Hermann Zapf (1918-2015) | Hacker News Reader

Hermann Zapf (1918-2015)

typedrawers.com

122 pointsweinzierl26 comments

There is a fascinating short (19 min) documentary about Hermann Zapf from 1967[1].

     The Art of Hermann Zapf
     a film on the purpose and techniques of calligraphy

It shows Zapf doing calligraphy with various tools and explaining how he does it and what's important to him. Near the end (14:35) you see him doing calligraphy with a ballpoint pen which is most fascinating.

Hermann Zapf said that showing him lettering through a glass plate was his own invention and large quantities of alcohol were involved in convincing the film crew to bring the idea to execution ([2] in German).

The film is also a short introduction into the history of lettering from the Romans to the computer type of the 60s. You can see Zapf's castle built 1460 at 3:25.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jD4CpzIuR4

[2] http://www.linotype.com/de/5667/theartofhermannzapf.html

Thanks for those video links.

Cracking quote from the end of the YouTube link.

"Autocomposition, and computerized composition are already with us. Designing types and letters for the new technology will increasingly involve mathematics and the laws of electronics…. Tradition and progress must be logically united. Does the new technology mean the serious lettering artist will be dispensable? No. The alphabet remains. But we will have new tasks to learn. But in learning them, we must take time to observe the world around us, and remember above all the artist’s challenge: to ensure, despite technology and mass production, that beauty is never lost."

Computer Modern, the typeface built for TeX using Metafont that gives academic and research papers that signature, serious look, was designed by Donald Knuth with the guidance and advice from Hermann Zapf.

I don't know, a lot of people I've met ditched CM for Times long ago because you can squeeze a lot more text in, which matters for conference publication page limits.

CM is a damn nice typeface, far better than Times in my opinion. Just because people started using bad typography in order to appeal to some silly rule doesn't mean CM is any worse of a face.

I always got a kick of the compliments I received from humanities professors in college when I wrote my papers in LaTeX with CM.

Totally better than Times. Times looks horrible, both on the screen and printed.

I find CM a bit boring because of how pervasive it is in math and science papers, and it really doesn’t work well with some types of documents, but Times is almost always awful, with only few exceptions. In particular, most of the commercially available computer Times typefaces have crappy kerning, are missing typographic features (ligatures, fractions, small caps, etc.), often have awful glyphs for common symbols (especially @, ugh), have a limited number of fonts optimized for particular sizes and uses. In general, Times has a very inconsistent look from one letter to another (w/t/t the stroke angle and various letter forms) and results in uneven and distracting text. I find it to be quite unpleasant in contexts like books or academic papers. Moreover, it is still very much overused.

Using Times in a document implies to the reader that the author/typesetter either doesn’t care very much about typography or is being pushed around by some overbearing external style guide or clueless client. In the latter case, it is possible to use Times well and produce workable documents, but it takes a lot of extra hard work on the part of the typesetter.

If your only goal is to fit more text in, there are dozens of better choices.

Okay, so what's a drop in replacement for Times that comes with standard LaTeX distributions? It must fit as much or more text and ACM must be okay with it.

Reviewers will actually criticize authors for using CM, preferring to have the extra information.

I am not familiar with the ACM’s style guidelines, sorry. I assume most ACM journals are going to have professional typesetters fix up documents to match the journal style, so if you’re just talking about what typeface to use in a draft/preprint, it won’t make it through to the final published paper anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter much. For conference proceedings, I dunno.. maybe make one version for the conference matching the style guidelines, and then a prettier version to host on your own webpage?

Yes for journals, but most CS papers are published at conferences. Depending on the conference, not every paper uses the same typeface - except, most people use Times because it is space-efficient.

Anyway, forget about ACM. What's as space-efficient as Times and also prettier?

I’m a fan of Slimbach’s typeface Minion, which is quite compact and looks sharp in most any context where Times would be appropriate, but doesn’t call any special attention to itself. A version typically comes with any Adobe Pro apps from the past decade at least, and in some cases is the default typeface I believe. Minion is therefore also quite overused, but not as bad IMO as Times or CM, and it’s much easier to make a good looking document with than Times is.

There are also some TeX-friendly math glyphs http://ctan.sharelatex.com/tex-archive/fonts/mnsymbol/MnSymb...

Great, thanks for the recommendation! I will give it a shot.

Some people also feel quite strongly about Minion: http://practicaltypography.com/minion-alternatives.html

Fonts are so divisive!

As a person who uses Minion by choice, and actually spent quite a bit of time configuring LaTeX to support Minion (not to mention quite a bit of money buying the actual font, before it was bundled with Adobe products), the fact that Minion could become the new Times saddens me.

He asked for a replacement for Times that would be appropriate in a technical paper with support for LaTeX formulae, while taking up less horizontal space than Times at the same point size. The goal here isn’t to be unique or prove that we’re typographically trendy, but to look good, be legible, and fit the requirements.

The main problem I have with Times isn’t that it’s overused, but more that it’s inappropriate for many contexts, and the specific implementations of Times are often bad. If you want to use Times at 8 pt, 10 pt, 12 pt, and 16 pt in the same document, and you pick up a typical digital implementation, at least some of those sizes are going to look crappy because there are no specific fonts included for display or caption sizes. If you need small caps or lowercase numbers you’re out of luck. If you want good kerning you’re going to have to manually adjust the kerning tables. (Not to mention, Times just doesn’t look very nice or even in the best case.) By contrast, Minion is an excellently designed and carefully implemented typeface which has been one of Adobe’s gems for decades and seen lots of polishing.

I think Butterick’s comments are inapplicable in general in this example: we’re talking about an academic typesetting his own documents not a professional typographer doing a paid job. But even in proper context, I think Butterick is being a little silly here. The job of a typographer is to figure out the client’s needs and solve the client’s design problems. Sometimes that means turning out stylish layouts that turn heads, but just as often that means getting all the little details right so the design gets out of the way and lets the content shine for itself.

The best font in the world is included in LaTeX: New Century Schoolbook.

Don't let the name fool you, the font is optimised for readability which means you can drop the font size and it will still be easier to read than CM at a higher font size but you get more space to work with.

There's Matthew Carter's great Charter, which is free to use and on CTAN. You might have to decrease the font-size a little to match TNR's space efficiency.

\usepackage{charter}

I remarked to Knuth after a Stanford talk several years ago how great CM was. He told me to thank the woman in front of me who was a calligrapher for him in the '70s. I never caught her name, but I was chatting with her right before that. I think he actually had a few students working on it.

    Hermann Zapf served as typographic advisor to both Dr. 
    Peter Karow (URW) and Professor Donald Knuth (TeX), the 
    pioneers of computerized typography whose legacy we all 
    benefit from today.

Letters are boring, we see them everyday. Through its omnipresence appearance we perceive them as a merely another form of visual communication.

And this is where we loose the hidden artwork. An unnoticed, visual pleasure that few can really enjoy, and even fewer – create.

I really liked Zapf's work. Here's a clip from the documentary Helvetica https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjaepids2Q0

It shows Zapf in his later years. His thoughts on Helvetica start at 2:20 (https://youtu.be/qjaepids2Q0?t=140)

        Rest In ✌
      Hermann Zapf
    November 8, 1918
      June 4, 2015

http://i.imgur.com/PKRP4gg.png

Palatino, Optima, and Melior were heavily used, I would say overused, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A friend who went to Rochester Institute of Technology when Zapf was there (as a visiting professor, I think), said that in a lecture Zapf said that he had never intended Palatino to be used for body text, producing some gasps from the audience.

But he did remarkable work.

Genuinely saddened by his passing. An inspiration and legend in the type and lettering field. Rest in Peace.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com