Talking about glyphs

[brianskywalker]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before or not, but I have been thinking about this a bit.

When somebody says something about a letter or glyph, they say something like "this lowercase a needs some work", and I get the meaning just fine. In writing, though, for some reason we feel like there needs to be some added emphasis, whether it be quotes, slashes, or italics. I've used all of them at one time or another. But I think it's unnecessary. And with non-alphabets or non-latin glyphs, it's even more obvious.

So rather than say,
—I think your 'a' is too wonky.
—I think your /a/ is too wonky.
—I think your a is too wonky.
—I think your «a» is too wonky.
I say:
—I think your a is too wonky.

This is simpler and still makes sense, right?

[HVB]

The quotes, etc. are not for emphasis, but for separation and clarification of meaning.

I think a is ok.
You think a WHAT is ok?

Was that the letter a or a lost word following the 'a'?

Many individual letters could be mistaken for typographical errors as above or, in today's texting shorthand, for full words. R u listening? C u later.

[brianskywalker]

Right, but are we talking type in texting shorthand on Typophile? Should you text type?

[eliason]

You don't see how the second of these is much more unambiguous?
1) I may be entirely wrong, but a bowl should be a bit bigger.
2) /I/ may be entirely wrong, but /a/ bowl should be a bit bigger.

[Mark Simonson]

Anyone who has used a font editor will recognize this notation:

     /H/e/l/l/o/period

I think this might work to unambiguously indicate a character. If this were adopted, it would be:

     "I think your /a is too wonky."

It only requires one delimiter, too, not counting the space, which would be there anyway.

[hrant]

We definitely need some "declaration".

Personally I love guillemets, especially when you have to add a possessive (like "the «a»'s top") and I mean for any kind of quoting*. It's just that they're a hassle to type. The slashes seem dorky (although I guess one is not as bad as two). So I just use double quotes.

* In fact Nina and I made it part of Armenotype's house style.
Example: http://armenotype.com/2012/04/archipelago/

hhp

[brianskywalker]

Still trying to argue against declaration at this point, although I'm clearly outnumbered.

So who actually says "I may be entirely wrong, but a bowl should be a bit bigger."? Do you not say, "The I may be entirely wrong, but a's bowl should be a bit bigger."?

[John Hudson]

I think your /a/ is too wonky.

I use this format specifically where the / delimit an actual glyph name in the font, and when I'm being really pedantic I distinguish e.g. /a/ glyph from |a| character. This is a personal convention, and I need to be careful not to use it when writing to linguists, who use the same conventions to distinguish natural orthography letters from phonetic transcription.

[Riccardo Sartori]

Because I'm lazy, I usually omit any indicator, and use them just when absolutely necessary (lowercase plurals, etc.). If I'm on a Mac, where I can type directly my curly quotes and apostrophes, I tend to use straight single quotes as enough distinct and minimally intrusive.
Anyway, the best solution would be having an appropriately styled HTML tag (chosen among the lees widely used ones, like < tt > or < kbd > or < dfn >, etc.).

[hrant]

Another problem: some letters and numbers (the usual suspects) are ambiguous of themselves, declaration or not. Like I tend to write things like "zero" and "el" (some of which actually don't need a declaration).

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

Why miss an opportunity to show one’s savoir faire?
Come on Typophiles, flash a few fancy keystrokes and get those curly quotes in play!

[hrant]

If Georgia had rationalist (AKA mirrored) ones I might go for that. This up-down business is too dumb a legacy to make an extra effort for.

hhp

[John Hudson]

Oh yeah, one arbitrary orientation is so much less ‛dumb’ than another.

[hrant]

The up-down (AKA 6/9) quotes were a result of metal typecasting/setting expediency (the arbitrariness of which somebody who -correctly- believes the rectangle model of type design is dumb should appreciate :-) while the mirrored ones point in a sensical direction (like parentheses). What's arbitrary about the latter?

hhp

[hrant]

Also, the apostrophe should NOT look like a third* quote mark when it occurs right before a quote (which is one other way guillemets rule). But if we can't handle strongly diverging the shapes, here's an idea I suggested a long time ago on Typo-L (and it's actually a feature of my Daam Entity fonts): keep the apostrophe the way it is, keep the opening quotes the way they are, but flip the closing quotes vertically.

* Or second in the British tradition.

Before and after:

And in Patria (unmodified in the top setting) the apostrophe and single quotes are larger than the double quotes to help things along (but I don't think it's enough).

hhp

[quadibloc]

I happen to like Bodoni's symmetrical quotes, so I agree with Hrant to a certain extent.

However, I don't see it as a big deal, and so if typographers can save money by using an upside-down comma as an opening quote... I can sympathize with their motivation.

Now that we're no longer using little pieces of lead-tin-antimony alloy (mustn't forget that other element, riding in its triumphal chariot... and, for that matter, the small amounts of other elements such as copper as well), maybe it might be considered appropriate to revisit this. But when people are used to something, changing it will be resisted as an impediment to quick reading.

Although it's not as if ordinary people notice Bodoni's quotes and are confused by them - or even have trouble with typewriter quotes. So people designing new faces certainly could use Bodoni-style quotes - if they dared.

[Mark Simonson]

I don't think there are any rules about this, just conventions. The type designer may do as he or she pleases. If one comes up with a better way to do it, people may embrace or reject it. Convention changes slowly.

Back to the original topic, I guess nobody likes my idea about borrowing slash notation from font editors.

[oldnick]

Since there are no formal conventions, the best approach is what works best to communicate what you're actually trying to say.

Out of context, “I think your a is too wonky” could be dis-ass-terously misinterpreted...

[Birdseeding]

I believe the /a/ thing is a convention from linguistics, right?

[brianskywalker]

What convention works best, then?

[Riccardo Sartori]

The advantage of the slash method, while visually a bit “heavy” and decidedly terminal-like, is that, as seen in Mark’s first example, it doubles as separator when one’s referring to mora than a glyph.
Perhaps another possibility could be square brackets: [A], [A]s, [A]’s, etc.

[quadibloc]

There is a convention from linguistics, but that is that /a/ stands for the sound of the letter "a", so using that punctuation for the glyph is potentially confusing. Just using quote marks, on the other hand, is relatively unambiguous.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Get the glyph outta here! Go glyph yourself, you glyph lover!

[Joshua Langman]

John and Birdseedling —

The normal linguistic conventions are /a/ for a phonemic transcription and [a] for a phonetic transcription, in IPA. Occasionally, |a| is used in "dictionary" phonetics.

[LexLuengas]

If we're making a convention which is only relevant locally among typophiles, I don't get why some are taking into account phoneticians or linguists.

Now, I notice the slash ‛bracketing’ being used by most of the people here, and I see it as the practice with best chances to prevail. If the matter boils down to a simple question of taste, why not standardise a method that is already an habit?