letra (muy) menuda

Esto lo tomé de un blog que me encanta, sobre tipografía. Las dos entradas están originalmente en http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=146

17 October, 2008

A Typographic Challenge at 7.08661417 × 10^-6 points

With what is delightfully being called “The Atomic Pen,” a team of researchers has created what are likely the world’s smallest letters. At left is an array of silicon atoms measuring two nanometers in height, or .000007086614175 points to you.

Their technique, documented in today’s issue of Science magazine, makes use of an earlier discovery: that within a certain proximity, individual atoms from the silicon tip of an atomic force microscope will exchange with tin atoms on the surface of a semiconductor. “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this,” said researcher Masayuki Abe, which sounds like a challenge to me: I can already think of one way to make letters that are 8% smaller, using the team’s own technique. Can you? Answers next week. —JH

21 October, 2008

Atoms & Aldus

Last week I mentioned the atomic pen, which scientists used to construct some awfully tiny letters one atom at a time. These are small letters indeed: measuring two nanometers in height, they’re about 1/40000 the thickness of a human hair, which surely gives their inventor sufficient authority to issue the casual throwdown that “it’s not possible to write any smaller than this.” But it is, of course, and the technique for doing so has been known to typefounders for more than five hundred years.

The issue of space-efficiency is one that’s very dear to type designers, and the tradition of designing around spatial limitations is one that dates to the very earliest printed books. The name most commonly associated with compact typography is Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), the renaissance printer who produced the world’s first octavo edition in 1501, a book small enough to be carried in the pocket. Aldus is remembered for a second important innovation as well: it was Aldus’s punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, who cut the world’s first italic typeface in 1499. Below is this italic as it appears in the oldest book in the H&FJ library, a small volume of verse by the humanist poet Giovanni Aurelius Augurello published in 1505. Not coincidentally this is a very small book, measuring just 3½" x 6¼" (89 x 159 mm); italics and small books have something in common.

Ioannis Aurelius Augurellus, published by Aldus Manutius. Venice, 1505.

Before the italic evolved its modern semantic function as an auxiliary to the roman, it was simply a different vernacular style. Some suggest that Aldus’s selection may have had a cultural component — that just as early Venetian printers used roman types to distinguish secular works from religious ones (which were set in blackletter), Aldus may have chosen italic letters to distinguish verse from prose (which was set in roman.) In any case, a demonstrable benefit of italics that Aldus exploited was their economy: italics are narrower than romans, and more compactly fitted, which allowed Aldine editions to carry more words per page than books printed in comparably-sized roman types.

Just as the hypotenuse is always the longest side of a right triangle, an angled letter I will always be longer than an upright I of the same height. This can be a nuisance when designing type families, since an especially slanted italic will have ascenders and descenders that feel too long, and shortening them would undercut a fundamental visual relationship with the matching roman. But where there is no matching roman, as in Aldus’s case, these strokes can be retracted at will, offering the additional benefit of shortening the alphabet’s overall height. And it’s this technique that suggests a solution to the atomic alphabet challenge: by reckoning letters on a rotated grid, in which there are upright vertices instead of horizontal ones, it’s easier to make letters that can be both shorter and more tightly fitted. A final benefit of the rotated grid is the ease with which it can render horizontal strokes, which are crucial to the Latin alphabet, and otherwise impossible in a hexagonal matrix. —JH

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me parece que, aunque fascinante la lectura y lo que se aprende sobre la cursiva, quién sabe si de veras se pueda afirmar que las letras 8% más bajas son más pequeñas… me parece que tal vez habría que calcular el área que ocupa cada letra (espacios incluidos); además, para las letras en cursiva parecen ser necesarios más átomos (si bien la s mayúscula tiene la misma cantidad en los dos casos, 9 y 9, no sucede así con la i, 3 y 4, y menos aún con la e mayúscula, 9 y 11).

me parece asimismo que, cuando se inventó, lo que permitía empacar mejor la cursiva para ganar espacio, tenía que ver, más que nada, con el ahorro de espacio intermedio que, algunas veces, incluso desaparecía, como se puede apreciar en los ejemplos de aldus que nos brinda el mismo JH. no da la impresión de que se pueda hacer algo similar cuando sólo se puede contar en átomos, pues el espacio es de un mínimo de uno o nada, y como que no hay posibilidades intermedias, ni para dónde más volver el entramado…

como que las cosas de veras siguen siendo del color del cristal que a uno se le antoje.
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