Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 January 30

= January 30 =

question about font design
One possible distinction you can make between types of letters of the alphabet is letters that have a curved bottom and letters that have a flat bottom. For example C and O and S have a curved bottom, whereas F and L and Z usually have a flat bottom.

I have noticed that the low points of these curved letters (like S) almost always extend BELOW the horizontal line on which flat letters like L are placed. They don't extend far below the line, like a lowercase "y" might, but only a little. Still it is noticeable, especially if you make the font very large, or you zoom in very closely on the letters.

Is there an aesthetic/artistic reason for this? I assume that they do it because it somehow "looks better" but can the reason for that it looks better be explained?--Captain Breakfast (talk) 04:24, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Basically this is because if the letter really only extended down to touch the baseline at a single point, then there would be whitespace between the bottom curve and the baseline on both sides of that point. This creates the optical illusion that the bottom of the letter is higher than it really is, so it looks as if the bottom is too high.  (Similarly with the top of letters like O and C: it would look too low, making the whole letter seem too small.)  See baseline and this page. --76.69.45.64 (talk) 06:13, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I assume you meant Baseline (typography). Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:01, 30 January 2016 (UTC)


 * If we put side by side a circle and a square of equal height/diameter, the circle would always be perceived smaller and vise versa due to some peculiarity of human visual perception. So to override this, oval letters are made a little larger, not too large, actually, but just enough that they look the same size as square letters. See a comprehensive explanation here--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 07:06, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * - we have an article on this. It's called overshoot. (Moore's article in Typographica is a good explanation of it and other optical illusions used by professional type designers. There's also a great quote by Hoefler which I put in the typeface article. Frutiger writes about it also. Added those citations to the article now.) Blythwood (talk) 20:13, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
 * If you're interested in font design you may also want to look at the typography article and kerning, to appreciate why designers adjust the white space between characters and line spacing. Different fonts require different white space to look pleasing to the eye and improve legibility. For example a page of dense text would use a lighter font, with more line spacing, while headings and sub-headings would use a bold font with less line spacing (known as Type color). Mike Dhu (talk) 08:11, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Imd
Where do I find how to retrieve the "imdbtitle"? Kmcclain77 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kmcclain77 (talk • contribs) 18:18, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * AllBestFaith (talk) 18:48, 30 January 2016 (UTC)