This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 13 Typography Rules and Conventions 375 T he art of typography isn’t easily separated from the art of illustration—text and graphics have coexisted on the printed page since there was a printed page. This chapter is a departure of sorts from regular documentation of CorelDRAW because before you drive the CorelDRAW text engine, you need to know the rules of the road. For example, the physical appearance of text should complement an illustration. Think of a font choice as the attire in which your message appears and CorelDRAW as the boutique where you shop for accessories to dress up your message. Like successful design work, typography has rules, such as hyphenation, punctuation, justification, line spacing; in addition to the rules, typography is subordinate to the design it appears with. Nothing spoils a good display sign like 15 exclamations marks misused to stress a point. Give this chapter a thorough read-through before moving on to the chapters on working with text later in this part of the book. This chapter has great examples of typographic dos and don’ts, and the tips you’ll learn will enhance the worth of your printed message—and at the very least this chapter has good examples of punctuation. Font Families and Font Styles When beginning a project, it’s usually best to cruise the Installed Fonts drop-down list in CorelDRAW, see what you think is an appropriate typeface choice, find fonts that work harmoniously if you need more than one typeface in the design, and then, if you’re drawing a blank, check out the typefaces you own but have not installed. It’s generally a bad idea to pick the first font on the installed fonts list; Arial is a good workaday font, but it’s most appropriate for text on aspirin bottles and caution signs because of its legibility at small point sizes and its authoritative, clean but spartan look. The following sections describe the anatomy of a font, what stroke width means, serifs and font characteristics, and basically explain why a typeface looks the way it does and therefore becomes appropriate for a design idea. Also, the better you understand the characteristics of characters, the better you’ll be able to communicate a specific need to a typographer or a press operator, and to conduct a quicker search on your drive and the Web for the typeface you need. Styles and Types of Typefaces There are two basic categories of typefaces a designer uses daily: ● Roman The characters (called glyphs by typographers) consist of thick and thin stems (called strokes) providing good contrast between characters to make long paragraphs at small point size easy to read. ● Gothic The characters are made up of strokes of even or almost-even widths. This makes a Gothic font an excellent choice for headlines with impact and for official signs. 376 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Within the categories of typefaces, there are two more branches: serifs and sans (from the Latin “without”) serifs. Serifs are an embellishment at the end of a stroke in a character; their original purpose was both as a flourish when scribes would hand-copy manuscripts and, as typesetting was invented, serifs made the wooden and metal slugs easier to remove from the surface the slug was pressed into. Typographers ages ago decided that a Gothic font could benefit from serifs and, conversely, a Roman typeface could become more functional as a headline-style font by removing the serifs. Designers now enjoy the use of both Roman and Gothic type cast in serif and sans serif treatments, examples of which are shown in Figure 13-1. In typographer’s language, a font is usually part of a family of typefaces. Optima, for example, has normal, italic, bold, and bold-italic as part of the font family; additionally, other weights of Optima, part of the Optima family, are available from several vendors you can find online. Typeface, in contrast, is generally used to describe either a single member of a family (Optima Bold is a typeface) or a typeface that has no family members, such as Rockabilly. CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 377 13 FIGURE 13-1 Examples of Gothic and Roman typefaces in serif and sans serif styles Gothic Sans Gothic Serif Roman Sans Roman Serif Other Types of Typefaces The design world would be a fairly boring place today if there weren’t other types of fonts designed by professionals. Variations on the traditional Roman and Gothic typefaces abound in the desktop publishing world and many defy classification. On the CorelDRAW installation disk(s), you’ll also find about a thousand typefaces, many of which would fit in the category of “designer” fonts: from classic to classy, from appropriate for packaging to logo treatments. In the world of digital typefaces, an element of playfulness has snuck in, and we have “grunge” fonts that look as though the office photocopier’s having a bad hair day, elegant script typefaces that are ideal for wedding invitations, Blackletter typefaces that span usage from fairytales to metal band logos, fonts that look like handwriting, and Pi (picture) fonts. In Figure 13-2 you can see a small collection of different types of fonts gathered from the CorelDRAW disk and third- party vendors such as Émigré, The Font Bureau, and Stu’s Font Diner. Distant Cousins in Typeface Families Often, font families are written for normal, bold, bold-italic, and italic variations on a typeface. However, as the need arose for specific printing purposes, typographers extended font families to include expanded versions—compressed, condensed, engraved, stenciled, and professional sets that include characters not regularly written to standard typeface sets. For example, Helvetica, Futura, and Goudy come in more than 17 “flavors” from different typeface foundries. Typeface manufacturers have retained the name “foundry” from the days 378 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 13-2 Examples of fresh and uncommon styles of typefaces Designer Pi (picture, symbol fonts) when typefaces were cast from metal using a forge, much like a metal foundry that manufactures machine parts. When shopping and using Bitstream Font Navigator (included with CorelDRAW, discussed later in this chapter), it’s important to know a few of the fancier variations on typeface families. On the next page are examples of a small caps typeface: it’s appropriate for formal announcements and doesn’t assault the reader as ALL CAPS does! Look for SC in a font name; typographers often use it to denote this special font. Also, some Roman serif typefaces have swash members: Bookman, Goudy, Garamond, and other popular fonts for body text can be purchased with characters that have strokes that sweep under and above neighboring characters for an elegant look. OldStyle versions of fonts contain numbers that alternate in position to make long sequences of digits easier to read, and frequently their filename is appended with OS. Finally, a well-designed, professional typeface of any family member will contain extended characters. An extended character is one you can’t directly access from the keyboard; instead you must first hold ALT and then type four digits on the numeric keypad area of your keyboard. For example, if you want to put a pause in a sentence, one way to punctuate is with ellipses (three periods when we used typewriters). However, the proper punctuation in today’s typesetting is the CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 379 13 What Is a Digital Typeface? Fonts you use in CorelDRAW and most every other Windows application are actually applications, specifically runtime applications that require a “player” to display, print, and otherwise use the characters contained in the typeface. Fortunately, after you add a typeface to the Fonts folder in the Windows Control Panel, you don’t have to worry about the player; it’s in the operating system, and most applications recognize a recently added typeface immediately. A digital typeface has outlines that describe the shape of the individual characters. This is why you’ll see a lot of picture fonts available on the Web for free: characters can be anything in a font, and it requires less skill to draw a tiny picture than to design a professional font such as Times New Roman for desktop publishing. Because the shapes are vector in nature, fonts can be small in file size, they scale smoothly to any size you might need, and CorelDRAW can simplify characters you type in a document so they become regular vector shapes that can be manipulated in any way you like. Common file extensions for digital typefaces are .OTF (OpenType font) and .TTF (TrueType font), and older fonts come in two parts: PostScript Type 1 fonts have the .PFB file extension for the binary data part, which contains the outlines of the characters, and an accompanying .PFM file holds header and metrics information (information character width, space surrounding characters, and so on). Windows and CorelDRAW can handle all three types of digital fonts. Later in this chapter you’ll learn how to use CorelDRAW’s Symbol Manager to catalogue characters you use often in a specific font that are frequently hard to locate. ellipse character, which is accessed from standard-encoded typefaces by pressing and holding ALT, then typing 0133. Some typefaces don’t come with extended characters, some come with a few, and the more professional typefaces have ligature characters in the extended range of the font. Ligatures were first invented by scribes several centuries ago to get more words per line on parchment and to even out the look of certain words, usually Latin. For example, (in today’s English) the word “find” looks awkward in certain typefaces because of the proximity of the f’s extension to the right, hitting the dot in the i. Because today’s digital typefaces can contain thousands of characters including entire foreign-language character sets, a specific typeface might have a ligature for fi with the dot missing from the i, but this ligature is nearly impossible to look up to use. Fortunately, you can add an fi ligature, an fl, or any other extended character through the Insert Character docker ( CTRL+F11), demonstrated later in this chapter. If you’re into typesetting, it’s a good idea to remember this keyboard shortcut. Ill 13-1 Ligatures occasionally come as part of an Expert set of a specific typeface, making it easier to locate the ligature you need. These sets are often called “Extras” in their filename. The Anatomy of a Font When looking for a font that seems appropriate for a specific design, the shape of the individual characters might or might not work out the way you intend; you want the spacing between lines of text (called leading) to be extremely tight, but the ascender on certain characters is too high and juts into the preceding line of text. What’s an ascender? The vertical strokes in characters have names typographers use and you should, too, when describing an ideal font or when seeking one: ● Character height Used to describe the overall height, which includes not only the character but also the space above the character, this is usually coded in by the person designing the typeface. Character height determines how much interline spacing you’ll need to make more than one line of text. ● Cap height This is the height of a capital letter in a typeface, which is usually not the same as character height, nor is it necessarily the height of all characters (which is called the ascender). 380 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide OldStyle figures Ligatures ● Ascender This is the height of the tallest character in a font; usually it’s the f, the h, or a swash if the font contains this embellishment. ● Descender This is the lowest part of a character; usually a g or a y, except when a font has swashes. ● X-height This is the measurement of a lowercase character, traditionally measured by the letter x in the font. ● Baseline An imaginary line where all the characters should rest. Figure 13-3 shows all the measurements just described. A few typographic elements have characters not found in a digital typeface, but instead are built by CorelDRAW and other applications. For example, an underscored character, used a lot in legal documents, in CorelDRAW is built from any typeface: you select the character(s) to be underscored, click the Underline button on the property bar, and you’re done. Similarly, if you need a Superscript or Subscript character (see the next illustration), CorelDRAW builds one from any font. However, a Superscript is a special treatment of a character, and you need to first choose the character’s glyph node with the Shape tool (not with the Pick or the Text tool). Then the Super and Subscript buttons appear on the property bar and you’re home free. Ill 13-2 Finding the Font You Need In this age of online transactions, you might find it hard to simply walk into a store and ask a knowledgeable person for a specific font. This is not a problem; fonts are small enough in file size to be downloaded in seconds, you can find the font you need in scores of places, and CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 381 13 FIGURE 13-3 The heights of the strokes in a typeface Character height Cap height Ascender Descender X-height Baseline CorelDRAW X5 has a feature that makes it a snap to identify a font you want to own. The following sections take you through the browsing process at MyFonts.com and get you up and running with Bitstream Font Navigator for previewing fonts. Let’s face it, “tt1040m_.ttf” doesn’t tell you that the typeface is actually Bitstream Amazone or that it’s a really cool script typeface! Working with Font Navigator Because the engine for displaying and printing fonts from Windows 95 up until Windows 7 was written to accommodate a hypothetically unlimited number of installed fonts, today’s designer enjoys an incredibly wide selection for pamphlets, flyers, and other needs. However, just because you have over 1,000 fonts at hand on the CorelDRAW install disk, doesn’t mean it’s a wise idea to install all of them! Managing your typeface collection is similar to arranging your sock drawer: it’s not a glamorous task, but you’re glad you’ve done it when you have a 9 A.M. meeting, it’s 8:30, and showing up with a blue sock and a black one is not a fashion statement. Happily, Font Navigator comes with CorelDRAW; if you chose not to install it during setup, you might want to install it now—it’s a must for previewing, organizing, and installing typefaces. Here are the simple instructions for using Font Navigator… Launch Font Navigator exactly as you do any other application: click the Windows Start button, choose All Programs, and then choose CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 | Bitstream Font Navigator. Alternatively, you can double-click the Font Navigator icon in a folder window if the program doesn’t show in the Programs menu. The default path to FontNav is C:\Program Files (x86)\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5\FontNav. Font Navigator immediately recognizes the disc in your drive and offers up all the fonts on the disc for previewing and organizing. If you want to browse a different collection, choose a different drive or folder from the drop-down list. If you scroll up the drop-down list, you’ll see that the Font Catalog above My Computer is an index of the fonts you decide to catalogue. It’s not a location for fonts on your hard drive, but rather it’s just an index. Therefore, when you browse a disk or folder location for fonts, you’ve moved from the Catalog to a hard drive or other location such as a USB thumb drive or optical disk. To browse a folder, you navigate the drive(s) from the drop-down list; to do some indexing, you go back up the folder tree on the drop-down list and choose Font Catalog. The four-pane interface is easy to understand, and everything you want to do can be accomplished by click-dragging. At upper left is the Contents Of Font Catalog list of fonts. At upper right is the Installed Fonts list of fonts you currently have on your system. These fonts were most likely installed through Windows Control Panel | Fonts and an application that auto-installs the fonts it needs. At lower left is the Font Groups area, and by default there’s nothing in it. At lower right is a preview panel, Font Sample, which can display samples of any typeface far faster than the Windows Fonts utility can. To view a font you haven’t installed yet, click a name in the upper-left Font Catalog panel to highlight it, and instantly the preview shows at lower right in the Font Sample panel. It’s the same deal with an installed font; click the name in the upper-right panel to preview the installed font. Typefaces don’t always have names indicative of what they look like, and occasionally you 382 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide might find an installed font you don’t want installed. If you want to remove a font from your system, the easy way is to open Windows Control Panel | Fonts, right-click and then delete the font; be sure you have a backup copy available whenever you delete something. Font groups are a handy and welcome feature. Any font that is installed can be put in a group and the group named anything you choose. At any time in the future, you can add or remove a group and the icons in that group folder. For example, let’s say you had a job for a Halloween party and you needed to use bold, striking, and truly ugly typefaces for the project. If you put them in a group, you can now uninstall them in one fell swoop, keeping your installed fonts in tidy and useful order. Performing operations in Font Navigator is as simple as its interface suggests: ● To add any typeface to the Catalog for indexing, choose it from the upper-left list, right-click it, and choose Add To Font Catalog. You’ll then be asked through a dialog whether you want to install the font and whether you want to copy the font file to a new location, an easy and convenient way to keep all your font files in one central location. After a font has been catalogued, its icon features a tiny yellow star tag, as shown here. Ill 13-3 CHAPTER 13: Typography Rules and Conventions 383 13 Not catalogued In the catalog . ascender). 380 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide OldStyle figures Ligatures ● Ascender This is the height of the tallest character in a font; usually it’s the f, the h, or a swash if the font contains. choose the character’s glyph node with the Shape tool (not with the Pick or the Text tool). Then the Super and Subscript buttons appear on the property bar and you’re home free. Ill 13-2 Finding the. different typeface foundries. Typeface manufacturers have retained the name “foundry” from the days 378 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 13-2 Examples of fresh and uncommon styles of typefaces Designer Pi