It’s the Little Things
Typography as a discipline is generally concerned with very small things. That’s not always true of course — sometimes letters can be big or even monumental. But most of the type we encounter daily is pretty small. In Marquand Books’ particular niche of the typographic world — book typography, and even more specifically art book typography — we’re especially concerned with another kind of small thing: numbers that are smaller than 1 but bigger than 0, expressed as portions of a whole. I.e. fractions.
Obviously, every application of type has its specific needs, and these needs often demand particular features in the design (and execution) of a typeface. An obvious example is setting text in languages other than English, which might require invoking arcana such as the cedilla or circumflex or macron. One need that the vast majority of our books share is the proper representation of the dimensions of works of art. To do this right we need two things: a dimension sign and fractions. And not just the standard half and quarters, but eighths, sixteenths, and sometimes thirtysecondths.
Unfortunately, for all the innovation and creativity that have been seen in the field of digital typography, niceties like the ability to set real fractions often fall by the wayside. OpenType, now the industry standard font format, makes it possible to set any combination of numerator and denominator, so long as the font in question has all the glyphs needed. But before OpenType really took off (The Bad Old Days, which stretched from before I was a designer to about 5 minutes ago), most fractions had to be faked or forgone. There are workarounds — but the results are always less than ideal.
Fonts are software as well as visual design, and like any other kind of software, some have more functionality than others. This means we’re forced to make choices in the design of a book between the beauty and aptness of a typeface on one hand and its technical specs on the other. Sometimes we don’t use a type we would like to use because it doesn’t have the functionality we need — but sometimes beauty wins out and we just do the best typesetting we can do with the glyphs we got.
This was the case in a current project: a catalog of Latin American abstract art that was just begging (I could hear it, though maybe nobody else could) to be set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s Verlag. It didn’t have OpenType fractions: oh well, we’d work around that. But once the design was approved by the client, the book laid out, and initial typesetting done, I began to be really bothered by the faked fractions: despite our best efforts they were spindly and ungainly, with too much space between some elements and not enough between others. And though it was easy enough to tell that they looked wrong, that didn’t mean we knew exactly what to change to make them look right. In a moment of desperation I sent a message to Hoefler & Frere-Jones (via Twitter, of course), and to my surprise received a reply saying they might be able to help.
After a brief email exchange, Jonathan Hoefler sent updated versions of the fonts with numerator and denominator figures inserted, as well as single-glyph versions of the half, quarter, fifth, eighth, and sixteenth fractions — and all the OpenType functions wired up. (Seems they already had these lying around the shop, but they hadn’t made it into the commercial release of the font due to time and workload constraints.) Fractions set with the upgraded fonts looked about a million times better, though the differences were nearly microscopic — a hundredth of an inch added or subtracted here and there. With several hundred fractions occurring in this large book, the tiny changes add up to a very real improvement in overall quality.
We’re grateful to H&FJ for their responsiveness, and to all the type designers embracing OpenType to allow us to do the detailed typesetting we want to be able to do. Of course, in the long run, there might be a better solution.
–Zach Hooker
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