Tugboat, Volume 36 (2015), No. 3 191 About the DK Versions Of

TUGboat, Volume 36 (2015), No. 3 191 About the DK versions of Lucida other names and suggesting alternative derivations. When we read, we recognize all these kinds of Charles Bigelow distinctions almost unconsciously because they are Donald Knuth's informative and amusing letter, \A part of our passive \vocabulary" of typographical sig- footnote about Òh, oh, zero!" [4], tells of his efforts nifiers. They help us understand the structuring of in the late 1960s to reduce confusion between capital text. In type design, these distinctions are elements letter Ò' and zero in the typography of computing of a designer's active graphical vocabulary, the con- journals and books, when he recommended to the ceptual toolkit used to shape the look of information. ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and Graphical distinctions within and between cap- his publisher Addison-Wesley a new, squarish shape itals and lower-case, roman and italic typefaces have of capital Ò' to distinguish it from oval zero in been devised, refined, and standardized since the fonts that simulated typewriter (fixed-width) text. early 15th century, when humanist scholar and scribe After much correspondence, ACM did not follow his Poggio Bracciolini developed the humanist handwrit- suggestion but Addison-Wesley did, commissioning ing that eventually became canonical roman type. a special squarish Ò' for the first volume of The Art Thanks to Poggio, nearly all Latin text typefaces con- of Computer Programming. tain two alphabets: upper-case (capitals) and lower- A dozen years later, Don designed a squarish case (small letters), and thanks to Poggio's friend, capital Ò' for Computer Modern Typewriter, which NiccolòNiccoli, who wrote a cursive variant of Pog- he made with his newly developed Metafont system. gio's hand, roman has been distinguished from italic. His beloved squarish Ò' is now standard in his own Over time, the capitals gained semantic import; books and in publications of others who use his marking a significant distinction. A \Bill" is a per- Computer Modern typefaces. son, but a \bill" is an invoice, a bird beak, or a cap He doesn't explicitly state in his \Footnote" brim. I can attest that something similar applies to (maybe it seemed too obvious to mention) that in ef- \Chuck" and \chuck". The distinction between upper- fect he was proposing a new parameter of typographic and lower-case is therefore graphemic; the graphical distinction: \squarishness" versus \roundishness" of difference signifies a difference in meaning. Interest- curves (my words) within a typeface. ingly, the patterns of capital usage differ between orthographies. In German orthography, initial capi- Structure of a typeface design tals mark nouns and are correspondingly frequent, The graphical structure of a typeface design is built whereas in modern French, capitals are rather rare from a complex set of distinctive features, some of except at the beginnings of sentences and personal which apply within a face, and others of which apply names. In English orthography, capital usage was between faces. Within a face, several features like fairly frequent in earlier centuries but has diminished round, straight, and diagonal, ascender or descen- since the 19th century. der, dot or no dot distinguish individual letters from Size. Capital letters are comparatively bigger, each other. Groups of letters are distinguished by as denoted by their Latin-derived name \majuscule" a few features, including height, width, pointyness (biggish) and lower-case letters smaller, in Latin \mi- (which distinguishes punctuation (hence the name) nuscule" (smallish). The Latin majuscule/minuscule from letters proper) and weirdness (for lack of a bet- distinction is rare among typographic writing sys- ter word) for characters like @ # $ % & that look tems, occurring first in Latin type, and later in Greek, somehow weirder than letters, are usually logographs Cyrillic, and Armenian types influenced by the Latin symbolizing a word rather than a single sound, and model but deriving their capital versus lower-case for which people can't seem to agree on names or forms from different roots and by different means. purported historical derivations. For instance, com- The \case" distinction is not found in most other mercial \at" @ (plausibly derived from a contracted writing systems, including Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, ligature of Latin \ad" meaning \at, to, toward" but Korean, Japanese, or the several related systems used poorly attested before the 16th century) is called \at" in India, such as Devanagari for Hindi and Sanskrit. by most English speakers, but its name varies won- Width. The width of characters is another dis- derfully from language to language, with meanings of tinction. In proportionally spaced typefaces, capital ear, strudel, elephant trunk, monkey tail, and so on; Ò' is wider than zero, which is usually adequate for number sign # (probably an abbreviation of Latin differentiation, but the width distinction is almost \numerus" meaning \number") is variously called neutralized in monospaced (fixed-width) fonts, and \hash", \octothorpe", \pound", \sharp" and \number" that is where confusion between Ò' and zero most in English. I expect that readers will enjoy noting commonly occurs. About the DK versions of Lucida 192 TUGboat, Volume 36 (2015), No. 3 Marks. The dot over the minuscule letter ì' ap- Catich briefly and with Catich's pupil, Fr. Bob Pal- peared in the late middle ages as a light stroke over ladino, can recount his other feats of brush-writing the letter ì' in blackletter \textura" script, to mark mastery, including writing a perfect Roman capital the letter as separate from other so-called \minim" `R' behind his back and upside down. letters. The dot, along with later accents and dia- Contrast. A distinction called \contrast", or critics, like those proposed in the 16th century by modulation of thick and thin strokes, was used in French typographer Geoffrey Tory, has been contin- \old-style" types from the 15th to the late 18th cen- ued in most Euro-Latin typography, and there are tury, and in modern revivals, in which the figure zero occasional extensions when adapting Latin letters to was cut approximately at lower-case height but as other languages or clarifying distinctions, as in fonts an annulus, an unmodulated ring without thick-thin for linguistics. Hence it seemed natural to add marks variation, distinguishing it from the lower-case ò', to distinguish capital letter Ò' from zero when con- which retained the varying line thickness of the hu- fusion between the two cropped up in the early days manist pen written letter. Contrast is also a major of computing. feature of the typeface genre called \modern". In my article \Oh, oh, zero!" [2], which Don In his 1960s suggestion to Addison-Wesley, Don Knuth \Footnoted", I gave examples of various pro- proposed a new way to distinguish the curve of the posals from computer journals and typography jour- Ò' from that of the zero: \squarishness" versus nals for distinguishing Ò' and zero. These included \roundishness" (my words). Although, as he relates, the addition (or rarely, subtraction) of slashes, dots, Addison-Wesley followed his suggestion, it wasn't a loops, bars, and other twiddles to Ò' or to zero. generally practical or enduring solution. In Metafont Proposals from scientists, technologists, engineers, or some ten years later, Don implemented his solution as mathematicians usually added distinguishing marks a parameter he called \superness" (from Piet Hein's to the Ò', keeping their zero pristine in its symbolic term \superellipse") [5]. Superness \controls the mathematical emptiness. Proposals from humanists, amount by which the curve differs from a true ellipse." artists, scholars and designers added distinguishing Thus, Don gave squarishness versus roundishness in marks to the zero, keeping their capital letter Ò' by typeface design a precise algebraic expression: the ex- historical precedent and charismatic authority, citing ponent of the general equation describing the ellipse. the classical Roman inscriptions, or the famous story The classic ellipse of the conic curves analyzed of the early Renaissance painter Giotto, as told by by Greek mathematicians is algebraically described Giorgio Vasari. When an emissary from the Pope by an equation of degree 2. In the early 19th century, asked Giotto for a drawing to show his skill: the French mathematician Gabriel Lamégeneralized Giotto . took a sheet of paper, and with a brush the ellipse by varying the exponent. In particular, dipped in red, fixing his arm firmly against his side an exponent above 2.0 makes the corners of the to make a compass of it, with a turn of his hand he ellipse smoothly bulge or inflate beyond the classical made an Ò' [tondo] so perfect in curve and contour elliptical oval. In 1959, Danish polymath Piet Hein that it was a marvel to see it. empirically determined that an ellipse of degree 2.5 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the most excellent was, for him, the most agreeable compromise between painters, sculptors, and architects the ellipse and the rectangle, and he used the shape (Here I translate Vasari's Italian word \tondo" as to design a traffic oval. Hein called the ellipse of Ò' in English, but it can also be translated with degree 2.5 a \superellipse". I believe that, to date, justification as `circle'. Modern Italians do both when Metafont is the only type design tool that provides referring to Vasari's story, sometimes saying `cerchio' control over this parameter. (circle) or Ò' instead of \tondo", which incidentally In \Oh, oh, zero!" [2], I also showed samples of also means \roman" when referring to a typeface.) recent digital fonts that distinguish zero and Ò' by The skill of drawing a marvelous Ò' was not various means, but I neglected to show a sample of lost with Giotto. The late Fr. Edward Catich, who Computer Modern Typewriter (shown here in fig.

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