David W. Fenton wrote:
Well, it seems to me that except for the 1 it's not distorting the
natural shapes to much to make them the same width. Most of them fit
into the same oval as a zero.
As I understand the creation of cast type, though, the thoughts go
differently: first, a rectangular type body of the necessary length and
width is created to accommodate the width and length of the oval of the
zero, and that all of the other numerals will fit within this same
rectangle. Of the numerals, the only one which might fit on a rectangle
of thinner dimensions is the "1", and I suspect that the historical type
founders put the 1 on the same width body as the other numerals.
With respect to
But for a long time the practical restriction was 128,
I would suggest that although it was not a "restriction", for a longer
time before that, the typical number of characters in a font was less
than 128, probably around 100, which is about the number of characters
in the set of 128, when one remembers that 32 slots were reserved for
control characters. Teletype used about the same number, and probably
the same constituent characters as contained in a typical metal type
distribution. Now, a printer with sufficient resources would have been
able to come up with the other items included in the 128 characters in
the font extensions, and an amazing number of other items, he would not
have considered a font of text type; some of the items we consider part
of a font today, for example ©, ®, and ¶ would have been part of a
symbols set; and numerals for superscripts would probably have been
drawn from a regular font of smaller types. Thus I don't consider 255
characters as a "restriction" or limitation.
But as long as one number is narrower or wider, it shows that the
numbers are proportional, because you wouldn't be able to mix 1s in
with other digits and maintain uniform vertical columns
Further review of the Rosen book shows that if one measures the distance
between the centerlines of the numerals "1" and "2" and compares it with
the distance between the centerlines of 3 and 4, that while there were a
number of faces which had a proportionally fixed width for 1, some of
the faces most commonly used, Bookman, Caslon, Century Schoolbook,
Cheltenham, Garamond, News Gothic, and Times Roman families seem to have
been characterized by fixed width numerals, while other families,
including Bodoni, Standard, and Weiss incorporated proportional width
numerals, in that the distance between the centerlines of the numerals 1
and 2 were smaller than the distance between the centerlines of 3 and
4. These are probably factors that typographers took into consideration
when designing the layout of a book.
With respect to the implications of this for Finale, and your comments
from an earlier post in the thread, where you wrote in part:
And we're still struggling with the 256-character limit in Finale
because music fonts are still limited to that.
I wonder how long it will be before we transition over to full
Unicode font sets in everything?
What is overlooked in much of this is that with a few exceptions, Finale
is not really limited to 256 characters in a set of music types. Both
of the latter two Finale music fonts, Maestro and Engraver are spread
across two fonts in a way which is transparent to the casual user. The
easiest example of this is presently in clefs: if you don't like the
choices available in Petrucci, Maestro, or engraver, it is trivially
simple to obtain a copy of Matthew Hindson's "Clefs" font, and map to
the one you want; and if you don't like any of those either, and have
the time and knowledge, you can create your own clefs font, and point to
that. Again, with a very few exceptions (the character apparently
hard-coded into Finale to be used in the case of melismatic
syllables--the hyphen--is the only one which comes to my mind, but I
assume that there are one or two that are escaping my recall at the
moment) Finale gives more flexibility in what characters are assigned
for what use than any other package with which I am familiar.
ns
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