Are digital versions of early italics less flamboyant?

[Member jac…]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

When looking through books published from early movable type, I am often struck by how different the italics appear to modern works published with, purportedly, the same faces, digitalised.

The modern Italics often seem far less flamboyant than their historic predecessors but I cannot work out whether this is due to the digitalisations being toned down in their reproduction of the forms; changes in typesetting practices or just my imagination.

For example, looking at some examples of Jannon Italic or the example in Carter’s “A View of Early Typography” at fig. 83, the Italics seem more striking than they do in modern revivals.

Of course, much of the flamboyance seems to be caused by greater use of swash letters (obvious in the Qs but also in the initial u); ligatures (in addition to the traditional “old-style” ligatures, ligatures such as the us and is which are rarely found in modern fonts); and less kerning than is possible today. However, I often feel that historic Italics sit less comfortably on the base-line than their modern revivals (for example look at the start of the word accoustumé in the second Italic line of the linked file); and that they tend to have less even stroke variation, in that the amount of contrast between the strokes is often different in different letters. I think, combined with the greater number of glyphs (e.g. a stand-alone s is rarely the same as the s in the st ligature, as it would be now), this makes the faces seem more extravagant, but I am worried that this may just be my imagination.

Although, I’ve been wondering about this for a while but do not have sufficient numbers of examples to be able to make proper conclusions. I was therefore wondering what typophile members thought about this.

Thanks!

Jacob

[Member The…]

This type is alive, for several reasons! It's wonky, shoddy, un-even, bits have broken off. The regular doesn't sit straight on its baseline either. The italics lean forward and backward, some individual characters almost look roman. Stem widths are un-even.

I love it. No surprise here that digital versions look flat and dead in comparison.

[Member hra…]

I'm of the other mentality: you don't want want two styles
competing for your attention to convey the text, and to me
the best Italic is a subservient one. So I think the older
philosophy reflects a less sophisticated understanding
of how an Italic is supposed to be read.

And I don't think a subordinate Italic needs to look dead:
http://www.themicrofoundry.com/other/nour&patria/dev/nour-latin.gif

hhp

[Member Nic…]

Here, I reset the deck from a 1920s magazine article in the 1990s, to compare foundry type with digital type.
I had long been interested in the sterilizing effect that technological progress, with its greater precision, has upon older forms.
For indeed, this is not a new digital phenomenon.
Fred Goudy addressed the issue with many of his designs, made for metal, such as Garamont and Kennerley.
Do italics suffer more than the roman?

Whatever reasons Robert Slimbach had for “cleaning up” Adobe Garamond, there is also a certain amount of technological determinism at play: in particular the role of hinting and alignment zones in PostScript Type 1, which tend to regularize x-heights. If you don’t standardize x-heights, slight deviations become ridiculously and unpredictably exaggerated at low resolutions—so rather than the charming and evenly distributed wonkyness of old letterpress, what you get is abrupt oddities standing out from conformity.

The italics of Garamond Premier Pro have slightly more personality than the older Adobe Garamond.

At any rate, there are by now, twenty-five years into digital type on personal computers, and with a solid ten years of prolific “indie” foundry font publishing, plenty of sturdy text faces with interesting new italics. Quadraat and Dolly spring to mind, both over 10 years old now. For my part, rather than redo Garamond, I produced a new design in the garalde genre—Oneleigh, with italics inspired by Oz Cooper’s love of a certain off-kilter font.