User talk:James Arboghast

: .: .. .: A R B O S P E A K S :. :: .. . Hello from Melbourne, Australia :^) .: . ..
I am working on TYPOGRAPHY and font-related articles. Please feel free to leave a message about anything.

Archive 1 (November 2005 to December 2005):

March 2006

Emphasis (Typography) rewrite

In typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.

Methods & use of emphasis

The human eye is sensitive to variations in letter orientation and weight (blackness) within a body of typeset text. This makes possible three ways of emphasizing words, by changing the regular font to a matching bold or italic style, or a combined bold-italic font.

Bold emphasis

Boldface makes text darker than the surrounding text. With this technique, the emphasized text strongly stands out from the rest; it should therefore be used to highlight certain keywords that are important to the subject of the text, for easy visual scanning of text. For example, printed dictionaries often use boldface for their keywords; Wikipedia follows this convention when the name of each article is marked at the top in bold.

Italic emphasis

Italics is a form of emphasis based on calligraphic and script letterforms, where the vertical aspect of letters is slanted to the left. Italics do not effect blackness. A a related but much rarer form of italics is or oblique.

Using bold or italic formatting—or both—words can be highlighted without making them "stick out" much from the rest of the text (inconspicuous stressing). Traditionally, this is used for marking passages that have a different context, such as words from foreign languages, book titles, etc.

If the text body is typeset in a serif typeface, it is also possible to highlight words by setting them in a sans serif face. This is somewhat of an archaic practice.

*Fig. 2: Example of blackletter emphasis acheived by changing fonts*

Emphasis in design

With both italics and boldface, the emphasis is correctly achieved by temporarily replacing the current typeface. Professional typographic systems (which include most modern computers) would therefore not simply tilt letters to the right to achieve italics (that is instead referred to as slanting) or print them darker for boldface, but instead use entirely different typefaces that achieve the effect. As can be seen in Fig. 1, the "w" letter, for example, looks quite different in italics compared to the regular typeface.

As a result, typefaces therefore have to be supplied at least fourfold (with computer systems, usually as four font files): as regular, italics, bold, and both bold and italics to provide for all combinations. Professional typefaces sometimes offer even more variations for popular fonts, with varying degrees of blackness. Only if such fonts are not available should the effect of italics or boldface be imitated by tilting or blacking the original font.

Alternative methods for emphasis

Capitalization

The house styles of many publishers in the United States use capitalization or all-uppercase letters, in order to emphasise

publication titles
warning messages
newspaper headlines
chapter and section headings

Capitalization is used much less commonly today by British publishers, and usually only for book titles. It is rarely used in other languages.

All-uppercase letters are a common form of emphasis where the medium lacks support for boldface, such as old typewriters, plain-text email, SMS and other text-messaging systems.

Japanese text can be emphasised in a similar way by writing the emphasised text entirely in katakana phonetic characters.

Letterspacing

In Germany, a different means of emphasis was previously used. To achieve a variance in blackness, instead of making the letters darker, one would increase the spacing between them. This resulted in an effect reverse to boldface: the emphasized text becomes lighter than its environment. This was referred to as sperren in German ("letterspacing" in English), which could here be translated as "spacing out". While sperren normally means "to lock (out)", this particular meaning was figurative: with the older method of typesetting with letters of lead, the spacing would be achieved by inserting additional non-printing slices of metal between the types.

The reason for this particular German typographic convention can be seen in the traditional use of blackletter typefaces, for which boldface was not feasible, since the letters were very dark in their standard format. The blackletter typefaces were officially abolished in 1942 by Nazi Germany, and after that, its use quickly diminished. As a result, the use of spacing as a means of emphasis in printed materials quickly became obsolete. However, spacing is sometimes still used as a means of emphasis in typographic media where only one typeset is available, e.g. in typewritten communication or on text-only computer terminals.

Special punctuation marks

In Chinese, emphasis in body text is supposed to be indicated by using an "emphasis mark" (着重號), which is a dot placed under each character to be emphasized. This is still taught in schools, but in practice it is not usually done, probably due to the difficulty of doing this in most computer software. Methods used for emphasis in western texts but inappropriate for Chinese, for example underlining and setting text in artificially slanted type (frequently incorrectly called "italics"), are often used instead.

Typography

Wikipedia is not a repository of images. Wikipedia articles are not collections of photographs, and articles should not have photographs with no encyclopedic content to go with them. Please remove these images from the article, as they have nothing to do with typography, other than in how they have words in them. You seem to be an expert on this subject, so please add encyclopedic content to the article instead of irrelevant, unhelpful images. --Bryan Nguyen | Talk 20:34, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The pictures I am adding are samples of typography. Typography is a special case within the encyclopedia. These samples are not "irrelevant, unhelpful images". Relax. I will be adding written content to go with the samples. In the meantime pease be patient, the pictures of type in use are a practical way of illustrating what typography is. Arbo 20:40, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"...they have nothing to do with typography..." That is plainly untrue, these are pictures of typography. Please relax. Arbo 20:42, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see what is to be learned about typography from the Kelloggs logo, an NYC billboard, and a screen capture of Mac OS X. I understand that typography is used in logos, billboards, and computers, but the images are everywhere and, as they stand, add nothing to the article. I hardly feel that six company logos, or a beer advertisement, or the OS X desktop belong in this article. Besides, the article layout is broken. I would suggest that you add images after sections have written, not before. --Bryan Nguyen | Talk 20:55, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. You may find the German, French, Spanish, and Japanese versions of this article interesting. --Bryan Nguyen | Talk 21:01, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I will check those out :-) Arbo 21:08, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Spanish typography article is excellent —what an encyclopedic article on typography should be. Samples in the Spanish one are excellent. Thankyou for showing me that :-) How can I get a translation of the text in english? That would speed up wikifying the english version a great deal. Arbo 21:58, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am adding written content now. Arbo 21:08, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I hardly feel that six company logos, or a beer advertisement, or the OS X desktop belong in this article."

That's just your view. From the Typographic POV, "type is everywhere". I'll reduce the number of logos. Arbo 21:08, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have to go offline now. Sorry I can't add written content 24 hours a day. If somebody can translate the text from the Spanish typografi article, and if it is okay to use some of that in the English version—yes please—give me a hand and the English version will happen much quicker. Meanwhile I am hurriedly throwing together some original writing on this much misunderstood subject. Arbo 22:04, 1 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And now I find out you, Bryan, are a middle school student. So it is difficult to take your criticisms seriously at all given your age. I'm 42 y.o, a professional typographer & typeface designer who is also a notable commentator on the subject at typophile.com, and you're telling me the images I'm adding are "...irrelevant, unhelpful..." and have "...nothing to do with typography, other than in how they have words in them." They've got type and fonts in them too, if you look closely you'll see. "I hardly feel that six company logos, or a beer advertisement, or the OS X desktop belong in this article." they do belong, and if you don't understand why now, maybe you will one day. From the perspective of a typography professional your view of typography is very, very limited.

Please take into account your age and lack of expert knowledge on typography. Instead of showing knee-jerk reactions and contempt for expertise, try to be more diplomatic: instead of baulking at what I do, assuming you know better and telling me to remove content which is actually relevant, please don't assume bad faith but ask first. Arbo 21:07, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it. It just was bothering me how few typefaces we had articles on. —Chowbok 18:36, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Caslon sample

What do you mean by "make it load faster"? A person doesn't have to download the entire file when they view an image. The server creates a file of that resolution when you define the resolution (eg: 300px). Once the server has done it once, it doesn't have to do it again. ₀₉₁₈^BRIAN • 2006-04-3 16:21

I thought that was how it worked---thanks for clarifying how the server operates. At one point my browser was downloading the full hi res file when viewing the thumb. Nevermind, it was probably my Internet Explorer in error. Arbo 16:30, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For example, the current image is at: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/65/Caslon_sample_779x1024.png/300px-Caslon_sample_779x1024.png — ₀₉₁₈^BRIAN • 2006-04-3 16:21

Yes, no problem, I understand all that. I'm an experienced graphic designer and publisher. Change the caslon sample back to your featured pic. Cheers Arbo 16:30, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, PNGs are much harder for the servers to manipulate than JPGs, so you should only use them when they are required (for diagrams/vector drawings). — ₀₉₁₈^BRIAN • 2006-04-3 16:21

Fine, no problem. Arbo 16:30, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, for the entire featured picture process, see WP:FPC, and for a list of featured pictures, see WP:FP. — ₀₉₁₈^BRIAN • 2006-04-3 16:33