chesnutt@adobe.com (Stan Chesnutt) (11/10/90)
A friend of mine has a few words to say about font classifications and a request. He can't post to the net, so I'm forwarding the remainder of this message at his request. Please contact Doug directly: his EMAIL address is at the end of the message. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Proper attribution lost: ] >Heh, I'm not sure I'm ready for a thread on "the PROPER way to classify type"-- >that one is nearly as arbitrary as "the best computer" :-). I personally >think the word "Egyptian," while historically accurate, has so little to do >with what those faces are all about that I just don't use it. You're right about it not being descriptive in a visually evocative way, and it's historically "accurate" only in the sense that it's been used for a long time. From "Printing Types", by Alexander S. Lawson with Dwight Agner (c. 1971, 1990, Beacon Press Books): "...William Caslon IV brought out a single monotone cap font which he labeled Egyptian. Curiously, this term was very soon applied to the slab-serif types...A probable reason is that the block shape of the early industrial letters superficially resembled Egyptian architecture in their solid, squared-off shape. Napolean's conquest of Egypt aroused great popular enthusiasm for things Egyptian, and this interest happened to coincide with the introduction of the square serifs." I'd be happy with *any* completely detailed classification system based on analytically identifiable characteristics, never mind the "proper" way. Every time the subject of classification arises, people start talking about the impossibility of "right and proper classifications" due to esthetic etc etc. Not very constructive. The classification systems I've heard about so far tend to be either very vague so as to avoid inconsistency (Vox, ATypI, British Standard, DIN, and Lawson's are discussed in the above book), or timid, as in the Panoche system, which covers conservative book fonts and book-font-like display fonts only. My personal opinion is that (1) since there may be an (almost?) infinite number of possible fonts, it may be that no single system can anticipate categorization of all not-yet-designed fonts, and (2) similarities and differences between fonts are such that a simple hierarchy may be impossible, but (3) classification should be possible using a graph structure, perhaps with a top level hierarchy, and a sub-network of inter-relations, and would certainly cover all of the thousands of commonly used fonts, if someone were to take the trouble. Doug -- uunet!crossck!dougm -------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stan Chesnutt, Adobe Systems chesnutt@adobe.com {sun|decwrl}!adobe!chesnutt