From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Mon May 07 2007 - 15:34:08 CDT
Asmus wrote:
> and the general trend in
> bicameral systems is to have 1:1 correspondence, including the addition
> of missing forms
A trend that generates very considerable problems in typeface design. When letters have no
written history, they have no evolutionary path to specific typographic forms. It is very,
very difficult to produce convincing and harmonious letterforms under these conditions, as
I have found when designing the 'missing' archaic Greek upper- or lowercase forms.
Having spent the last half hour sketching uppercase eszett forms based on trying to
crowbar the lowercase form into the proportions of uppercase letters, I'm inclined to
think that this is a thoroughly rotten approach to creating an uppercase letter.
Relatively few Latin uppercase letters look like big versions of their lowercase
counterparts, and there are sound graphic reasons for this that can be deduced from
palaeography.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com We say our understanding measures how things are, and likewise our perception, since that is how we find our way around, but in fact these do not measure. They are measured. -- Aristotle, Metaphysics
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