Non-Designer’s Type Book, The, Second Edition

Guidelines for Using Swashes

There are a few guidelines to follow when working with swash characters:

• Please, don’t ever set text in all capital swash characters.

  

  Besides looking stupid, it is also dreadfully difficult to read.

• Swashes are designed to add elegant curves to otherwise empty spaces, such as under or over letters or at the beginnings or ends of sentences. So don’t insert the kind of swash in the middle of a word that creates an unsightly gap, or even at the end of a word in mid-sentence if it disturbs the word spacing.

  

• In a typeface ...