Here, we discuss some typography basics. While this information is not essential, many font lovers will find it interesting.
3.1 Classifications of Typefaces
Fixed versus variable width
There are several classifications of typefaces. Firstly, there are fixed width fonts, and variable width fonts. The fixed width fonts look like typewriter text, because each character is the same width. This quality is desirable for something like a text editor or a computer console, but not desirable for the body text of a long document. The other class is variable width. Most of the fonts you will use are variable width, though fixed with can be useful also ( for example, all the example shell commands in this document are illustrated with a fixed with font ). The most well known fixed width font is courier.
To serif or not to serif ?
Serifs are little hooks on the ends of characters. For example, the letter i in a font such as Times Roman has serifs protruding from the base of the i and the head of the i. Serif fonts are usually considered more readable than fonts without serifs. There are many different types of serif fonts.
Sans serif fonts do not have these little hooks, so they have a starker appearance. One usually does not write a long book using a sans serif font for the body text. There are sans serif fonts that are readable enough to be well suited to documents that are supposed to be browsed / skimmed ( web pages, catalogues, marketting brochures ). Another application that sans serif fonts have is as display fonts on computer screens, especially at small sizes. The lack of detail in the font can provide it with more clarity. For example, Microsoft touts Verdana as being readable at very small sizes on screen.
Notable sans serif fonts include Lucida sans, MS Comic Sans, Verdana, Myriad, Avant Garde, Arial, Century Gothic and Helvetica. By the way, Helvetica is considered harmful by typographers. It is somewhat overused, and many books by typographers plead users to stay away from it.
The old and the new -- different types of Serif fonts
Old Style
Old style fonts are based on very traditional styles dating as far back as the late 15th century. Old style fonts tend to be conservative in design, and very readable. They are well suited to writing long documents. The name ``old style'' refers to the style of the font, as opposed to the date of its design. There are classic old style fonts, such as Goudy Old Style, which wre designed in the 20th century. The old style class of fonts has the following distinguishing features:
Well defined, shapely serifs. Diagonal emphasis. Imagine drawing a font with a fountain pen, where lines 45 degrees anticlockwise from vertical are heavy and lines 45 degrees clockwise from verticle are light. Old style fonts often have this appearance. Readability. Old style fonts are almost always very readable. Subtlety and lack of contrast. The old style fonts have heavy lines and light lines but the contrast in weight is subtle, not stark.
Notable Old Style fonts include Garamond, Goudy Old Style, Jenson, and Caslon ( the latter is contentious -- some consider it transitional )
Moderns ( or didone )
The moderns are the opposite of old style fonts. These fonts typically have more character, and more attitude than their old style counterparts, and can be used to add character to a document rather than to typeset a long piece. However, nothing is black and white -- and there are some modern fonts such as computer modern and Monotype modern, and New Century Schoolbook are very readable ( the contrast between heavy and light is softened to add readability ). They are based on the designs popular in the 19th century and later. Their distinguishing features include:
Lighter serifs, often just thin horizontal lines. Vertical emphasis. Vertical lines are heavy, horizontal lines are light. Many moderns have a stark contrast between light and heavy strokes. Modern typefaces with high contrast between light and heavy strokes are not as readable as the old style fonts.
Bodoni is the most notable modern. Other moderns include computer modern, and Monotype modern ( on which computer modern is based ).
Transitional
Transitional fonts fit somewhere in between moderns and old style fonts. Many of the transitionals have the same kind of readability as the old styles. However, they are based on slightly later design. While a move in the direction of the moderns may be visible in these fonts, they are still much more subtle than the the moderns. Examples of transitionals include Times Roman, Utopia, Bulmer, and Baskerville. Of these, Times leans towards old style, while Bulmer looks very modern.
Slab Serifs
The slab serif fonts are so named because they have thick, block like serifs, as opposed to the smooth hooks of the old styles or the thin lines of some of the moderns. Slab serif fonts tend to be sturdy looking and are generally quite readable. Many of the slab serifs have Egyptian names -- such as Nile, and Egyptienne ( though they are not really in any way Egyptian ). These fonts are great for producing readable text that may suffer some dilution in quality ( such as photocpied documents, and documents printed on newspaper ). These fonts tend to look fairly sturdy. The most notable slab serif fonts are Clarendon, Memphis and Egyptienne, as well as several typewriter fonts. Many of the slab serif fonts are fixed width. Conversely, most ( almost all ) fixed width fonts are slab serif.
The Sans Serif Revolution
Surprisingly, the rise of sans serif fonts is a fairly recent phenomenon. The first well known sans serif fonts were designed in the 19th early 20th century. The earlier designs include Futura, Grotesque and Gill Sans. These fonts represent respectively the ``geometric'', ``grotesque'' and ``humanist'' classes of sans serif fonts.
Grotesque
The grotesques where so named because the public were initially somewhat shocked by their relatively stark design. Groteques are very bare in appearance due to the absence of serifs, and the simpler, cleaner designs. Because of their ``in your face'' appearance, grotesques are good for headlines. The more readable variations also work quite well for comic books, and marketting brochures, where the body text comes in small doses. Grotesques don't look as artsy as their geometric counterparts. Compared to the geometrics, they have more variation in weight, more strokes, they are squarer ( because they don't use such circular arcs ). They use a different upper case G and lower case a to the geometrics. While they are minimalistic but don't go to the same extreme as the brutally avant-garde geometrics.
Notable grotesques include the overused Helvetica, Grotesque, Arial, Franklin Gothic, and Univers.
Geometric
The Futura font came with the manifesto: form follows function. The geometric class of fonts has a stark minimalistic appearance. Distinguishing features include a constant line thickness ( no weight ). This is particularly conspicuous in the bold variants of a font. Bold groteques and humanist fonts often show some notable variation in weight while this rarely happens with the geometric fonts. Also notable is the precise minimalism of these designs. The characters almost always are made up from straight horizontal and vertical lines, and arcs that are very circular ( to the point where they often look as though they were drawn with a compass ). The characters have a minimal number of strokes. This gives them a contemporary look in that they embrace the minimalistic philosophy that would later take the world of modern art by storm. A tell tale sign that a font is a geometric type is the upper case ``G'', which consists of a minimalistic combination of two strokes -- a long circular arc and a horizontal line. The other character that stands out is the lower case ``a'' -- which is again two simple strokes, a straight vertical line and a circle ( the other ``a'' character is more complex which is why it is not used ). Notable geometrics include Avant Garde, Futura, and Century Gothic.
Humanist
As the name might suggest, humanist fonts were designed with a goal of being less mechanical in appearance. In many ways, they are more similar to the serif fonts than the geometrics and the grotesques. They are said to have a ``pen drawn'' look about them. They tend to have subtle variation in weight, especially observable in bold variants. The curve shapes are considerably less rigid than those of the geometrics. Many of them are distinguishable by the ``double story'' lower case g, which is the same shape as the g used in the old style serif fonts. The humanist typefaces are the easiest to use without producing an ugly document as they are relatively compatible with the old style fonts.
Compatible Typefaces
Grouping typefaces is not easy, so it pays to avoid using too many on the one page. A logical choice of two typefaces consists of a serif and a sans serif. Monotype's Typography 101 page provides a category-matchup. They conclude that the moderns and geometrics form good pairs, while the old styles and humanists also go together well. The transitionals are also paired with the humanists. The slab serifs are paired with the grotesques, and some variants of the slab serifs are also said to match the geometrics or humanists.
From reading this, one gets the impression that their philosophy is essentially to match the more conservative serifs with the more moderate sans serifs, and pair the wilder modern serifs with the avant garde looking ( pun unavoidable ) geometrics.
3.2 Ligatures, Small caps fonts and expert fonts
Ligatures
Properly spacing fonts brings with it all sorts of issues. For example, to properly typeset the letters ``fi'', the i should be very close to the f. The problem is that this causes the dot on the i to collide with the f, and the serif on the head of the i to collide with the horizontal stroke of the f. To deal with this problem, font collections include ligatures. For example, the ``fi'' ligature character is a single character that one can substitute for the the two character string ``fi''. Most fonts contain fi and fl ligatures. Expert fonts discussed later often include extra ligatures, such as ffl, ffi, and a dotless i character.
Small caps fonts
Small caps fonts are fonts that have reduced size upper case letters in place of the lower case letters. These are useful for writing headings that require emphasis ( and they are often used in LaTeX ). Typically, when one writes a heading in small caps, they use a large cap for the beginning of each word, and small capitals for the rest of the word ( ``title case'' ). The advantage of this over using all caps is that you get something that is much more readable ( using all caps is a big typographic sin ).
Expert fonts
Expert fonts consist of several extras designed to supplement a typeface. These include things like ligatures, ornaments ( much like a mini-dingbats collection designed to go with the typeface ), small caps fonts, and swash capitals ( fancy, calligraphic letters ).
3.3 Font Metrics and Shapes
Font metrics define the spacing between variable width fonts. The metrics include information about the size of the font, and kerning information, which assigns kerning pairs -- pairs of characters that should be given different spacing. For example, the letters ``To'' would usually belong in a kerning pair, because correctly spaced ( or kerned ), the o should partly sit under the T. Typesetting programs such as LaTeX need to know information about kerning so that they can make decisions about where to break lines and pages. The same applies to WYWIWYG publishing programs.
In addition to the metrics, is the font outline, or shape. The components of the fonts shape ( a stroke, an accent, etc ) are called ``glyphs''.
Slashdot Mirror
5. The Installation This section does not give much detail on the Slackware installation process. In fact, it assumes you are familiar with it. Instead, this section concentrates on those areas where special care or unusual steps are required. 5.1 Boot the machine Make a boot-disk from one of the images. I recommend you use bareapm.i on a laptop and bare.i on a desktop - unless you have a parallel-port IDE device (pportide.i). Boot the laptop from it. When the boot: prompt appears, type "mount root=/dev/hdax" where x is the temporary root partition. Log in as root. Then activate the swap partition. 5.2 Floppy/Parport CD-ROM Install In both these cases, no extra work should be necessary to access the installation media. Simply run setup. 5.3 Network/PCMCIA Install Slackware has supplementary disks with tools for these and instructions for their use greet you when you log in. Use the network disk on a desktop PC with ethernet card or a laptop with pocket ethernet adaptor. Use the PCMCIA disk for PCMCIA install. Once your network adapter/PCMCIA socket has been identified, run setup. PCMCIA install on the Aero The Slackware installation process runs the PCMCIA drivers from the supplementary floppy. Because the Aero has a PCMCIA floppy drive, this means you can't remove the floppy drive to insert the PCMCIA CD-ROM/ethernet card. The solution is simple: the Slackware PCMCIA setup routine creates /pcmcia and mounts the supplementary disk there, so 1.Create the /pcmcia directory yourself 2.Mount the supplementary disk to /mnt. Be sure to specify the type as vfat - if you don't, it'll be incorrectly identified as UMSDOS and long filenames will be mis-copied. 3.cd /mnt;cp -dpPr ./* /pcmcia/ 4.Unmount the floppy. 5.Run pcmcia. When the script complains that there is no disk in the drive simply hit Enter: Card Sevices will start. Connect your PCMCIA device and hit Enter. 6.Run setup 5.4 Set-up The Slackware set-up program is straightforward. Start with the Keymap section and it'll take you forward step by step. AddSwap You do need to do this step so it can put the correct entry in fstab but make sure it doesn't run mkswap - you're already using the partition. Target In this section Slackware asks which partitions will be mounted as what and then formats them if you want. The safest bet here is to leave your temporary root partition out altogether and just edit fstab later once you know you don't need it for it's temporary purpose anymore. If you're going to reuse it as /home then it is OK to designate it as /home - obviously, don't format it now! If you intend to re-use it as a part of the directory structure that will have files placed in it during installation (/var, for example) then you absolutely must ignore it in this step: after the installation is complete you can move the files across. Select Here you choose which general categories of software to install. I chose as follows: A - Base Linux System AP -Non-X applications F - FAQs and HOWTOs N - Networking tools and apps Y - BSD games collection I wouldn't recommend adding to this - if anything, prune it back to A, AP and N. That gives you a core Linux setup to which you can add according to your needs. Install Choose the Expert installation method. This allows you to select/reject for installation individual packages from the categories you chose in the Selection step. Appendix A goes through the precise choices I made . This part takes about 3 hours for a PCMCIA network install. You are prompted to select individual packages before the installation of each category, so you can't just walk away and leave it to run through. Configure Once the packages are all installed, you are prompted to do final configuration for your machine. This covers areas like networking, Lilo, selecting a kernel etc. Some points to look out for: If you did a PCMCIA install, don't accept the offer to configure your network with netconfig. This will ruin your pcmcia networking. Wait until you've rebooted and then edit /etc/pcmcia/network.opts This is the point where you should install a kernel. For a laptop the bareapm kernel is best, for a desktop simply the bare one. Exit The set-up process is finished but you are not. Do not reboot yet! There is another vital step to complete. 5.5 Pre-reboot Configuration On a normal machine you would simply reboot once the installation is complete. If you do that here you may have to wait 6 or 8 hours for a login prompt to appear and another half hour to get to the command prompt. Before rebooting you need to change or remove the elements that cause this slowdown. This involves editing config files so you need to be familiar with vi, ed or sed. At this stage your future root partition is still mounted as /mnt so remember to at that to the paths given here. /etc/passwd Edit this to change root's login shell to ash. ash really is the only practical login shell for 4mb RAM. /etc/rc.d/rc.modules Comment out the line 'depmod -a'. You only need to update module dependencies if you have changed your module configuration (recompiled or added new ones, for example). On a standard system it only takes a second or two and so it doesn't matter that it's needlessly performed each time. On a 4mb laptop it can take as much as 8 hours. When you do change your module set-up you can simply uncomment this line and reboot. Alternatively, change this part of the script so that it will only run if you pass a parameter at the boot-prompt. For example: if [ "NEWMODULES" == "1" ] ; then depmod -a fi /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 This script starts network services like nfs. You probably don't need these and certainly not at start-up. Rename this script to something like RC.inet2 - that will stop it from being run at boot and you can run it manually when you need it. /etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia On the Aero you should also rename this script, otherwise you'll lose the use of your floppy drive on start-up. It's worth considering for any other small laptop as well - you can always run it manually before inserting a card. Once these changes have been made, you are ready to reboot. 5.6 Post-reboot Configuration. If you made the changes recommended in section Pre-reboot configuration then the boot process will only take a few minutes, as opposed to several hours. Login as root and check that everything is functioning properly. Re-use the temporary root. Once you are sure the installation is solid you can reclaim the partition you used as the temporary root. Don't just delete the contents, reformat the filesystem. Remember, the mke2fs that came with the mini-Linux is out of date. If you intend to re-use this partition as /home, remember not to create any user accounts until you have completed this step. Other configuration tweaks. In such a small RAM space, every little helps. Go through SlackWare's BSD-style init scripts in /etc/rc.d/ and comment out anything you don't need. Have a look at Todd Burgess' Small Memory mini-HOWTO http://eddie.cis.uoguelph.ca/~tburgess/ for more ideas. Next Previous Contents URLWatch: For notice when this page changes, fill in your email address. Maintained by: Webmaster, Linux Online Inc. Last modified: 17-Apr-2000 08:59AM. Views since 01-Jun-1998: 100. Material copyright Linux Documentation Project. Design and compilation copyright ©1994-2000 Linux Online Inc. URLWatch provided by URLWatch Services. Internet services provided by AiNET. All rights reserved.
3. Fonts 102 -- Typography
Here, we discuss some typography basics. While this information is not essential, many font lovers will find it interesting.
3.1 Classifications of Typefaces
Fixed versus variable width
There are several classifications of typefaces. Firstly, there are fixed width fonts, and variable width fonts. The fixed width fonts look like typewriter text, because each character is the
same width. This quality is desirable for something like a text editor or a computer console, but not desirable for the body text of a long document. The other class is variable width. Most of
the fonts you will use are variable width, though fixed with can be useful also ( for example, all the example shell commands in this document are illustrated with a fixed with font ). The most
well known fixed width font is courier.
To serif or not to serif ?
Serifs are little hooks on the ends of characters. For example, the letter i in a font such as Times Roman has serifs protruding from the base of the i and the head of the i. Serif fonts are
usually considered more readable than fonts without serifs. There are many different types of serif fonts.
Sans serif fonts do not have these little hooks, so they have a starker appearance. One usually does not write a long book using a sans serif font for the body text. There are sans serif fonts
that are readable enough to be well suited to documents that are supposed to be browsed / skimmed ( web pages, catalogues, marketting brochures ). Another application that sans serif
fonts have is as display fonts on computer screens, especially at small sizes. The lack of detail in the font can provide it with more clarity. For example, Microsoft touts Verdana as being
readable at very small sizes on screen.
Notable sans serif fonts include Lucida sans, MS Comic Sans, Verdana, Myriad, Avant Garde, Arial, Century Gothic and Helvetica. By the way, Helvetica is considered harmful by
typographers. It is somewhat overused, and many books by typographers plead users to stay away from it.
The old and the new -- different types of Serif fonts
Old Style
Old style fonts are based on very traditional styles dating as far back as the late 15th century. Old style fonts tend to be conservative in design, and very readable. They are well suited to
writing long documents. The name ``old style'' refers to the style of the font, as opposed to the date of its design. There are classic old style fonts, such as Goudy Old Style, which wre
designed in the 20th century. The old style class of fonts has the following distinguishing features:
Well defined, shapely serifs.
Diagonal emphasis. Imagine drawing a font with a fountain pen, where lines 45 degrees anticlockwise from vertical are heavy and lines 45 degrees clockwise from verticle are light. Old
style fonts often have this appearance.
Readability. Old style fonts are almost always very readable.
Subtlety and lack of contrast. The old style fonts have heavy lines and light lines but the contrast in weight is subtle, not stark.
Notable Old Style fonts include Garamond, Goudy Old Style, Jenson, and Caslon ( the latter is contentious -- some consider it transitional )
Moderns ( or didone )
The moderns are the opposite of old style fonts. These fonts typically have more character, and more attitude than their old style counterparts, and can be used to add character to a
document rather than to typeset a long piece. However, nothing is black and white -- and there are some modern fonts such as computer modern and Monotype modern, and New Century
Schoolbook are very readable ( the contrast between heavy and light is softened to add readability ). They are based on the designs popular in the 19th century and later. Their distinguishing
features include:
Lighter serifs, often just thin horizontal lines.
Vertical emphasis. Vertical lines are heavy, horizontal lines are light.
Many moderns have a stark contrast between light and heavy strokes.
Modern typefaces with high contrast between light and heavy strokes are not as readable as the old style fonts.
Bodoni is the most notable modern. Other moderns include computer modern, and Monotype modern ( on which computer modern is based ).
Transitional
Transitional fonts fit somewhere in between moderns and old style fonts. Many of the transitionals have the same kind of readability as the old styles. However, they are based on slightly later
design. While a move in the direction of the moderns may be visible in these fonts, they are still much more subtle than the the moderns. Examples of transitionals include Times Roman,
Utopia, Bulmer, and Baskerville. Of these, Times leans towards old style, while Bulmer looks very modern.
Slab Serifs
The slab serif fonts are so named because they have thick, block like serifs, as opposed to the smooth hooks of the old styles or the thin lines of some of the moderns. Slab serif fonts tend to
be sturdy looking and are generally quite readable. Many of the slab serifs have Egyptian names -- such as Nile, and Egyptienne ( though they are not really in any way Egyptian ). These
fonts are great for producing readable text that may suffer some dilution in quality ( such as photocpied documents, and documents printed on newspaper ). These fonts tend to look fairly
sturdy. The most notable slab serif fonts are Clarendon, Memphis and Egyptienne, as well as several typewriter fonts. Many of the slab serif fonts are fixed width. Conversely, most ( almost
all ) fixed width fonts are slab serif.
The Sans Serif Revolution
Surprisingly, the rise of sans serif fonts is a fairly recent phenomenon. The first well known sans serif fonts were designed in the 19th early 20th century. The earlier designs include Futura,
Grotesque and Gill Sans. These fonts represent respectively the ``geometric'', ``grotesque'' and ``humanist'' classes of sans serif fonts.
Grotesque
The grotesques where so named because the public were initially somewhat shocked by their relatively stark design. Groteques are very bare in appearance due to the absence of serifs, and
the simpler, cleaner designs. Because of their ``in your face'' appearance, grotesques are good for headlines. The more readable variations also work quite well for comic books, and
marketting brochures, where the body text comes in small doses. Grotesques don't look as artsy as their geometric counterparts. Compared to the geometrics, they have more variation in
weight, more strokes, they are squarer ( because they don't use such circular arcs ). They use a different upper case G and lower case a to the geometrics. While they are minimalistic but
don't go to the same extreme as the brutally avant-garde geometrics.
Notable grotesques include the overused Helvetica, Grotesque, Arial, Franklin Gothic, and Univers.
Geometric
The Futura font came with the manifesto: form follows function. The geometric class of fonts has a stark minimalistic appearance. Distinguishing features include a constant line thickness (
no weight ). This is particularly conspicuous in the bold variants of a font. Bold groteques and humanist fonts often show some notable variation in weight while this rarely happens with the
geometric fonts. Also notable is the precise minimalism of these designs. The characters almost always are made up from straight horizontal and vertical lines, and arcs that are very circular (
to the point where they often look as though they were drawn with a compass ). The characters have a minimal number of strokes. This gives them a contemporary look in that they embrace
the minimalistic philosophy that would later take the world of modern art by storm. A tell tale sign that a font is a geometric type is the upper case ``G'', which consists of a minimalistic
combination of two strokes -- a long circular arc and a horizontal line. The other character that stands out is the lower case ``a'' -- which is again two simple strokes, a straight vertical line
and a circle ( the other ``a'' character is more complex which is why it is not used ). Notable geometrics include Avant Garde, Futura, and Century Gothic.
Humanist
As the name might suggest, humanist fonts were designed with a goal of being less mechanical in appearance. In many ways, they are more similar to the serif fonts than the geometrics and
the grotesques. They are said to have a ``pen drawn'' look about them. They tend to have subtle variation in weight, especially observable in bold variants. The curve shapes are considerably
less rigid than those of the geometrics. Many of them are distinguishable by the ``double story'' lower case g, which is the same shape as the g used in the old style serif fonts. The humanist
typefaces are the easiest to use without producing an ugly document as they are relatively compatible with the old style fonts.
Compatible Typefaces
Grouping typefaces is not easy, so it pays to avoid using too many on the one page. A logical choice of two typefaces consists of a serif and a sans serif. Monotype's Typography 101 page
provides a category-matchup. They conclude that the moderns and geometrics form good pairs, while the old styles and humanists also go together well. The transitionals are also paired with
the humanists. The slab serifs are paired with the grotesques, and some variants of the slab serifs are also said to match the geometrics or humanists.
From reading this, one gets the impression that their philosophy is essentially to match the more conservative serifs with the more moderate sans serifs, and pair the wilder modern serifs with
the avant garde looking ( pun unavoidable ) geometrics.
3.2 Ligatures, Small caps fonts and expert fonts
Ligatures
Properly spacing fonts brings with it all sorts of issues. For example, to properly typeset the letters ``fi'', the i should be very close to the f. The problem is that this causes the dot on the i to
collide with the f, and the serif on the head of the i to collide with the horizontal stroke of the f. To deal with this problem, font collections include ligatures. For example, the ``fi'' ligature
character is a single character that one can substitute for the the two character string ``fi''. Most fonts contain fi and fl ligatures. Expert fonts discussed later often include extra ligatures, such
as ffl, ffi, and a dotless i character.
Small caps fonts
Small caps fonts are fonts that have reduced size upper case letters in place of the lower case letters. These are useful for writing headings that require emphasis ( and they are often used in
LaTeX ). Typically, when one writes a heading in small caps, they use a large cap for the beginning of each word, and small capitals for the rest of the word ( ``title case'' ). The advantage of
this over using all caps is that you get something that is much more readable ( using all caps is a big typographic sin ).
Expert fonts
Expert fonts consist of several extras designed to supplement a typeface. These include things like ligatures, ornaments ( much like a mini-dingbats collection designed to go with the typeface
), small caps fonts, and swash capitals ( fancy, calligraphic letters ).
3.3 Font Metrics and Shapes
Font metrics define the spacing between variable width fonts. The metrics include information about the size of the font, and kerning information, which assigns kerning pairs -- pairs of
characters that should be given different spacing. For example, the letters ``To'' would usually belong in a kerning pair, because correctly spaced ( or kerned ), the o should partly sit under
the T. Typesetting programs such as LaTeX need to know information about kerning so that they can make decisions about where to break lines and pages. The same applies to
WYWIWYG publishing programs.
In addition to the metrics, is the font outline, or shape. The components of the fonts shape ( a stroke, an accent, etc ) are called ``glyphs''.