I am thinking that I would like to add the Spanish inverted question mark and inverted exclamation mark to some of my fonts. I am hoping to learn Spanish and so having the characters in my own fonts would be good.
I am wondering what is the correct alignment vertically for these characters.
Does anyone know what is the correct alignment vertically for them in quality Spanish typography please, indeed is there a correct alignment?
William Overington
I have been trying some tests.
I have used the following string of characters.
H¿x¿xq¿g?
I have tried that, at 72 point, in various well-known fonts.
In Times New Roman, the centre of the dot is at x-height and the loop goes down to the same depth as the g.
In Arial, the top of the dot is at x-height with the loop going down to the same depth as the g.
In Tahoma, the loop part is about the same height as an x, from zero to x-height with the dot above: the top of the dot approximately level with the top of the H.
So, I am thinking of trying to add the inverted question mark and the inverted exclamation mark to some of my own fonts, by mirroring the glyph both vertically and horizontally and then adjusting the vertical height as necessary so as to make the top of the dot at or about x-height, depending upon the general design of the font.
William
I think the lower alignment with the g or q is the correct one, but Bitstream Vera is aligned with the Caps Height and baseline. Most of my fonts are wrong, because I didn’t notice this earlier, and forgot to go back and fix them.
Edit: Looking at my entire font collection it seems that all Bitstream fonts share inverted punctuation on the baseline. Earlier fonts from Serif Font Pack by WSI fonts, mostly use the x-height alignment.
This is what it says on Microsoft Typography Design Standards
Inverted question
Unicode: U+00BFInverted exclamation
Unicode: U+00A1The inverted question and inverted exclamation have two possible alignments.
X-height alignment : In most text fonts the inverted question and inverted exclamation tops align with the lowercase x-height. In a round design the lowercase x-height’s overshoot. The bottom should not exceed the lowercase descender value. In this case many type designers use an uppercase alignment method or shorten and redesign the glyphs.
So the principle seems to be — if you can align them vertically with the x-height, if they are too big to do that without falling below the descender line, shorten the glyphs, or align them on the baseline.
Thank you for your comments.
I have put the characters into the working copies of two of my fonts so far, Quest text and 10000. I have added five glyphs to each, namely the inverted question mark, the inverted exclamation mark, the superscript a, the superscript o and the inverted interrobang which is currently in the Unicode pipeline, so that it is ready, though it is possible that the mapping could change from the proposed 2E18 hexadecimal.
http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html
The pdf documents about languages which are available at the following web page are useful.
http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/
I have just been looking at the following.
http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/spanish.pdf
It appears that I need to include « and » in the fonts as well.
Looking at the document for Portuguese, I notice that single angled quotes are used. That is interesting. I can try making the « and » from two copies of < and > as a starting point.
http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/portuguese.pdf
I have been interested in the possibilities of learning Spanish and Portuguese for many years, though have done little about it.
Recently, the One Laptop per Child project has come along and this has caused me to start thinking of trying to learn something of some of the languages which are likely to be involved.
Some readers might be interested to read the following.
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/English_Portuguese_and_Spanish_Localization_Common_Room
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/Talk:English_Portuguese_and_Spanish_Localization_Common_Room
The main address of the webspace is as follows.
As the laptops will need fonts, there are some potentially interesting font-related topics, such as about the producing of fonts with the characters needed for rarer languages.
William