No. 3 Science and History Behind the Design of Lucida Charles Bigelow
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204 TUGboat, Volume 39 (2018), No. 3 Science and history behind the design of Lucida Charles Bigelow & Kris Holmes 1 Introduction When desktop publishing was new and Lucida the first type family created expressly for medium and low-resolution digital rendering on computer screens and laser printers, we discussed the main design de- cisions we made in adapting typeface features to digital technology (Bigelow & Holmes, 1986). Since then, and especially since the turn of the 21st century, digital type technology has aided the study of reading and legibility by facilitating the Figure 1: Earliest known type specimen sheet (detail), development and display of typefaces for psycho- Erhard Ratdolt, 1486. Both paragraphs are set at logical and psychophysical investigations. When we approximately 9 pt, but the font in the upper one has a designed Lucida in the early 1980s, we consulted larger x-height and therefore looks bigger. (See text.) scientific studies of reading and vision, so in light of renewed interest in the field, it may be useful to say Despite such early optimism, 20th century type more about how they influenced our design thinking. designers and manufacturers continued to create The application of vision science to legibility type forms more by art and craft than by scientific analysis has long been an aspect of reading research. research. Definitions and measures of “legibility” Two of the earliest and most prominent reading often proved recalcitrant, and the printing and ty- researchers, Émile Javal in France and Edmund Burke pographic industries continued for the most part to Huey in the US, expressed optimism that scientific rely upon craft lore and traditional type aesthetics. study of reading would improve the legibility and Moreover, the craft of type punch-cutting involved economy of written and typographic forms. visual knowledge that vision science had not yet en- “The object [of study] is the characters in compassed. For five centuries, type punch-cutters — use. We shall have to investigate their size, type designers before the term — carved extremely their form, their spacing.” (Javal, 1878) tiny forms that had to be effortlessly recognizable “We therefore should seek to improve by the greatest number of readers, and as well be legibility without reducing the number of visually pleasing to the casual glance. Renowned letters on the page.” (Javal, 1905) punch-cutters like Garamond, Granjon, Van Dijck, “Certainly the letter-forms that have Bodoni, and others, though not scientists in the mod- come down to us through the ages have ern sense, were cognizant of some of the most re- never been pruned to meet the reader’s fined aspects of visual perception. needs, though the writer and printer have made conservative changes for their own 2 Body size and x-height convenience. There is not the slightest The most universal feature of type is size. The abil- doubt that forms can be devised which will ity to compose type at nearly any size is taken for be much more legible than these ancient granted today, but not in the early years of typogra- traditional symbols.” (Huey, 1908). phy. The laborious creation of many sizes of type, A few years later, Barbara Roethlein, in her M.A. the punches cut by hand, was the life work of highly thesis at Clark University, formalized the questions skilled artisans over generations and centuries. to be asked of typographic legibility: In the incunabula era, printing through 1500, “Every reader has observed that all of very early books were printed in single sizes and these variants of letter-forms are not styles of type, but later printers did employ a broader equally legible — an observation which range of sizes. In 1486, Erhard Ratdolt, a German raises the theoretical question: What printer established in Venice, printed the first known are the factors upon which legibility type specimen sheet, showing 14 different typefaces depends? And the practical question: (fig. 1). Ten were gothic rotunda fonts in sizes from 1 How should one proceed if one set out to 36 to 9 point (Ratdolt, 1486). improve the legibility of printed letters?” 1 These measurements in point sizes are rounded to integers. (Roethlein, 1912) The actual body sizes are a few fractions of points bigger or Charles Bigelow & Kris Holmes TUGboat, Volume 39 (2018), No. 3 205 A remarkable feature of Ratdolt’s range of ro- of 1913, which may have been the starting point for tunda fonts is that at three of the sizes, 18, 13, and Times New Roman of 1931 (Carter, 1985). 9 point, he displayed two versions, one with a large Commenting on the longstanding trend to larger x-height relative to the body, and one with a small x-heights, Stanley Morison lamented the lack of doc- x-height. Ratdolt’s larger x-height versions look sub- umentation on the “development of type design con- stantially bigger to us than the smaller x-height ver- sciously viewed as a means of reducing the real sions at the same body size. Ratdolt left no expla- space occupied by the letters while maintaining their nation, but we may reasonably suppose that visible apparent size” (Morison, 1968). differences between the different x-height versions In an influential essay on the “optical scale” in appeared the same to the printer and his readers typefounding, Harry Carter (1937) pointed out that in the 15th century as they do to us today. A side types intended for different reading sizes were tra- observation is that Ratdolt’s gothic fonts, as with ditionally designed differently. In particular, types most gothic types of the era, had larger x-heights for newspapers and other continuous texts com- than the roman types produced by printers in Italy posed at small sizes often had abbreviated descend- at the time, yet the roman style soon replaced the ing strokes or “tails”, as well as shortened ascending gothic in Italian printing, and thence proceeded to strokes, to increase the x-height fraction in relation do the same in French and eventually English and to the body size. By “x-height fraction” we mean Dutch printing. the portion of the total body height occupied by the During the 16th century, average type sizes in x-height. use decreased by a few points. The main economic Although it had been evident for 500 years that factor was cost of paper. Smaller type sizes enabled larger x-height fractions made type appear bigger, in smaller page sizes, less paper, cheaper editions, and the 1980s we did not know of studies that proved a larger market. Other factors have been suggested. that types with bigger x-height fractions were actu- One is greater production and usage of eyeglasses, ally more legible in terms of speed of reading or to make smaller type more legible for older readers degree of comprehension. Apparently, when type or others with vision difficulties. Another is techni- looked bigger, that was good enough to persuade cal improvement in the methods of punch-cutting printers and readers of its value, but several early and type casting, including improvements in met- 20th century legibility studies focused on the mini- allurgy to produce harder, more durable type. A mum sizes that were easily readable. religious reason may also have been a factor dur- Javal (1905) stated that nine point type was ing the Protestant Reformation and the Counter- most used for books and newspapers in France; Reformation: smaller type enabled books to be more the 9-point type in his book had an x-height of economically printed and transported, and, if the 1.5 millimeters. Huey (1908) recommended a min- contents were proscribed by religious authorities, imum x-height of 1.5 mm for fast reading. Roeth- easier to conceal. lein (1912) tested 10-point fonts, the majority of But, as roman type body sizes decreased in the which had x-heights in the range of 1.4 to 1.5 mm 16th and 17th centuries, their x-heights increased. (insofar as the heights could be determined). For example, in 1569, Robert Granjon cut a “Gros Miles Tinker’s Legibility of Print (1963) summa- Cicero” (“Big 12 point”) in the style of Garamond but rized decades of meticulous legibility research by with a bigger x-height that made it look almost as Tinker and Donald Paterson on type size and legi- big as the next larger body size, the St. Augustine bility. Using body size in points as their measure, (14 point) (Vervliet, 2010; M. Carter, 1985). In the they found that type sizes of 10 and 11 point were 17th century, Dutch punch-cutters and typefounders read most quickly. By the early 1980s, many of the continued the trend toward bigger x-heights, and in types tested by Tinker and Paterson a half-century the 18th century, Pierre Simon Fournier cut alterna- earlier were no longer in common usage, but our tive faces with large, medium, or small x-heights, in measurements of those types and sizes in catalogs several sizes. He called certain of his large x-height, indicated that the x-heights averaged 1.5 mm. slightly narrow faces “in the Dutch style” (Fournier, Those early assertions of minimum type size 1766). for fluent reading were confirmed in a series of rig- It has been said that Granjon’s Gros Cicero was orous psychophysical reading studies by Legge et the eventual model for the Monotype face “Plantin” al. (1985, 2007), which found the “critical print size” below which reading speeds decrease markedly, but smaller. Typographic point systems were not promulgated until above which increases in type size do not apprecia- the 18th century and not stabilized until the 19th and 20th centuries (Ovink, 1979).