July 2010
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
7h 40m
English
Content preview from Type Rules!: The Designer's Guide to Professional Typography, Third EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 10. FRACTIONS, SIGNS, SYMBOLS, AND DINGBATS
There are a number of other typographic elements not previously mentioned that you will need from time to time. Not surprisingly, they are often misunderstood, as well as improperly or tastelessly used.
FRACTIONS
Fractions are a fairly common element in typeset copy. Sometimes they appear with great regularity, such as in recipes and cookbooks, manuals, and other documentation; sometimes they appear sporadically, as in the occasional measurement, dimension, and quantity. But in either case, good typography calls for professional-looking fractions, which in most cases are diagonal fractions.
Prior to OpenType, setting good-looking diagonal fractions was a challenge, especially if you needed more than the standard ¼, ½, and ¾, which are available in some (but not all) Type 1 and TrueType fonts. But today's OpenType fonts not only contain a wider assortment of prebuilt fractions but often can create any fraction on-the-fly. Unfortunately, not every OpenType font is capable of this, as they vary greatly in their fraction-making capability.
Diagonal fractions (½, not 1/2) can be either prebuilt and part of the font or created on-the-fly by your software. The best way to view which prebuilt fractions are part of a font is to search for them via the glyph palette. Fractions built on-the-fly vary in appearance: they can look as good as the prebuilt variety–or not so good and with bad spacing, heavy fractions bars, and/or light numerals. Both ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.