Typesetting Manual and Specimen Typesetting Manual and Specimen 3 Introduction 7 Measurement of Type 17 Family Composition 21 Language Support 23 Hyphens, Dashes and Features 33 Expansion of the Alphabet Typesetting Manual and Specimen Gramatika Typesetting Manual and Specimen Written and Designed by Roman Gornitsky Gramatika was initially developed as a typeface for the visual identity of V-A-C Foundation (Moscow/Venice) in close collaboration with Experimental Jetset and the V-A-C Foundation design team. The author would like to thank Marieke, Erwin, Danny, Lyosha and all the others involved in the development process. This is an online version of the manual. You can order a printed version at shop.temporarystate.net/gramatika-manual Gramatika is available for purchase at typefaces.temporarystate.net Published by The Temporary State 2020 ISBN 978-3-00-067256-9 Introduction Font Size: 75 mm Gramatika Regular Introduction Kees Broos Design: Total Design Breda, 1983 4 Font Size: 30 mm Gramatika Regular Line Height: 24 mm Introduction will sooner or later (and whether The phone book, which he consults, he realizes it or not) encounter one is typographically arranged by of the many visual products of the Total Design, just as the text Amsterdam design office Total and illustrations of his Spectrum Design (TD). Encyclopedia. On his way to the Amro Bank, While visiting museums and which has started the renewal exhibitions, he certainly ran into of its interiors according to TD the work of Total Design more than design. Wandering past the blue- once. While escaping the wet green-red banners fluttering along Dutch winter to warmer regions, the facade of the local Property TD routing systems at Schiphol Development Foundation and past Airport make sure that he reaches the bright display windows of his plane quickly and easily. Randstad employment agency. A red van of Rapid Post passes him, followed by trucks of Boskalis and Calpam. In the cultural centre, posters of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Boymans Rotterdam are displayed. At the post office his eyes dwell upon the new red reception desk. He has just seen a whole series of letters, symbols, colours and spatial designs, which all originate from Total Design. Even if he was to stay at home the whole day, chances are that a mailman delivers a letter carrying a stamp designed by a TD associate. Font Size: 6 mm Gramatika Regular Line Height: 6 mm 5 Introduction Industry Standard Throughout the 1960s and 70s the Dutch To suggest that the way we use Helvetica design studio Total Design produced a truly is an easy way out typographically immense amount of work. As described is ridiculous. We spend an enormous before, their design was omnipresent and their amount of time spacing, kerning, lining client list seemingly endless. It will not be and positioning type. The fact that we use an understatement to say that the image of the only a small variety of typefaces demands entire country at that time was shaped by just a certain discipline, a skillful precision, one studio. Such scale comes with an obvious a focus on the finer details. It’s certainly downtrade: only the key items and concepts not that a-different-typeface-for-every- could be worked through by the studio’s occasion attitude. Now, that would be world-renown partners (Wim Crouwel, Benno an easy way out. Wissing, Friso Kramer, Ben Bos, etc.), the rest of Experimental Jetset, the work had to be delegated to an army of 2003 common employees. At its peak in the end of the sixties, the office of Total Design employed Lets call it the “Helvetica Paradox”: 45 “permanent associates” — not including the The mechanistic image of Modernism requires countless interns and freelancers. When the Helvetica to be set extremely tight — which is production reaches such scale, it’s not only possible through the most unmechanistic possible anymore to strive for artistic manual labor of a skillful typesetter. excellence in each produced piece, but rather the issue of quality control becomes the main focus. An employee is not supposed to create a masterpiece, an employee is supposed to not make a mistake. To ensure the quality of graphic production, numerous manuals and guidelines were conceived — the industrial production of graphics required the industrial standardization: At the start of our activities, Friso, Wim and I had realized very quickly, that in dealing with large projects, a number of things had to be standardized so that the arrangement of information could be more easily programmed, and more time would become available for handling intrinsic problems. If there were to be variations within the final products, we preferably searched for variations within a modular system, so that mutual relationships, interconnections, clustering and industrial production wouldn’t demand follow-up care. This principle was applicable to architecture, industrial design and graphic design. That’s the history of the birth of the grid! A cuckoo in the nest? Benno Wissing, 1983 Helvetica was an essential element at the core of this system of “total” unity of style. Celebrated throughout the world by the International Style designers as a tool to orchestrate the entire design process, Helvetica does surprisingly little to streamline the actual typesetting process. On the contrary, since the Modernist typography requires it to be set as tightly as possible, it usually requires meticulous and tedious arrangement of every letter by hand: 6 Measurement of Type Font Size: 75 mm Gramatika Regular Line Height: 60 mm Measurement of Type Font Size Working in InDesign, you can set the measurement units in your document to points1, picas2, inches, inches decimal, millimeters, centimeters, ciceros3, agates4, pixels5, or even 19.07 mm introduce your own measurement units. There 32.74 mm is, however, one area to which these settings won’t apply — type size will always be 26.32 mm measured in points regardless of your settings. 13.92 mm Why do fonts require their own measurement system and why can’t their size be expressed 26.27 mm in understandable metric units? I guess, it is some sort of a conspiracy: an obscure measurement system is designed to conceal 19.86 mm the fact that the font size is, essentially, a lie. Because if you look at, for example, Times New 30 mm Roman set in 30 mm size, you won’t find 19.83 mm a single measurement, that relates to the declared 30 mm size in any way (fig. 1). All 13.42 mm the measurements seem to be completely random and do not relate to any measurements Candara Microsoft in any other typeface. In fact, it seems to be the type designer’s duty to reinvent all the metrics whenever a new typeface is created. Hx Often even the fonts by the same publisher won’t feature a single matching value (fig. 2). 19.99 mm All of this makes modern digital fonts completely incompatible with each other: you can’t put two different typefaces on 14.01 mm the same grid. It also renders the creation of any universal typographic system impossible: you can’t build a rational grid out of some unmeasurable ethereal substance, whose size is decided solely by what “feels right” (and therefore changes with every new task). For any true modernist, such environment is 30 mm a constant lingering pain. The standard has to be introduced! Microsoft Cambria Microsoft Technical Note Every character of a digital Times New Roman has 2048 UPM typeface is described as a series and the caps height of 1356, Hx of Bézier curves on a coordinate therefore the letter “R” in 10mm plane: each node and each curve Times New Roman has the height handle is represented by a pair of of roughly 6.6211 mm. There is numbers (see p. 9). To convert a good reason to assume that all these abstract coordinates into the fonts have 1000 UPM and convert 18.95 mm real world values, a parameter their inner measurements called UPM (Units per Em) is used. accordingly (unless you want to Usually it equals 1000, which means challenge your calculus skills a lot). that if you, for example, set the 13.93 mm type in 10 mm, 1000 units of a coordinate plane become 10 mm of physical measurements. So the letter “R” from the example on the opposite page, if set in 10 mm size, will have the height of exactly 6.5 mm. 30 mm 30 mm HOÁpx Hx Roman Times New Calibri Microsoft 1 2 5 You can choose, whether One pica equals 12 points. One pixel equals one PostScript you want to use PostScript points point. A rather liberal assumption, (roughly 0.3527 mm), “Traditional” 3 to say the least. points (roughly 0.3515 mm; One cicero also equals 12 points. “Traditional” stands for “American”) Didot points, not PostScript points. or if your idea of a point is Therefore, in InDesign 1 cicero something completely different — equals 12.788 points. you can assign the point to be anything between 0.315 and 4 0.42 mm. A bizzare measure of 1/14th of an inch. I’m not sure if anyone has ever made use of it in the entire history of InDesign. 8 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Measurement of Type Font Size: 275 mm Gramatika Regular Line Height: ----- 9 Measurement of Type Line Height One might assume that all these seemingly random metrics are, in fact, carefully calculated values designed to ensure that the typeface looks good when the text is set on a line height matching the font size. Unfortunately, that cannot be further from truth.