TYPO

Typography and Digital Typesetting

This lecture is an introduction to the world of typography and digital typesetting, that is, the art of putting mostly textual documents into shape, and its history. Our goal is to provide a very broad view of the discipline, ranging from the scientific and technical, to the historical and esthetics angles. In particular, we emphasize on the relations between the beauty and the readability of text, the different typographical styles and usages, the tools allowing to compose in very high quality, and the underlying technical and algorithmic challenges.

Chapter 1: History of Writing

• Proto-writing and writing systems: non-alphabetical and alphabetical, taxonomy (logograms, phonograms). Writing media: volumen and rotulus, codex, book, manuscript vs. printed, contemporary media (physical and digital).
• Slides (fr)

Chapter 2: History of Printing

• Prehistory: stamping, xylography, bloc printing. History: mobile characters in the far-east and in Europe. Press: flat-bed, cylindrical, rotary. Linotype, monotype, lumitype.
• Slides (fr)

Chapter 3: History of Fonts

• History: antique (medieval and humanistic influences, birth of roman), transition (modern roman), contemporary (slab-serif, sans-serif, “art nouveau”). Taxonomy: classifications, vox atypi. Anatomy of a character, ligatures, kerns.
• Slides (fr)

Chapter 4: The Digital Era

• Introduction: pre- and post-digital typographic worlds. First systems: dedicated harware, timesharing and markup, contemporary typesetting systems. Tracing: segment-based, plotters, frames and bitmaps, by outline, ductus. Font formats: Adobe and Postscript, \TeX{} and \hologo{METAFONT}, the font wars, Type 1, TrueType, OpenType, variable fonts.
• Slides (fr)

Chapter 5: Paragraph Justification: the Knuth-Plass

Exposé GUTenberg

• Introduction and history. The TeX model: boxes, glues, esthetic criteria, tolerance, penalties, demerits. Problem modelling: solutions graph, shortest path, optimization with dynamic programming.
• Slides (fr)
  

Chapter 6: The Art of Composition

• Introduction: typogaphic criteria, objective, concept of “typographic color”. Macro-typography: pagination rectangle, interlining. Ortho-typography: rules, conventions, customs, internationalization, multilingualization. Micro-typography: the TeX model, protrusion, expansion, letterspacing, wordspacing, washed, thieve, deceptive lines, orphans, widows, similarities.
• Slides (fr)