Features of Printing Types Their Sizes Font Schemes &c. with a Brief Description of Their Manufacture by Stewart A A Alexander A

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PAGE

FEATURES OF A TYPE 7

A FONT OF TYPE 9

SCHEME FOR JOB FONT 11

SCHEME FOR 100-LB. FONT 12

THE SIZES OF TYPE 13

LINING TYPE FACES 16

KERNED TYPES 18

SPACES AND QUADS 19

HOW TYPE IS MADE 20

THE LINOTYPE 23

THE MONOTYPE 25

INGREDIENTS OF TYPE METAL 26

WOOD TYPE 27

SUPPLEMENTARY READING 28

REVIEW QUESTIONS 29

GLOSSARY OF TERMS 32

MECHANICAL FEATURES OF TYPE

Type is made of an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. Its length is .918 of an inch. Each type is cast separately in a mold, and has the letter or printing character in bold relief on one end.

Exact uniformity of body is necessary in order that the types, when composed in lines and pages, may be locked together by pressure at the sides so as to make a compact mass. All types in a printing form must be of the same height, so that their faces may present a uniformly level surface from which an impression may be made that will show all the characters clearly. A short type will print faintly or will not print at all, while a long one will be unduly forced into the sheet.

There are on an average about one hundred and fifty roman letters and other characters required in ordinary book printing. These letters are divided into a number of classes: full-body letters, ascending letters, descending letters, short letters; and in some cases, small capitals, which are larger than short letters but not so tall as capitals or ascenders. Only a few letters, like J and Q, cover nearly the entire surface on the end of the type; other letters, like B h l i, cover the upper portion chiefly and leave a blank space at the bottom; while the small letters, like a e o u v, occupy only the middle portion of the surface; still others, like g y p, cover the middle and lower portions of the surface. As all these irregular shapes must be made to appear in line with each other, the type-body on which they are made is larger than the letter. The blank parts around the face of a letter are called the counter, the shoulder, and the beard. The counter is the shallow place between the lines of the face. The shoulder is the low flat part of the type around the face. The beard is the sloping part between the face and the shoulder.

An important feature of a type is the nick on the side of the body. In many cases there may be two, three, or even four nicks on a type. Usually all the types of a font have nicks that are identical in number and position, and when the types are composed in lines these nicks match each other and form continuous grooves on the lower part of the line of type.

The nicks serve as guides to the compositor when taking the type from the case to his composing stick, and they assist in distinguishing the types of one font or face from those of another on the same size of body. Individual letters of different type faces sometimes bear such close resemblance that they are more readily distinguished by the nick or some other body-mark than by the face. A difference in alignment of nicks in a line will readily show the presence of a wrong-font letter. Typefounders sometimes make an extra nick on a few small-capitals in order to distinguish these types from the lower-case letters of the same font.

A font of type is an assortment of one size and kind that is used together. It is usually all the type in the composing-room of a certain kind matching in body, nick, and face. A small font may be held in one case, but several cases may be required for a font of large quantity.

An ordinary font of roman type for book work will include these characters:

The dollar-mark $, short-and &, and sterling pound-mark ? are also included with all full fonts.

The character is an old-style ligature made in some fonts of old-style faces. It is one of the many letter combinations formerly common, in imitation of the work of old manuscript writers.

Many styles of roman types have italic letters to match, but the italic fonts include only capitals, lower-case, figures, and punctuation marks:

Small capitals are not made for italic fonts, except in rare cases. When they are needed in composition, capitals of a smaller size of type are justified into the text line.

Other extra characters, not included in ordinary fonts but which may be added when required, are accented letters , fractions 3/4 5/13 etc.), mathematical signs , superior and inferior letters and figures, leaders , commercial signs , and many other characters for special kinds of printing.

Fonts of advertising, jobbing, and display types usually consist of the capitals, lower-case letters, figures, and points, with occasionally a few extra characters. For many recent styles of heavy faces the founders furnish fractions, accented letters, and other special characters to match in boldness of face, but these are not included in ordinary letter-fonts.

The quantity of each character apportioned to a regular font is the estimated average required for ordinary composition in the English language. It is rare that more than a fraction of a small font can be used in any piece of composition. No general scheme can meet the needs of every kind of work; tables and statistical matter will need extra figures, directories and other lists will call for surplus capitals, dialogue matter will need more than the usual portion of commas and apostrophes for quote-marks; even plain descriptive composition will often call for extra "sorts." For these and other peculiar kinds of composition extra quantities of some characters, as well as other material, must be provided.

Ordinary roman and other faces used in large quantities are measured by weight. The proportion of letters in a 100-pound font, showing the proportions of each character, is given on the next page. Miscellaneous faces used in small quantities are put up in fonts containing a certain number of each letter, the size of the font being designated by the number of capital A's and lower-case a's it contains.

All printing type has, first, a name denoting its size, and second, one denoting the style of its face. For instance, the type used for the text of this book is 10-point Lining Caslon Oldstyle .

The usual sizes are graduated by points up to 12-point. Sizes above 18-point are multiples of 6-point up to 60-point . Larger sizes are 72-point, 84-point , 96-point, 120-point, and 144-point, the latter being the largest type commonly cast in a mold.

In addition to the small sizes shown in the accompanying illustration, there are some intermediate sizes like 5-1/2-point and 4-1/2-point, and type as small as 3-point has been made. These are rare, however, as type smaller than 5-1/2-point is not practicable for extended use. These small sizes are employed for special purposes, like miniature editions of books cut-in notes, piece-fractions, small borders, special characters, and occasional words or lines that are required to be put in the smallest possible space. The size of type known as agate is considered the common standard of measurement for newspaper and magazine advertising space.

Many plain types for books, periodicals, etc., are made only in small sizes. Certain faces are made in a few sizes only, while others are made in more or less complete series from 6-point to 48-point. The irregular sizes of 5-1/2-point, 7-point, 9-point, and 11-point are mostly roman faces, with companion italics, and a few bolder styles for headings and other display in combination with romans of the same body. Many new faces are now made by founders in graded series from 6-point to 72-point, and in some cases even larger. Type faces adapted to many kinds of work are made in nearly all the regular sizes, while those faces designed for small and dainty work, like personal and society cards and stationery, are made only in the smaller sizes of the list.

Types are now often cast with faces larger or smaller than is commonly made on the body, such as a 12-point face on 10-point body, giving the effect of compactness; or an 8-point face made on a 10-point body, which gives a lighter appearance as if opened with 2-point leads. These are known as bastard types. Because of this irregularity in the faces of types it is difficult to know the exact body-size of a type by merely examining a printed sheet.

Borders, ornaments, florets, and decorative characters cast on type-bodies are now made mostly in sizes based on the 6-point as the unit , but 8-point, 10-point, and 14-point sizes are sometimes used.

Before the adoption of the point system, type sizes were named in a haphazard way. Arbitrary names were given to certain sizes and in many cases types of the same name made by different founders varied so much in size that they could not be used together without great inconvenience to the printer. Some of these old names still survive and are applied to the point-system bodies which approximate the old sizes.

POINT SIZE OLD NAME

While these old names and their sizes are now nearly obsolete, young printers should learn the names and associate them with their corresponding sizes of the point system. In the foregoing list there are several intermediate sizes rarely used for type of recent design. Fonts of these odd sizes may be sometimes found, and there has been a size of 15-point made, but little used. These odd sizes are, however, mostly old faces, scripts, and black-letter, originally cast on old bodies and later, after the introduction of the point system, made on new point-bodies which are nearest to their original sizes.

On different sizes of type the shoulder, or blank space, at the bottom of the letter increases gradually with the size of the type, so that a word of small type placed beside a larger size must have some spacing material below as well as above to keep it in its right alignment. This necessary difference in the face-alignment of various sizes is graduated by points, in the lining system, so that when more than one size type is used in the same line the justification is made by using point-body leads. This makes the use of slips of card and paper unnecessary and secures greater accuracy and solidity of the composed page.

Faces of radically different style are not, however, all cast on the same alignment, but are classified into three groups. One group embraces the majority of type-faces, those having capitals and small letters, g y p j. Another group embraces fonts of capitals only, mostly faces known as title letters and combination lining faces which, having no descenders, may be made lower on the body. A third group includes those faces having long descenders, like script types, which must be placed high on the body.

A common class of "lining" types for job work are the combination series, or those having two or more sizes of face cast on bodies of the same size. Each face is made to line with the others on the same body, and all the faces are readily used in combination, with a single size of spaces and quads. In order that the type of each face may be readily distinguished, the nicks are varied in number or position--a single nick for one face, two nicks for another, etc.

When the face of a letter is so large that it projects over the type-body, it is known as a kerned type. Letters of this kind are common in italic and script fonts, and there are a few letters, like f and j, in some oldstyle roman fonts which have the tip of the letter overhang. Kerned types are a source of trouble because of the ease with which these projections break off during composition, proofing, etc. Yet they cannot be entirely dispensed with, especially in italic and script faces having a definite slope, where the long letters would have wide gaps on the side if they were cast on bodies wide enough to hold the entire face. In some styles of upright faces having extra long descending letters g, p, q, y, these descenders may be kerned.

Modern type-makers try, by changing the shape of the letters slightly, to avoid kerns as much as possible, because of the extra care and expense involved in casting. Too often, unfortunately, this avoidance of the kern, in order to meet mechanical convenience, is secured by sacrificing the distinctive form of the letter.

Short metal spaces and quads , used for blanks between words and elsewhere, are of various thicknesses, as illustrated below. An em is a square of type body of any size. This 10-point em is ten points square; a 10-point three-to-em space is one third of the em, a four-to-em is one fourth, etc. The en quad is really a thick space, though called a quad, and is equal to half the em. Larger blanks are the two-em and three-em quads, used to fill the last lines of paragraphs and other wide spaces.

The metal blanks shown here are the regular spaces and quads belonging to a font of type of the size of 10-point. They enable the compositor to obtain the many different spacings required to make lines the required length, and to properly separate words and place them wherever desired in the line. While these thicknesses of spaces are the usual kinds for sizes of type up to 12-point, larger types may have other kinds of spaces, six-to-em, eight-to-em, and even smaller divisions. The thickness of the hair space does not always bear the same proportion to the em quad; in some sizes it is one sixth of the em, in others it may be one eighth or one twelfth. Very thin spaces , for exact spacing and justifying, are supplied by dealers.

A space of the thickness intermediate between the three-to-em and the en quad, known as a patent space, has been made for use in book work. Although it has great advantage as a substitute for two of the thinner spaces when these are needed in spacing a line, its use has been limited and it is not included with the usual assortment furnished by dealers.

The common spaces and quads for general work, when the type itself is used for printing, are about seven-eighths of the height of the type, so that they are well below the printing surface. A type-page composed with these spaces will have a little deep hole at the top of each space. These numerous little holes present a difficult surface for making a good wax mold when an electroplate is made for printing. Where much molding is to be done, higher spaces, quads, and other blanks are provided. These high spaces and quads reach nearly to the shoulder of the type.

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