Tag Archives: small caps

Reminder: PostScript fonts do not work in ePUBs

Skilled Workman Posted on by

 Click to enlarge This capture shows you some of the different characters available in an OpenType font. This font, Contenu Book, has oldstyle figures [lowercase], lining figures [caps], & small cap figures. It also has true small caps, discretionary ligatures, ornaments, ordinals, and more. These things are always supposed to be used in print, even though only InDesign and Quark support such a thing for page layout AFAIK. I assume most of you know this, but I … Continue reading →

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 →

What is a font?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

A font is a very specific thing. A font is the entire set of characters for a given type style. In the days of letterpress (1460 to 1970), a font was all the characters in a given point size. You had Times 12-point, Times 14-point, Garamond 18-point, and so on. In some old fonts, this was hundreds of characters. When phototype became available in the 1950s, a font came in several sizes. These film strips could be … 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 →