h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So many little errors in a subject about which I care. I'll have to come back to this one when I have more time.

I'd be most grateful if you could find the time to point them all out, since it's a subject about which I also care.

Bels

I´d already mentioned the letter known in english as thorn (here´s an attempt to show it: þ Þ)
I´m guessing that many of the rules of type-setting apply to all roman-letter languages... so think globally
All that needs changing in the following sentence is adding the word 'english' or substituting that instead of 'single'...

"Font sizes are described in points: the higher the point size, the larger the printed characters. The size of a font is measured from the top of an ascender (eg, the vertical line of the letter 'b') to the bottom of a descender (eg, the 'tail' of the letter 'p'). Because there is no single letter that has both an ascender and a descender, however, it is not very easy to measure the point size of a font!"

cheers ismarah

Thanks, ismarah, I did note your point about the thorn, but it is not possible in a basic guide such as this to deal with the requirements of every language and every alphabet, even if I were competent to do so.

I think it is already quite well understood that the language of h2g2 is modern English.

Your suggestion to insert the word 'English' would only raise the question of what exactly is meant, since the thorn is used in Old English and some dialects of Middle English - though those terms again are vague and would require definition. The entry is aimed at people using a WP program to set modern English and, as the title indicates, it is for beginners. Since they would be highly unlikely to encounter the thorn, I feel that the statement 'it is not very easy to measure the point size' is fine in this context.

Bels

OK I'm back. I'll go through it in sections until I have to disappear again - otherwise you might not get anything today!

Under "Typeface or Font":
- serifs are literally "feet" and are just decoration/tidyness, not to lead the eye anywhere. You may be thinking of the linkers in script fonts.
- sans serif means "without feet" and doesn't preclude any other property.
- neither option has anything to do with line thickness. Although many sans serif fonts are uniform, see Hobo which isn't. For a uniform serif font see Courier.
- you can't know what skin or font the reader is using.

Oops - missed one of my earlier points...

Throughout:
- you have been inconsistent in your use of commas, brackets and hyphens.

Under top:
- "But to a professional typesetter" probably shouldn't start with a conjunction and could have commas. "To a professional typesetter," with or without the comma would do.
- "alone, and there" should not have a comma
- put "and the people who spent many years acquiring them" between brackets, not hyphens.
- "or, in papermaking, a wire mesh" could be "or the wire mesh of paper manufacturers" (ie no commas).
- "), and typesetters" should not have a comma.
- "silk screens, and other" should not have a comma.
- "commonly-encountered" should be two separate words, not hyphenated.

Oh, I see! So not really errors after all, mostly just debating points.

> serifs are literally "feet" and are just decoration/tidyness, not to lead the eye anywhere

What do you mean, 'literally'? In which language? The Oxford Dictionary defines 'serif' as "a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter" and gives the origin as "mid 19th cent: perhaps from Dutch 'schreef' ('dash, line') of Germanic origin."

And why do you deny that they serve to lead the eye?

>You may be thinking of the linkers in script fonts.
No, I'm not.

> you can't know what skin or font the reader is using.
True. An unwarranted assumption on my part.

>Throughout:
- you have been inconsistent in your use of commas, brackets and hyphens.

I haven't used any brackets. Do you mean parentheses?

Firstly, this is all a matter of style, of opinion, of judgement, not of right or wrong.

Secondly, some of these things were changed in the editorial process, after I had finished.

>"commonly-encountered" should be two separate words, not hyphenated.

I strongly agree with this. I never hyphenate in such cases where there is an adverb ending in '-ly', since there is no ambiguity. The present case, where these two quite long words are joined, is particularly unfortunate, in my view. In phrases such as, for example, 'a little used car' or 'a fine tooth comb', hyphenation would indeed be important. But I did not perpetrate the hyphen that we both object to.

Bels

No, I did mean errors but you can debate them anyway.

I agree that "literally" may have been a poor choice of word, but nevertheless "sans serif" is usually translated as "without feet" (presumably since the base of the letter is a common location for the serif and shows where the letter stands).

They do not exist to lead the eye. If they do lead the eye this is merely incidental.

I meant one form of brackets, () rather than {} or [] in your case, which you have used to delineate some of your parentheses (a parenthesis is the text marked off by the dashes or brackets and parentheses has thus come to mean these bracket markers too).

The use of a comma before and is normally regarded as wrong. The mixing of parenthesis styles is confusing to the reader.

I realise you may not be in charge of the editorial process and therefore not responsible for some errors. This is one reason I haven't put anything in to be edited!

sans serif-
sans means 'without', so sans serif means without serifs. Serifs are the projections found on the ends of the strokes on some letters in some faces. I understood that they helped the eye to know when the stroke had finished, thus allowing a character (espeially at a small size) to be read at spead with more ease. I could be mistaken, it has been a long time since my typography stuff & I can't find my notes.

Serif fonts tend to be used in small print (look in a book), while sans serif was used for display at larger sizes. DON'T give me a hard time about this- there were exceptions, there are more now, due to the spread of computers.

I think we are being tied up in the finer points of grammer & ignoring the factual errors & ommisions in the original entry.

OK, ignoring the grammar and punctuation (and history and linguistics), the really glaring error in that paragraph is the confusion of the serif issue with the concepts of contrast and stroke variation. They are not the same thing and are not correlated as stated.

Moving onward down the page...

Under "Pitch":
- you don't need "stiff and wooden", just "stiff" or "rigid" would do.
- "small letters; a full stop is tiny, and" should have a comma instead of the semi-colon and no comma before "and".

Under "So What's the Point?":
- the point measurement system was invented in 1737 by a Parisian typefounder called Pierre Fournier. His points were apparently 0.349mm but that's approximately 1/72 inches (which would be almost 0.353mm). Windows allegedly uses 1/72" but actually cheats by making things larger.
- "full point, or period" shouldn't have a comma.
- the letter f has both an ascender and a descender in some fonts (also old s and some symbols). In addition to having inaccurate content, the sentence construction from "Because" onwards is very bad. The brackets on the sentence before it are in the wrong place (should start where the comma is incorrectly placed) but this is less bad.
- capitals are not always the same height as letters with ascenders (eg they can be smaller).

Under "Above and Below":
- "rather grandly called, respectively, superscript and subscript characters." should be "rather grandly called superscript and subscript characters respectively."
- punctuation marks are not really superscript or subscript characters.
- you have forgotten accent marks.

The Pica section should merely be part of the Point section.

When Apple designed the Mac, they used 72dpi as their screen resolution (remember, this was before multiscan monitors). The result of this was that what was visible on the screen was the same size (roughly) as the finished output. Once Microsoft jumped on the WIMP bandwaggon they settled on 96dpi (don't ask me why). Ironically, this is now the 'standard' for webpages (there was recently some discussion about Apples' new browser which uses).

Might I suggest a diagram of a couple of letters, showing their respective features (ascenders, x-height, serifs, ears etc.)

If you want, I will knock one up for you.

Hi Chairmaker,

We seem to have lost Bels for the moment. Note that you won't be able to upload a GIF diagram. You'd have to fake it with text or table art.

My previous post after one of yours was not actually a reply to you at all but a continuation of what was wrong with the description of serifs in the guide entry. I agree with you that book usage tends to be serif for normal text and sans serif for big headers. However, I think the use of serifs long predates any concept of moveable type. It goes back to clay and stone tablets, eg Roman stone masons needed to chisel a tidy end to their letter strokes. The marks made by a stylus in clay were naturally flared or bifurcated (though not recognisable as modern letters). Then there are the various forms of calligraphy...

I think that most of the points raised so far are either tangential or, somewhat annoyingly, mere opinion masquerading as fact. Where facts are at issue, as for example regarding the meaning and derivation of 'serif', you are demonstrably wrong. In addition to the Oxford Dictionary which I have quoted from, I note that the Merriam Webster Dictionary states:

Etymology: probably from Dutch schreef stroke, line, from Middle Dutch, from schriven to write, from Latin scribere -- more at SCRIBE
Date: 1841
: any of the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter

And 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' has this:

The nature of Typography
Many typographers have long been attracted to the clean and uncluttered look of so-called sans serif type (the two little bases on which the vertical elements of the lowercase "n" rest are serifs, as is the backward pointing slab atop the lowercase "i" or "l," and sans serif types are those in which such embellishments are lacking [T I]). But the difficulty is that almost every study ever completed has indicated that sans serif type is less easy to read in text than is type with the serif.
Sans serif
in printing, a style of roman letter stripped of its serif--i.e., such embellishments as the vertical line at the end of the top right and lower left curved segments of the letter "s," the base line on which the lowercase "n," "m," and "l" rest, etc. Tests appear to indicate that the roman face is easier to read with serifs than without them.

Your kind offer about 'ignoring the grammar and punctuation (and history and linguistics)' is magnanimous indeed, but serves only to suggest that there are problems in the entry with grammar, history and linguistics - a sweeping condemnation which has not been backed up by any evidence whatsoever.

You have pounced for comment on some very narrow areas of the entry and seek to damn the whole thing on the basis that it does not agree with your opinion on these minor points. You have not substantiated any of your opinions on the points you raise about matters of punctuation. In any case it is understood that these are not wholly within the control of the author, whether here or in most other publications.

It would have been far more productive to raise this discussion at the Peer Review stage, where a much broader range of views than yours or mine would have been available. As it is, I can only suggest that as you appear to be so dissatisfied with the whole entry you should write one yourself and allow others to review it.

Bels

The correct use of English could be considered standardised opinion (not just mine). Where the facts are concerned I have provided demonstrations and references as to why you are wrong.

According to the various dictionaries I have checked, the etymology of serif is uncertain (it was also spelled ceriph at one point). Obviously words like scribe in the various Germanic languages for writing/writers come from the Latin, but that is not relevant unless an unbroken connection is proven to serif.

I have given you font examples as to why you are wrong to link the serif issue with stroke variation. Do you need more proof?

The ease of reading different font types is irrelevant if that is an after-effect. It can only be considered when designing a new font not in inferring the history of writing. Note that tests show that lower case is far easier to read than upper case - although monuments tend to use upper case. Note also that tests show the top halves of letters are easier to read than the bottom halves.

I did say at the beginning that there were a lot of _little_ errors which you now complain are "narrow areas" and "minor points". I never said to throw the whole thing away. I didn't see the article at the Peer Review stage. I'm not a scout and have only ended up looking there on a couple of occasions when following other threads.

I'm with SEF on this; the original entry contained lots of glaring errors that anyone with typographical experience would not have written. The main point that both SEF & myself have raised is the statement that sans serif fonts have lines of a constant thickness (if I have read it correctly; it could also read that the characters have a uniform width, the phrasing is rather clumsy at the end of that sentence). Both interpretations are incorrect. Fact.

A guide entry should be correct, wherever possible. Some kid could copy chunks & use it in homework & get a poor mark . Worse, people could believe what they read here! (although it is 'mostly harmless'...)

I also would have liked to have seen this article in the peer review stage.

I propose to ask the Editors to make some changes which I hope will adequately address some of your (and my) concerns.



Here's a guide to some of the most commonly-encountered terms.

will become:

Here's a guide to some of the most commonly encountered terms. It must be borne in mind that in matters of grammar, punctuation, layout and style, while there are certain rules that should always be observed there are also 'grey areas'. There are many different opinions, often varying not only from one Anglophone country to another but also between different publishers in the same country. The accepted norms are also liable to change over time. If you are writing for publication you should always check the publisher's preferences or style guide.



Deriving from an old word for the casting of metal (as in a 'foundry'), a font is a set of characters of a particular design and size - a typeface. A character could be a letter, a numeral, a punctuation mark, a symbol, or one of several kinds of space.

Some fonts have little bits called serifs added on at the ends of the letters, to lead the eye forward through the text. Fonts that do not have these are called 'sans serif'. In serif fonts (eg, Times) the thickness of the line in each character can vary; in sans serif fonts (such as the one you are reading now) all characters are the same thickness.

will become

Deriving from an old word for the casting of metal (as in a 'foundry'), a font is a set of characters of a particular design and size - a typeface. A character could be a letter, a numeral, a punctuation mark, a symbol, or one of several kinds of space. Some fonts have little bits called serifs added on at the ends of the letters, which seem to help to lead the eye forward through the text.





Capitals are the same height as letters with an ascender, but of course appreciably wider.

will become

Capitals are usually the same height as letters with an ascender, but of course appreciably wider.



Because there is no single letter that has both an ascender and a descender, however, it is not very easy to measure the point size of a font!

will become

In modern English and in most modern fonts, however, there is no single letter that has both an ascender and a descender, so it is not always very easy to measure the point size of a font!



Comments?

Bels
"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

That looks OK. I guess I'd have to see it in context. It's hard to check somthing in little pieces which can't be guaranteed to remain the same in the "final" version! You missed the bit about the original point system inventor (and therefore size) and the re-positioning of the Pica section to that area. NB I haven't checked the other versions of point size which you give.

I've been busy elsewhere again. So I never did finish going through the last few paragraphs, eg I remember you (or the editor) mixed up some of the attribute types. However, if you are going to start a thread under Feedback-Editorial, I can add them later when I slither back this way. NB that was why I posted the first quick message here - to give myself a trail to follow when the article fell off the front page! _@"

Obviously I do not expect an instant response, but I'm not going to be in a position to attend to a long-drawn-out discussion either. I also have other things to do.

Since you opened this thread here, rather than for example on my Personal Space or by email, I feel this is the best place to continue. I will not be opening threads on this elsewhere.

No, I didn't miss the other bits you mention!

Look, this entry was researched and written; it has been through Peer Review; it has been sub-edited; and it has been looked over by the Editors. My main concern now is to ensure that in spite of this the entry could not be construed as somehow misleading.

The entry is already much longer than the average for this site. Therefore, especially at this late stage, I am not inclined to introduce additional material which, however interesting, a) is extraneous to the chief purpose, and b) should properly be Peer Reviewed. Matters such as the name of the inventor of the Point should have been dealt with in Peer Review, where for all I know I might still have felt as I do now.

So I'll leave this here for a little while to see if anyone has any further comments.

Bels

Hi Bels & Sef,

You have left the common confusion about the difference between typeface & font in- maybe replace

Deriving from an old word for the casting of metal (as in a 'foundry'), a font is a set of characters of a particular design and size - a typeface. A character could be a letter, a numeral, a punctuation mark, a symbol, or one of several kinds of space.

with

A typeface is a set of characters of a particular design. A font is a set of characters all in the same typeface, in a particular size. The word font derived from an old word for the casting of metal (as in a 'foundry'). So a printers might have several fonts in different sizes of the same typeface.

-

I'm not convinced the in depth discussion about typewriters is called for. They are not really relevent to an entry about typesetting, apart from a brief reference to mono spaced typefaces (which don't require any skill to set anyway)

Pitch is relevent to proportional spaced typefaces; it's not done any more but I have a type rule for estimating the amount of room that will be taken up by a paragraph of a certain size, pitch & leading (can't remember how to use it though!). The reason that this is no longer done is computers; if you have the words on screen on Quark you can see how much space they will take up!

Please see my earlier comments about the misuse of the term justified (!)

A reference to the typsetters reading upside-down & back-to front (& spotting spelling mistakes!) might be dropped in?

There were several mechanical methods of producing type between movable characters & the onset of computers (such as the 19th century Linotype system). Should't these get a mention if the subject is typesetting?

Maybe an entry about typography is called for