Language(s)
English |
Other languages |
Typography & fonts
Dictionaries and thesauri
Writing
-
Language Portal of Canada includes, among other things
- Canadian spelling
- George Orwell’s essay on
‘Politics and the English Language’,
a plea for clear writing, appears in many places
on the Web:
this version is uglier than
this version,
and cites no source,
but avoids at least one error (‘difference opinion’
instead of ‘difference of opinion’).
-
Purdue Online Writing Lab
-
Editing and Proofreading (from UNC-Chapel Hill)
- Some trouble spots [under construction]
- ‘Uncountable’ nouns
cannot be plural and cannot be preceded by a number or by
‘a’ or ‘an’.
Some nouns can be treated as either countable or uncountable,
depending on the sense in which they’re being used
(e.g., ‘all milk is white’ vs.
‘cow and goat milks taste different’ where the
emphasis is on the individuality).
Examples of uncountable nouns:
software, mail, e-mail.
- Articles
( ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’).
Most of the following tips and links are thanks
to Sarah Leu, via Diane Dechief:
- A singular, countable noun must be preceded by a
‘determiner’, which is often but not always an article.
- Uncountable nouns cannot be preceded by ‘a’ or
‘an’.
- Superlatives
(e.g., ‘best’, ‘biggest’, etc.),
‘same’, and ‘only’ are preceded
by ‘the’.
- In most cases, do not use an article with a proper noun
(e.g., ‘the Canada’,
‘the Captain Janeway’)
but there are many exceptions
(e.g., ‘the United Kingdom’,
‘the St-Lawrence River’,
‘the Champlain Bridge’,
‘the Duff Building’,
‘the Easter Bunny’,
‘the Captain Janeway’)
- In most cases, when ‘the’ is used, you should
be able to answer the question ‘which one(s)?’
(i.e., which specific thing is referred to)
- British Council resources:
The definite article (‘the’)
and
The indefinite article
(‘a’ and ‘an’)
- ‘both’ vs. ‘the two’
- Say ‘The two cats are the same colour’
(meaning ‘the same as each other’)
and not ‘Both cats are the same colour’
(unless you mean ‘the same as some other thing’).
- Say ‘The two of us …’ and not
‘The both of us …’.
- ‘note that’ is almost certainly superfluous
- ‘it is interesting’ – don’t say it,
let the reader decide whether it’s interesting
- ‘variance’ is a technical term in statistics,
don‘t use it when you mean ‘variation’ or
‘variability’
- ‘comparable’ vs. ‘similar’
- ‘compared with’ vs. ‘compared to’
- ‘allow’ usually requires
an object: ‘allows us to measure’,
‘allows the measurement of’, but not
‘allows to measure’
- ‘x is connected to y’ or
‘z connects x to y’ but not
‘x connects to y’
- ‘have been’ vs. ‘were’
- ‘affect’ vs. ‘effect’
- ‘minimal’, ‘optimal’ etc.
-
‘electric’ vs. ‘electrical’
(IEEE
Dictionary),
‘acoustic’ vs. ‘acoustical’
(ASA Standard;
Hunt, 1955)
- ‘-ic’: for something containing, producing,
arising from, actuated by, carrying or designed to carry
electricity or sound
- ‘-ical’: for something related to, pertaining to
or associated with electricity or sound, but not having
its properties, dimensions or physical characteristics
For example, ‘Acoustical Society’ but
‘acoustic signal’.
There are borderline cases.
This distinction does not apply to ‘mechanical’,
‘physical’ or ‘chemical’.
- ‘between … and’ or
‘from … to’
- ‘x times higher than’ or
‘x times as high as’
- Make sure the document language is set correctly
(e.g., Canadian English) and that the appropriate
spell-check dictionary is installed.
- When there’s a choice of spelling, be consisent;
for example, ‘toward’ vs. ‘towards’.
- Use real minus sign (‘−’),
en dash (‘–’) or
em dash (‘—’)
rather than hyphen (‘-’)
(and know how to insert special characters in general).
- Italicize characters when used to denote variables
(e.g., x, Y) but not when used to denote
operators (e.g., dt), digits (e.g., x1)
or abbreviations (e.g., YTM).
- Use curly quotation marks and apostrophes
(and know how to set up autocorrect in general).
- Single (‘ ’) or double (“ ”)
quotation marks? Be consistent. Alternate when nesting.
- Don't use superscripts for 1st, 2nd, etc.
- Line breaks: use non-breaking space characters to prevent line breaks
between quantities and units, between sequence numbers and list items,
between people's initials and family names, etc.
Use non-breaking hyphens when necessary (e.g., in ‘3-D’).
- Matching of commas (sometimes virtual) except in lists
- In comma-separated lists, don’t put a comma between the
next-to-last and last items
(except to avoid ambiguity or awkardness).
- Connectors
- Be careful with the grammatical usage of connectors:
‘This one is green but that one is red.’
but
‘This one is green. However, that one is red.’
Or
‘This one is green. That one, however, is red.’
‘But’, ‘and’ and many others
are ‘coordinating conjunctions’, but
‘however’, ‘moreover’ and many others
are ‘conjunctive adverbs’
(ref).
Avoid starting a sentence with a conjunction.
- Also, be careful with the meanings of connectors.
Make sure you know what the word means and then make sure
it actually fits what you're saying.
For example, do the two sentences (or parts of sentences)
contradict one another (e.g., ‘however’),
reinforce one another (e.g., ‘furthermore’),
have a logical connection (e.g., ‘therefore’), or
just form parts of a list (e.g., ‘moreover’)?
- Generally use the same word for the same thing;
don’t change just to make it sound nice, because the reader may
think the meaning has changed, and you may end up using a word
that’s not quite the right one.
- ‘in the rat’ vs. ‘in rat’
- Positioning of ‘only’. Example:
- Only we [and no others] were able to obtain meaurements in [exactly?] three cases. (ambiguous)
- We only were able to obtain meaurements in three cases. (ambiguous)
- We were only able to obtain meaurements [and not do anything else] in three cases.
- We were able only to obtain meaurements in three cases. (ambiguous)
- We were able to only obtain meaurements in three cases. (incorrect wording)
- We were able to obtain only meaurements [and nothing else] in three cases.
- We were able to obtain meaurements only in three cases. (ambiguous)
- We were able to obtain meaurements in only three cases [not more].
- We were able to obtain meaurements in three only cases. (incorrect wording)
- We were able to obtain meaurements in three cases only [not more]. (less common wording)
Technical writing
- Significant digits – don’t use too many.
- Define acronyms the first time they’re used
(e.g., “the tympanic membranes (TM’s)”)
and then use them consistently.
Some people use apostrophes for pluralized acronyms
and some don’t
(e.g., “TM’s” vs. “TMs”); be consistent.
Don’t use an acronym unless the term is really frequently used
in your text.
Consider including a list of acronyms and abbreviations.
(I’m actually misusing the word ‘acronym’.)
- Don’t use contractions in formal writing –
say ‘do not’ rather than ‘don’t’.
- Citations
- Only cite things that you have read yourself.
- Distinguish between
primary, secondary and tertiary sources.
Generally prefer primary sources (e.g., original research article),
sometimes use secondary ones (e.g., textbook, review article),
seldom tertiary.
- Attempt to evaluate whether your source is authoritative.
- Lean toward either the earliest relevant source or a recent one.
- Use ‘e.g.’ if selecting from among several possible
sources (e.g., author1, 1900; author2, 1950).
- When citing multiple sources at the same time,
put them in chronological order.
- Use a consistent style for citations and for the list of
references. Almost always use reference-management software
(e.g., Zotero).
- Use ‘official’ abbreviations for journal names
(NLM,
ISSN’s LTWA)
- Figures and figure captions should use the word processor’s
caption facility (e.g., right-click on newly inserted image
and select ).
- Use correct anatomical terms
(Terminologia Anatomica)
Software for computer-aided translation
- OmegaT - free (GPL)
translation-memory tool (written in Java)
Translation servers
Shown for each service is its translation of
‘this is the middle ear’ into French.
- Google language tools
(to/from 81 languages as of 2014 Jun 12)
(c'est l'oreille moyenne with other options offered)
- DeepL translator
(26 languages as of 2022 Jan 9)
(c'est l'oreille moyenne or voici l'oreille moyenne)
- Reverso
(to/from 18 languages as of 2022 Jan 9)
(C'est l'oreille moyenne)
- Babelfish
(to/from 14 languages as of 2014 Jun 12)
(Il s'agit de l'oreille moyenne)
-
GTS Free Online Translation Tool
(to/from 37 languages as of 2014 Jun 12)
(c'est l'oreille moyenne)
Dictionaries, grammars, language courses and general information
French
Dutch
Latin
Other languages
Typographic design
- Robert Bringhurst’s The elements of typographic style,
2nd edition, 1996, 350 pp., Hartley & Marks, Vancouver
(an excellent book)
- Richard Rutter’s
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web,
based on Bringhurst's book
(original version 2005; now open-source, latest modification
2015 Sep 14 as of 2016 May 8)
- Typography on the web
by Matt McDonagh
(2011, so some of the technology discussed is out of date).
As of 2016 May, the author says (personal communication) that
he would now recommend
Aleo (serif) and
Lato (sans)
rather than Alegreya (serif) and Ubuntu Sans
(cf. ‘@Font-face embedding on this site’ at
@Font-face : Type embedding).
-
Butterick’s Practical Typography
by Matthew Butterick (2010–2016 as of 2016)
Font software
- There are many different
font formats,
including PostScript, TrueType, OpenType, Open Font Format,
Graphite and others.
UFO is XML.
SVG (also XML;
W3C specification)
and
WOFF
are explicitly for the Web.
- Markus Kuhn’s
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux is an
‘information resource on how you can use Unicode/UTF-8
on POSIX systems (Linux, Unix)’,
including the relationships
among ISO 10646 (and UCS), Unicode and UTF-8/16/32,
and their use with X11
(last substantive modifications made in 2009).
- Graphite
is a system for defining complex font behaviour
such as context-dependent shaping and positioning,
‘designed for flexibility of writing system description’,
for the sake of small-market minority fonts.
See
here
for a comparison between the approaches of Graphite and OpenType.
See
here
for an opinion about how Graphite fits with OpenType, and see
the Introduction to their Graphite2 Manual for more details.
See
Typography toolbar LibreOffice extension
for fancy typographic features
using the Graphite fonts
Linux Libertine G and Linux Biolinum G.
See also Graphite Font Extension.
- FontForge, an open-source
programme for creating and editing fonts.
As of 2020 May 5, the latest release is dated 2020 Mar 14.
See
Dave Crossland's posting (2012 Jun 12, by ‘abattis’;
at web.archive.org)
about its status,
and
his posting (2015 Nov 27) throwing his support behind
TruFont instead of FontForge;
as of 2020 May 5, the latest version of TruFont is 0.4.0 dated 2016 Apr 15.
[2013 Jun 16] Under Windows I run FontForge using Cygwin:
then right-click on
and select
then give the command fontforge.
It seems that FontForge doesn't handle Graphite tables,
but here is a discussion
of how to edit a font with FontForge without losing the Graphite tables.
Fonts
-
Font Licensing and Protection
- Bowfin Printworks
Font-identification resources
- Collections of zero-cost or open-source fonts:
- dafont.com presents a large
variety of public-domain, free, freeware, shareware and demo-version
fonts; easy to search and browse. Includes most of the designers
and fonts mentioned below.
- Font Squirrel:
‘We know how hard it is to find quality freeware
that is licensed for commercial work. We’ve done the hard work,
hand-selecting these typefaces …’.
- FontZone:
‘Over 50,000 free fonts’.
Had a font that neither dafont.com nor Font Squirrel had;
I don’t know if that’s because it’s not
really free.
-
The League of Moveable Type: catalogue includes 15
fonts as of 2012 Apr 6, of which 5
(by Barry Schwartz)
are serif text faces.
- Pablo Impallari
currently (2012 Apr 16) offers several 'serious',
script and 'playful' font families under the SIL Open Font License.
- Open Font Library
currently (2015 Nov 22) offers 767 font families
in 5745 font files
- Ray Larabie:
hundreds of fancy fonts by Ray Larabie, a mixture of zero-cost
and paid fonts. Effloresce and Goodfish are two
that could possibly be used for serious text.
-
TypOasis: a large collection of apparently free fonts,
mostly fancy,
by a number of designers; no longer active, difficult to browse;
designers who have some relatively
straightforward fonts include
Nick Curtis (Kelmscott Roman),
Manfred Klein (Optimus Princeps, Parma Petit,
Roman Serif, Timeless, etc.),
Paul Lloyd (Bertham, Bolton, …),
Dieter Steffmann (Caslon Antique, Cavalier,
… Packard Antique …).
- comp.fonts
newsgroup
- iKern: a paid service for
computing the spacing and kerning of fonts, by Igino Marini
- FAQ about fonts
by Norman Walsh (1996)
- STIX Fonts and my variant, Mastic
(free and open-source)
-
TeX Gyre fonts: ‘an extensive remake and extension of
the freely available 35 base PostScript fonts
distributed with Ghostscript’.
These 35 fonts are found in 105 files
(.afm, .pfb and .pfm for each font,
with 8-character file names)
in /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/:
| Filename | Family | Font | Comment
|
|---|
| a | 0 | 10 | 0 | 13,15,33,35 | l | URW Gothic L | Book, Demi, Book Oblique, Demi Oblique | 'a' for Avant Garde Gothic
|
| b | 0 | 18 | 0 | 12,15,32,35 | l | URW Bookman L | Light, Demi Bold, Light Italic, Demi Bold Italic |
|
| c | 0 | 59 | 0 | 13,16,33,36 | l | Century Schoolbook L | Roman, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic |
|
| d | 0 | 50 | 0 | 00 | l | Dingbats | |
|
| n | 0 | 19 | 0 | 03,04,23,24 | l | Nimbus Sans L | Regular, Bold, Regular Italic, Bold Italic | based on Helvetica
|
| n | 0 | 19 | 0 | 43,44,63,64 | l | Nimbus Sans L | Regular Condensed, Bold Condensed, Regular Condensed Italic, Bold Condensed Italic |
|
| n | 0 | 21 | 0 | 03,04,23,24 | l | Nimbus Roman No9 L | Regular, Medium, Regular Italic, Medium Italic | similar to Times
|
| n | 0 | 22 | 0 | 03,04,23,24 | l | Nimbus Mono L | Regular, Bold, Regular Oblique, Bold Oblique | similar to Courier
|
| p | 0 | 52 | 0 | 03,04,23,24 | l | URW Palladio L | Roman, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic | based on Palatino
|
| s | 0 | 50 | 0 | 00 | l | Standard Symbols L |
|
| z | 0 | 03 | 0 | 34 | l | URW Chancery L | Medium Italic | 'z' for Zapf Chancery
|
TeX Gyre equivalents (‘can be used as a replacement for’):
- Adventor :: ITC Avant Garde Gothic
- Bonum :: ITC Bookman
- Chorus :: ITC Zapf Chancery
- Cursor :: Courier
- Heros :: Helvetica
- Pagella :: Palatino
- Schola :: Century Schoolbook
- Termes :: Times (New) Roman
- Linux Libertine fonts
(free and open-source); Graphite fonts work with
Typography toolbar LibreOffice extension
- Google's
Croscore fonts,
related to the
Liberation fonts
- The Brill typeface
(no cost for non-commercial purposes)
- Noto (‘no tofu’)
‘is a collection of high-quality fonts
with multiple weights and widths in sans, serif, mono, and other styles,
in more than 1,000 languages and over 150 writing systems’.
It includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs;
Chinese, Japanese and Korean glyphs;
Canadian syllabics;
glyphs for many other languages; and
emojis (colour and black-and-white) and other symbols.
See Noto fonts
Wikipedia article for some history.
- Nerd Fonts is a collection
of fonts that are intended for programmers to use for coding and that
have had thousands of icons added to them
- Programming Fonts is
‘the most complete resource for the best monospace coding fonts’.
- Recursive
is a five-axis variable sans-serif font
‘built to maximize versatility, control, and performance’.
The 5 axes are Monospace, Casual, Weight, Slant and Cursive.
It supports over 200 languages and uses the SIL Open Font Licence.
- Small caps: see Alec Julien's
post about
small caps for a discussion of real and fake small caps. In
this
TEX
thread some fonts are listed that have real small caps: mathpazo
(‘Palatino-type font’), TeX Gyre project, Latin Modern
(lmodern, based on Computer Modern), Computer Modern, KP fonts
(kpfonts), mathptmx (‘Times New Roman font’), heros
(‘ugly’ small caps).
I have added algorithmically defined small caps to
Mastic, my variant of
the STIX fonts.
-
Times (New) Roman, a brief discussion of the history of,
and differences between,
Times Roman (Linotype/Adobe/Apple) and
Times New Roman (Monotype/Microsoft),
by Charles Bigelow.
See
Ilene Strizver's post (2009 Oct 14) for an illustration
of some of the differences.
Bringhurst (1996, p. 97) referred to Times (New) Roman
as ‘an historical pastiche’ with ‘a humanist axis
but Mannerist proportions, Baroque weight, and a sharp,
Neoclassical finish.’
The Times used its new type,
set using both Linotype and Monotype systems,
for the first time on 1932 Oct 3, with an announcement
(‘“The Times” in new type’)
on p. 14.
(Images are from THE TIMES Digital Archive 1785-2009).
- Comparison of Times New Roman and similar fonts
On the Web
Evolution of lower-case ‘g’
The modern forms of ‘g’ with either one or two closed loops
are the result of a long evolutionary path with multiple branches.
According to
Analysis of the Letter-forms of the
Vindolanda writing tablets,
Fig. 11 no. 14, in the first century AD
the cursive letter ‘g’ was written with
two or three strokes, with the stroke for the top written last and sometimes
connected to the following letter. This is apparently the origin of the
small ear at the top right of the modern two-level ‘g’.
Steffens (1910), in his discussion of Merovingian letter forms, said:
La tête du g est souvent composée
d’un trait ondulé, mais souvent ce trait forme en avant
une boucle tantôt fermé et tantôt demi-ouverte;
cette boucle est faite de bien des façons; en souvenir de
l’ancienne forme, le g porte en haut, à
droite, un petit trait par où il est possible de le relier aux
lettres suivantes; ainsi s’explique le petit appendice
qu’aujourd’hui encore on donne au g dans
les imprimés d’écriture latine. La queue du
g est d’ordinaire ouverte.
Hanzi and kanji
‘Hanzi’ refers to Chinese characters.
They are also used in Japanese, where they are called ‘kanji’.
Jeffrey's Kanji Lookup provides a very flexible method of
looking up kanji.
Wikipedia displays kanji using
<span lang="ja" xml:lang="ja">…</span>
with the actual characters represented by their Unicode values.
I don't know what the lang and xml:lang
attributes actually accomplish.
Kanji can also be included in a Web page just using
&#xnnnn; to represent the hexadecimal Unicode values;
for example,
耳力学 gives
耳力学.
This word-processing document
demonstrates the above three kanji in a number of fonts.
The image on the right shows the same three kanji as generated by
my Far font-creation software.
The glyphs are defined in plain-text
.arc files, which can then be compiled into Fortran
subroutines by farrd, or interpreted directly by
sign. The fin programme provides (crudely)
for interactive display and design of Far fonts. The software development
was started in the days of the Runoff text-formatting software
(ref)
and dot-matrix printers
(ref),
before there were word processors and inkjet or laser printers,
as a way of getting math symbols into my manuscripts.
It is still of some interest (to me) because the glyphs are defined
in terms of strokes rather than bitmaps or outlines.
The strokes are made up of straight lines, circular and elliptical arcs,
and Bezier splines; they can have different pen shapes, and they
can be tapered. Complex glyphs can be made up by combining
multiple simpler glyphs, recursively. All of this is particularly
appropriate for Chinese characters, where the direction and sequence
of the strokes is well established and is useful in looking up
characters in dictionaries, and where most characters are actually
combinations of simpler characters. Even for Latin and similar alphabets,
stroke direction and sequence are relevant
for understanding the derivation of handwritten
cursive characters from printed characters.
R. Funnell
Last modified: 2024-07-01 18:35:40