Alternative to «Quiosco»

[marcdan]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Hi! I'm a pupil at a German school in Portugal, and speak several languages. I mostly write texts for homework in languages which make use of many diacritics, like Portuguese, German, French, Swedish. My favourite font is Quiosco (http://www.fontbureau.com/media/images/specimen/characters/quiosco/quios...) . I'm looking for alternatives to this font, with some of these characteristics: 1. All accents should be very visible. In Times New Roman, for example, the accent on the small i is very hard to distinguish from the normal dot. Accents play a very important rôle in Portuguese: início=beginning, inicio=I start - cágado=turtle, cagado=shit. 2. The circumflex accent ^ should be large and visible, as it is in Quiosco. In most fonts I've seen, it is too close to the letter, too small, or too thin. 3. The trema ¨ should be at exactly the same hight as the i-dot. 4. The ordinal indicator º ª should be underlined (as in Quiosco), because this is part of the orthographic traditions in Portuguese. 5. The ß is a German letter used whenever a s is pronounced like ss, but follows a long vowel. It was created by a ligature, either between the long s (ſ) and the old z (which looked something like this ʒ), or between ſ and s. So in modern typography there are these two versions: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/ß_in_Arial_%2B_Helvetica.png . As the letter in German is called Esszett (sz), I'm prefer fonts which use that version. That's what happens in Quiosco, where, on top of that, there is a small stroke on the left side of the letter, resembling the appearance of the ſ in some fonts. 6. The font should be serif. Thank you for your help.

[hrant]

You're very picky.
Good.

It sounds like you need a custom[ized] font.
But: do you have a budget? :-)

hhp

[charles_e]

Have you considered Brill?

http://www.brill.com/author-gateway/brill-fonts

As long as you're not publishing, should be fine. Read the license, it's generous, and moral folk will follow it. There's a policy for immoral folk, too. I'll leave it unstated, don't tempt us.

(P.S. Do we all have to chip in $20.00 to hrant to keep him from posting the same comment on every thread? At 200+ posts per month, it gets boring)

[Igor Freiberger]

As hrant said, a custom font would be the solution.

I did a quick search focusing the diacritics, but not paying much attention to resemblance with Quiosco. Regarding the available serif families with good diacritics and underlined ª and º, you may consider: Greta Text, Kingfisher, Tundra Pro, and Malabar. Some other quite different from Quiosco: Rooney Pro, Museo Slab, and Scotch Modern.

Without the underlined ª/º but still presenting good diacritics: Argos, Calluna, Charter Pro, Guardian Text, Iowan OldStyle, Karmina, Freight, Marat Pro, Utopia, Alcala, PT Serif, Sina Nova, Sirba, Whitman, and Stuart Pro.

SIL offers free derivations from Charter (Charis) and Times (Doulos), besides the original Gentium, all with underlined ª/º.

Avoid Meta Serif. Its diacritics are a disaster to set up texts in Portuguese.

Note that almost all fonts use diaresis (trema) smaller than dot, especially in ï, although many adopt a subtle size variation. And Ezset is still quite rare –from the lists above, I think just Calluna, Rooney, and PT Serif include it.

A MyFonts search may help.

[edited to add SIL fonts.]

[hrant]

Charles, my voice is not for sale, only my font making is.

But of course there could very well be a font out there that satisfies marcdan's meticulous criteria. I simply don't have Igor's sleuthing skills.

BTW, it's not per month.

hhp

[charles_e]

I stand corrected!

[hrant]

So Charles, I went looking at Brill again -a wonderful face*- and checked out its EULA, and I have to wonder: what made you recommend it in this case? I mean, the EULA doesn't allow modification (and I'm the one who advises people to ignore that sort of restriction, but you don't) so could you explain how to use InDesign to, let's say, change the look of an eszet?

* Very nice "g" for one thing.

hhp

[charles_e]

While not large fan of the Rollling Stones, Jagger does have a few good philosophical moments:

But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need

I could be wrong, but I'd doubt marcdan has the US $20,000 y'all seem to want for a custom typeface.

[hrant]

Hence the smiley in my original post - especially since he did say "pupil".

On the other hand:
- Your numbers are way off. Example: there's a movie coming out soon for which I did a custom font, $1,500. Because it only took me about ten hours (which is still 9.5 hours more than it took Cameron to choose Papyrus for Avatar, the butthead).
- Note the "[ized]" in my original post; that's way cheaper. When I was commissioned to add a bunch of accents for Sanskrit transliteration to Garamond Premier, it was only a few hundred dollars.
- It remains that you can't legally change Brill's eszet for example. So why recommend it? Because it's free? I have a coupon for a free burger at In-N-Out. You wanna try using that to help marcdan? Go for it dude. And I'm sure he can get them to add truffles to the burger... for free.

hhp

[hrant]

Well, somebody likes going into pouty hissy-fits when he doesn't get his way... Don't fling insults if you don't want to deal with the repercussions (not that I myself ever insulted you in this thread, or in fact anywhere) and on occasions that you realize you didn't make [enough] sense, just admit it.

BTW, it's not about quantity.

hhp

[charles_e]

Congratulations. Since your 20+ posts a day mean you're everywhere, and since I find most of these posts counterproductive and somewhat offensive, you've convinced me to stop posting on Typophile.

[marcdan]

Well, now that I've looked at all the fonts suggested, Quiosco is definitely still my favourite. I consider it the most beautiful font I've seen so far... but, it's a newspaper face. My question is: do you think this font is good in normal documents too? Thanks for your help!

[hrant]

News fonts have massive x-heights for good reason - those proportions are not ideal for things like books. You can use smaller point sizes to avoid it looking horsey, but the main problem is there's little room for ascenders and descenders to play their important role in immersive reading (whereas reading a newspaper tends to be much more erratic and environmentally challenged, hence the need for good visibility = large apparent size = large x-height).

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

The trema ¨ should be at exactly the same hight as the i-dot.

I usually make it lower.
The principle is well demonstrated in Times:

The first “fül” is the composite character from the font. In the second “fül” I have vertically aligned the dieresis with the tittle, causing it to float up high among the ascender serifs, dissociated from the letter it is supposed to be qualifying.
The jä combination is frequent in Finnish, where it can be seen that varying alignment of the accents improves distinction.

See also:
https://typography.guru/forums/topic/50439-forwarding
https://typography.guru/forums/topic/27484-forwarding