We treat digital typography in a general way. We look at font types and techniques for screen and print resolution types and how to manage fonts on a computer.
In this article we continue to address the concepts and general knowledge that every designer should have about fonts. On this occasion we are going to deal with two related and highly valuable issues so as not to get into trouble when using fonts.
On the one hand, we are going to talk about the characteristics of fonts treated in two very different media, such as printing on paper and viewing on a screen. Later in this same article we are going to address how font management is carried out on a computer, clarifying some procedures of the usual work with fonts in our system.
digital typography
The application of computing to printing, graphic design and, later, web design, has revolutionized the world of typography. On the one hand, the multitude of computer applications related to graphic and editorial design have made it possible to create new fonts comfortably and easily. On the other, it has been necessary to redesign many of the already existing fonts for their correct display and reading on the screen, making them fit the pixel grid of the monitor screen.
Digital type makes it possible to type and design characters better and with greater fidelity than metallic type, with most of the typeface families adapted to computer work currently on the market, and modern desktop publishing and design applications allow easy handling of the different fonts and its possible variants in size, thickness and inclination.
The problems of lack of quality of output peripherals have also been overcome through laser technology and the postscript programming. The latter, especially, has given a great boost to the typographic field, by allowing perfectly defined outlines of letters, based on mathematical functions.
Another important advance in digital typography came from the hand of the Apple company, which launched the TrueType fontsalso based on the mathematical definition of the letters, which allows a perfect scaling of the same, without sawtooth effects, similar to what happens in vector graphics.
Regarding the fonts available on a computer, operating systems install a variable number of them by default. Subsequent installations of office applications, desktop publishing and design install other new fonts, in such a way that it is difficult to know at any given moment which fonts are available on a certain computer.
The main font families included in Windows operating systems are Abadi MT Condensed Light, Arial, Arial Black, Book Antiqua, Calisto MT, Century Gothic, Comic Sans MS, Copperplate Gothic Bold, Courier New, Impact, Lucida Console, Lucida Handwriting Italic, Lucida Sans, Marlett, News Gothic MT. OCR A Extended, Symbol, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Verdana, Webdings, Westminster, and Wingdings. To these must be added those installed by other Microsoft applications, such as Andale Mono, Georgia and Trebuchet MS.
For its part, among the fonts included in the MacOS operating system are Charcoal, Chicago, Courier, Geneva, Helvetica, Monaco, New York, Palatino, Symbol and Times.
In addition, there are countless fonts available on all kinds of media (floppy disk, CD, DVD, web pages, etc.), as well as non-standard fonts created by specific authors, all of which can be easily installed on any machine.
The main drawback of this lack of knowledge is that we cannot know for sure if the fonts we are using on the screen will later be available at the printer, on the printer or on the reader’s computer, so it is convenient to use standard fonts or check the compatibility of the fonts used with the necessary printing media.
An exception to this rule is when the texts are saved as a graphic file (TIFF, GIF, JPG, PNG, SVG, SWF, etc. formats), since in this case the printer or monitor will interpret the text appropriately , although generally with poorer quality.
Fonts: print and screen
Fonts designed for traditional printing systems are designed to be reproduced in high resolutions and are generally poorly displayed on computer screens, especially in small sizes, since the shapes of the characters have not been conceived to be reproduced in a low resolution screen.
This factor has made it necessary to create specific fonts to be viewed on a computer monitor, designed to be easily readable in low resolution conditions. These are fonts like Verdana, Tahoma (sans serif) and Georgia (serif).
While print fonts become indefinite and illegible when subjected to antialiasing to smooth the staggering of the strokes, in fonts designed for display on the screen, each stroke and each dot fit exactly into the pixel pattern that makes it up.
Its design avoids, as far as possible, curves, tending towards vertical or horizontal lines, which makes them appear clear and defined in small bodies.
Pixelization and antialiasing
Fonts designed for the screen have the disadvantage that, as they are designed for a certain size, it is not possible to resize them correctly, with the vertical and horizontal strokes that compose them appearing distorted.
One possible solution would be to resize them to exactly a multiple of their natural size, since it would again match the screen’s pixel grid, but then they look pixelated, with sawtooth effects.
This undesired effect can be avoided using the antialiasing technique, consisting of blurring the edges of the characters, creating intermediate pixels between the color of the character and that of the background, so that the change between the two is not so abrupt, thus which makes the margins look smooth and not saw-toothed.
Antialiasing, also known as antialias, is a mechanism widely used in the treatment of bitmap images, and almost all graphic programs have specific filters for their application.
As far as text is concerned, operating systems usually offer antialiasing configuration options to prevent it from scaling on the screen. On Windows systems, for example, this functionality is accessed from Start > Control Panel > Display > Appearance, where there is usually a checkbox to enable antialiasing.
As the application of this text display method is configurable by the user, we can never be sure of its activation, so we don’t know in advance how the fonts will look on each user’s monitor. As an alternative, we can convert the texts into images, as long as they are short (short headlines, headers, etc.), since then we can apply antialiasing to them and be sure of their final display.
hinting
Another technique applicable to screen fonts is the so-called hinting process, essential for any font that tries to work on small bodies and low-resolution devices.
It is a method of defining exactly which pixels are lit to create the best possible drawing of a small character at low resolution. Since the bitmap that draws each character on the screen is generated from an outline, it is often necessary to modify this outline so that the desired combination of pixels lights up. A “hint” is a mathematical instruction that is added to a font in order to modify the drawing of the characters in certain fonts.
Managing fonts on a computer
As we have seen, every operating system installs a set of fonts by default, a number that increases with subsequent installations of different software, especially desktop publishing, office automation, graphic design and web design applications.
Generally, each of these fonts is stored as an individual file in a folder intended to store all the system fonts. For example, Windows does this in a folder called Fonts, which hangs directly from the main system installation folder, Windows.
Although certain applications can install certain fonts for their exclusive use, in the Fonts folder we will find all the fonts that will later be available for the different editing and graphics programs. If we access this folder, we will see the font files available on our machine and the common names of each of them.
Windows can handle different types of fonts. Some are fixed resolution, including screen fonts and printer fonts. We will hardly ever use these types of fonts, especially the first ones in applications. They are the ones used by the programs for their own menus and the rest of the graphical interface.
If we want to see how these fonts are presented, just double click on their file, which will open the Windows font viewer, showing us the phrase “The fast Indian bat ate a happy cardillo…12340567890” in different font sizes. . The choice of this phrase is due to the fact that most of the characters of the alphabet are found in it, with which we can get a good idea of the appearance of the font.
The fonts that we will almost always use with our applications, both on the computer and for printing, are scalable fonts. There are two main types of scalable fonts: TrueType fonts and Postscript Type 1 fonts.
Truetype (TT) and Postscript Type 1 (PS1) are cross-platform outline fonts and in both their forms are defined by lines and curves. Their representation is independent of the resolution of the output device and therefore they can be scaled to any size without any loss of quality.
PS1 fonts originate from Adobe’s Postscript page description language, while TrueType technology was developed by Apple. The main difference between these technologies consists in the mathematical way they use to describe the character curves, since while PS1 uses Bézier curves, with nodes and control points that define the shape, TT is based on its own functions, called ” splines”. Another difference is that TT fonts have all the data in a single file (.TTF extension), while PS1 fonts require two separate files (one .PFB and one .PFM ), one containing the definition of the outline of the font for the printer and another that contains…
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