Why is Bold Italic a bastard stepchild?

[John Hudson]

The Aldine pocket books mimic the format and style of the informal manuscript books of the humanist scholars, who were interested in copying a text quickly in a portable format rather than producing prestige volumes. These books were written in the informal, cursive style, and hence Aldus' pocket editions followed suit.

[Nick Shinn]

But that doesn't mean they weren't also economical, because it is the nature of a strong design to satisfy multiple needs and/or constraints.

[marcox]

When choosing a workhorse typeface for a magazine, I regard the lack of a bold(er) italic as a serious omission. There are too many instances where a bolder weight (not always the "bold," if a medium/semibold is available) is used for text (sidebars, captions, tables, etc.) and requires an italic counterpart.

It sometimes seems as if Typophile is populated solely by book designers and that the only thing humans read are long, immersive texts. :)

[hrant]

Narrow and/or small-on-body fonts (slant or no) save space in proportion to the infrequence of paragraph breaks; the more frequent the paragraph breaks the more you'll save more space by instead using a large-on-body font at a smaller size (which guarantees vertical space savings no matter the breaks). In fact, all else being equal large-on-body fonts are more economical (except for poetry where long lines that have to break just into a second line make the results wasteful, but most of all ungainly).

hhp

[quadibloc]

@hrant:
Yes, but we can't condemn Aldus Manutilus for not having access to the glowing testimonials of users of Corona.

[Joshua Langman]

Manutius doesn't have an l in it.

[dberlowgone]

Manutius and Manutilus were two different people, the later being a crazy submarine typographer of the 19th century.

@dan "No, it is because some type designers know what is best for their typefaces"

This is reasoning for both solutions. If I don't supply a BI I am saying to the user not to use one, if I do supply one I'm trying to make sure the computer doesn't supply it.

Back at the original question, bold italic was something that was made in many display faces. Text bold italics were not common in the Linotype library when I arrived in 1978, but by 1986, all families intended for use in text and display use required a BI

What happened was, i think three things;
ITC was producing large, for the time, families of matching roman and italic for each weight. Linotype and maybe others were digitally standardizing on 12 pt masters and at the same time expanding families like Caledonia, Century and Aster w/Ikarus, and while doing so added BI to keep up.

WYSIWYG word processors were starting to catch on that used matching bitmaps for printer and screen fonts. Hand edited bitmaps had the ability to be boldened and slanted without damage being apparent to your average word processor developer. Software logic says R, RI and B should always make BI possible, so font developers were compelled to either see computer generated BI, or supply it.

So when typesetting and word processing merged into desktop publishing, it placed the typographically mindful and mindless on the same platform while converting to digital outlines, and so the BI became expected.

Same with fonts don't have I, B or BI today, like Brush Script... and look what happens.

[Nick Shinn]

Further to David’s exegesis: a big impetus to the concept of large families came about through the technological ability to photographically modify typositor fonts and settings. “Modding”.

Headliners International, for instance, had in the 1970s and 80s small-x height “Neo-Mini- ” versions of all the classic typefaces, including even Gill Sans, in multiple weights, roman and italic (for use in heads, Marc!)

Both slanting and bolding could be done photographically (outlines and shadows too); the results weren’t perfect, but the amount of manual clean-up work required was substantially less than drawing from scratch.

The weight of a typositor setting could be varied during or after the setting process, and the same techniques used in font production.

In the 1960s and 1970s, high-end typesetters provided hand lettering and typositor-set headlines, as well as body-text galleys. Often a headline setting would be modded and tweaked by lettering artists to the extent that it became a hybrid beast. Les Usherwood ran one such shop in Toronto, Typsettra, and used the technology and talent at his disposal to design and produce many different fonts based on the same modded body, both as stylistic variants (different serif treatments) and as family extensions.

[Richard Fink]

@ ren man
Speaking as a bastard stepchild myself, I resent your tone.

[oldnick]

FWIW, in the heyday of photo-lettering, type designers merely designed the characters themselves; the matters of metrics and kerning were handled by the Typositor/compositor operator.

Outlines were created using a film positive, a film negative and, usually, an orbital cam contraption; adding shadows required another positive and negative and a bit of creative film stripping. Now those methods have gone the way of the horse and buggy…well, except in Amish country.

[Don McCahill]

Am I wrong in remembering that the Linotype could only contain four weights on the machine. You got Roman, Italic, Bold and Small Caps. BI was not part of the mix. Or is that just on certain magazines?

[dberlowgone]

Far from gone, I think all the treatments and mods referred to above, in addition to more... (So that's oblique, bold, underscore, strikethrough overscore, outline, shadow, horizontal scale, skew, and the combinatorial hoodlum fonts that result), have been converted from horse and buggy or dark smokey room activities, to icons in many apps... including some being web-standardized and enabled in some browsers.

What happens next in type treatments on the web should be interesting.

[dezcom]

There just is not one answer. In the area of possible need, there are variances between, book, magazine, brochure, advertising, web, etc.., for a given face. This gets further compounded by a given users perception of what they need vs. what it costs to buy. Using the same logic, a type designer might ask himself if there would be enough more sales just because the BI was included to more than offset the time and effort to make a BI. Sometimes a type designer might assume that a BI is not worth doing for a given face. They may well be wrong by some counts but that was there perception at the time.
I you need a BI in a face that does not have one, contact the foundry and ask about it. They may just need a few nudges in that direction to produce that variation. Otherwise, you may need to choose another face for the job. I might also say that making a decent BI when a family has only a bold roman and a regular italic is not just a few quick mouse clicks as someone implied above. All good things require work.
When you need it, you need it. That does not mean a type designer may think the time and effort was worth it at the moment of release. They may change their mind if they get asked often enough.

[kentlew]

Am I wrong in remembering that the Linotype could only contain four weights on the machine.

Don — Depends upon the model of the machine and how many simultaneous magazines it could accommodate. Lino mats were duplexed — i.e., two styles on one mat. So each magazine would carry two styles together (which were, technically speaking, a single font).

Usually the pairings were typical Roman with Italic or Roman with Bold.

Small caps were not provided as a separate font/style. Those faces that sported small caps were usually targeted at book work and were provided in fonts of Roman with Italic and Small Caps. I don’t know offhand exactly what the duplexing scheme was (and there may have been a few different arrangements).

If there was a Bold Italic, it would be offered with the Bold. But there were not a lot of those in the library.

And you could also get certain pairings across families (usually, two romans) — so, for instance, Excelsior with Memphis Bold — for jobbing work.

[Nick Shinn]

When Scala was first published (on floppy, c.1990), it had Regular, Italic, Bold, and Capitals fonts.
I thought it was very cool that it had small caps and alternate figures but not Bold Italic, and this definitely positioned it, in my mind, as being a typeface for serious typographers.

At the time I was doing editorial design and generally used sans serif for sidebars, so the lack of a Bold Italic was not an issue.

[John Hudson]

Am I right in remembering some phototype technology with four style/weight fonts on a single film strip or wheel?

[hrant]

AFAIK they crammed as much as possible on single disks, and that's what killed optical masters.

hhp

[quadibloc]

@kentlew:
I don’t know offhand exactly what the duplexing scheme was (and there may have been a few different arrangements).

Typically, on a Linotype machine, the small capitals were duplexed with the digits and other special symbols like the at sign and the dollar sign. Unlike bold and italics, there was no way to make them the same size as a different weight of letter.

[kentlew]

Yes, exactly. I just don’t recall offhand which small-cap letters were duplexed with which digits and symbols. There are charts of such things in my library. I just haven’t bothered to look them up. And I believe that there may have been multiple schemes in different circumstances (but I could be remembering wrong on this count).

[quadibloc]

Before the issue arose of computers automatically bolding or slanting font styles for which bold, italic, or bold italic were not provided arose, indeed, the selection of typefaces with a bold italic was small.

One source - perhaps biased - would be the set of fonts offered for the IBM Selectric Composer.

Having Medium and Italic:

Pyramid

Having Medium, Italic, and Bold:

Aldine Roman
Baskerville
Bodoni
Century
Theme

Having Bold Italic as well:

Journal Roman
Press Roman

And then there was Univers, which did not have a bold italic, but which did have condensed and light versions.