dot-font: Language Culture Type

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

Putting together a book about the type of the whole world is a massive task. The subject itself makes producing the book an exercise in complexity, coordination, deadline brinksmanship, and technical creativity. The result will be a tool for global communication, and if we succeed in our tasks, the effort put into getting it done will be largely invisible.

Language Culture Type is the name of the book, which is being published for the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) by Graphis later this year (in time for the ATypI conference in Rome this September, as well as the fall publishing season). The book’s subtitle is “International Type Design in the Age of Unicode,” which reflects the attempt to incorporate all the world’s scripts into a single digital encoding system, to enable us to communicate across cultures through digital type without (we hope) any loss of detail or meaning. The heart of the book is the winning typefaces from ATypI’s first-ever type-design competition, bukva:raz!, accompanied by a wide-ranging set of essays by various type experts on different scripts and languages, and the problems and opportunities of creating digital type for them.

Language Culture Type will be published by Graphis in September.

My working title when we began this project was World Type—a pretty handy label for what it was about, as well as an ironic echo of “world music.” I’ve been both editor and project manager, working in San Francisco with occasional forays to New York City. Maxim Zhukov, at the United Nations in New York, designed the book and has been both instigator and invaluable collaborator from the first to the last. John Hudson, in Vancouver, has been not only doing the hard, slogging work of typesetting and producing the pages but simultaneously serving as an erudite source of knowledge about many of the scripts and languages involved. The contributors of the essays come from various parts of the world, and the designers of the winning typefaces represent an ever wider geographical and cultural area.

Multilingual Typesetting

A project like this could never have been done, at least not in this short a time, without the very means of digital communication that we’re writing about. The showings of the winning typefaces (even when they weren’t digital fonts) have all been produced as electronic images, and sent to us either on disk or by e-mail. The texts of the essays, and all their illustrations, have likewise been sent electronically, and queries and replies about both their content and their artwork have bounced back and forth through the digital aether across at least twelve time zones. The book itself—the “camera-ready copy” that publishers like to speak of—is being produced in digital form, and will be delivered that way to the printer. We have used Adobe Acrobat extensively to send PDF files back and forth for review and approval, and to send the nearly final page proofs to Jan Wright, the indexer, in New Mexico.

Maxim Zhukov used QuarkXPress to design the book and create detailed page templates, but John Hudson has been doing the actual production in InDesign 2.0, because of its ability to handle Unicode—an absolute necessity for a book like this. John is also one of the key contributors; his essay “explores the relationship of text and type in the context of international software development, and, in particular, in the context of the Unicode character encoding standard.” (It’s the most technical essay in the book, yet remarkably clear and to the point.) Obviously, one of the biggest challenges was exactly the subject of John’s essay: ensuring that all the characters or glyphs in all of the typefaces mentioned and shown in the book, no matter what alphabet or script they come from, reproduce accurately on the page (and, during production, on the screens of everyone working on the project). As anyone who has tried something as simple as sending an accented character in an e-mail message knows, this is not easy.

Sometimes non-Latin characters in the essays didn’t show up properly in the manuscripts. Here, in Vladimir Yefimov’s essay on Peter the Great’s Cyrillic type reform, the modern Russian came through, but the archaic characters in another font appear as random characters.