Italics

THE TEMPORARY STATE

You should start making italics if you want people to buy your fonts. — Friendly advice, 2017

IS IT REALLY
NECESSARY?

The Chicago Manual of Style (whose entire cover is set in italic) prescribes the use of italic for emphasis, book & movie titles, names of music albums, paintings and ships, for foreign words or quotations of texts in a foreign language, for references of a word, letter or number as itself, when intro­ducing or defining tech­nical terms, for algebra symbols, physical quantities, mathemath­ical constants, and in numerous other situations. Following those rules it’s practically impossible to set any text of length without the use of italic, which means that any type family without italic styles can find use only in situational display applications.

It is easy for people outside of Anglo-Saxon print tradition to overlook the imminence of italics in English language typography — the idea of "italic style" being an essential part of every font might seem strange for an outsider. Initially, when the first italic print typeface appeared in the books published by Aldus Manutius around the year 1500, it wasn't meant as a supplement for the Roman character set, but as a self-sufficient body typeface of its own — a print imitation of fashionable at that time calli­graphic style. The new style gained immediate popularity and began to spread even despite the fact, that the Venetian Senate had granted Aldus exclusive right to use italics.

Once the new style was introduced, counterfeited italics started to be massively produced and used all over Europe (maybe one of the earliest cases of massive copy­right infringe­ment). The use of italic to show emphasis in a text set in Roman type originated in the same 16th century and by the 17th century it became a clear norm. Also around that time the trend developed to present italic and Roman types as matching in the type specimen books. If you look at the situation nowadays, the established tradition implies the use of italic for almost every occasion, where any text highlighting is required. Even the Typographic Revolution would not dare to oppose this tradition:

TYPOGRAPHIC
REVOLUTION

I'm starting a typographic revolution, directed above all against the idiotic, sick-making conception of the old-fashioned Poetry Book, with its hand-made paper, its 16th century style, decorated with galleons, Minervas, Apollos, great initials, flourishes and mythological vegetables, with clasps, mottoes & Roman numerals.

The book must be the futuristic expression of our futuristic thought. Better yet: my revolution is against among other things the so-called typo­graphic harmony of the page, which is in complete opposition to the flow of style which the page allows. We will, if need be, use 3 or 4 different colours and 20 different typefaces on the same page. For example: Italic for a series of similar & swift sensations, Bold for the imitation of heavy tones, and so on. A new conception of the typo­graphic or painterly page. 1 — Filippo Marinetti, 1919

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1 In the first edition of the article this quote was mistakenly attributed to Jan Tschichold’s «New Typography». We apologize for this mistake. Thanks to Caluã Pataca for pointing it out.

It is strange, how Marinetti in his call for revolution against "the Poetry Book" doesn’t see any problem with italics. Somehow, Roman numerals are an issue, but the use of highly deco­rative imitation of a 16th century pretty handwriting is a futuristic expression, not part of the "typo­graphic harmony" ensemble. It's even stranger, that he doesn’t address the application of italic itself, as his idea of highlighting the page with «three to four colors and twenty different typefaces» is really close to how the use of italic is regulated in the Chicago Manual. The only difference is: where Marinetti suggests «twenty different typefaces», Chicago only suggests one — italic. So, seemingly to achieve Marinetti’s idea all that is needed is to diversify the means of text highlighting. And it’s not like there are no alternative typographic traditions, which could be used to sub­stitute the italic.

Nowadays foreign text is highlighted in italic, but in the days of Latin as the inter­national language of Europe, a different combination was used — Roman for Latin & blackletter for vernacular German:

Gefunden, dab gegen die febiger dagegen Militaire fenen Officiers, fie Gemeine nach Unter oderge.

In general, blackletter tradition offers a great variety of text highlighting techniques that don’t use italic (for an obvious reason — there is no italic in blackletter):

Die Orgel, der flugel, das fortepiano, und das Clavicord

For example, a combination of two different blackletters may be used.

Dahin gehoret, die nom formirte hochloblichen Confiftorio des Serkogthums

Sometimes you can find a mix of two different type sizes in one text (in this case, with a mix of two different sizes for Roman as well).

Selma Lagerlof
Inhalt der Oeffamelte

But probably the most common tech­nique to encounter is the "sperrsatz" (wide letterspacing).

It is rather natural, that the designers of Bauhaus, coming from blackletter-dominant German typographic tradition, seem to be the first ones to start practicing italicless typesetting within modern Western typography. Their magazine, «Bauhaus» did not have any italics, but instead a variety of other techniques (rather similar to blackletter examples mentioned above) was applied:

kontrast und die durch die technik gleichwertigkeit auch dieses mittels

In rare cases — underline.

demgegenuber ist die fotoplastic eine organisierter spuk art

Almost everywhere — sperrsatz.

das kugeltheatre von andreas weininger eine des raumtheatres antwort auf die frage

Bold (often in combination with sperrsatz).

SLANTED

It might be tempting to attribute the absence of italics in Bauhaus magazine to the unavailability of such styles at that time for sans serif fonts (which were mostly used in the magazine, even for longer texts), but actually italic grotesks were already quite common at that time and you can find italic sans serifs even in the 19th century specimens.

I would like to think that Bauhaus designers did recognize the ridicu­lous­ness of the idea of adding a style, that imitates the handwriting, to the mechanistic typeface of the future — the grotesk (though, most likely their argument against italics was that of efficiency, rather than one of aesthetics — probably, italics were avoided for the similar reasons as uppercase.) 2 But why in further development of sans serif typography almost nobody seemed to continue the Bauhaus italicless tradition up until the digital revolution?

2 According to Bauhaus, «we write all lowercase, therefore saving time. Besides: why two alphabets if one achieves the same thing? Why write in uppercase, if one cannot speak in uppercase?» Even though we indeed don’t speak uppercase, the question of whether or not we speak italic can be argued.

Sans serifs have italics nowadays just as often (read: always) as the serif typefaces, but for sans serifs often slanted (oblique) styles are used instead of true italics. 3 It is hard to say who exactly was the first one to come up with the idea, that slanted (oblique) would be more befitting for the neutrality of Swiss Modernism, but it is well possible that the trend was set by the most successful modernist sans serif — Helvetica. Helvetica’s oblique style instead of true italic makes perfect sense from a certain point of view — why would a typeface, that represents modernity and objectivity have a style, that imitates handwriting? Of course, slanted makes more sense. Though the bigger question is: why does a typeface, that represents modernity and objectivity is trying to imitate the calligraphic lean in at all?

3 The term "true italics" is used to differen­tiate italic styles that use cursive lettershapes from oblique styles that use slanted versions of upright characters. For many reasons obliques can be still named "italic" in font files (especially for pre-OpenType font formats).

There are a lot of arguments in favor of "true italics" and against the oblique/slanted styles. Especially the mechanically slanted fonts are disliked for their distorted outlines:

But wouldn’t exactly the mechanical distortion (and a noticable one) be the most befitting for a modernist typeface of the machine world?

And what about geometric grotesks? Typefaces, whose design is entirely based on simple geometric shapes — circles, rectangles, triangles. What sense does it make to try to play off a slanted by eleven degrees oval as a basic geomteric shape? If anything, the logical solution for an italic style of geometric grotesk would be not a slant, but rotation. This was the thought behind the new "italic" style of Five Years Later, FYL Rotated:

Rotation has a very interesting effect on Latin alphabet. In theory, rotating letters sound like a simple and natural thing to do, but you won’t find «Rotate characters» function in InDesign for a reason (and very, very rarely will you find a "rotated" type­face). Character rotation is unnatural for Latin typography, as it defies two fundamental concepts of Latin type­setting: the baseline and the inter­character spacing system of a propor­tional typeface.

First, the baseline: if you decide to rotate the characters in a line of text, what should become the center of rotation? If you try to align the letters to the baseline by their lowest points, they would appear jumping up and down (depending on their widths) and even bigger problem would be dealing with ascenders & descenders (since, for example, the descender of "p" might not touch the baseline). How should the capitals be placed in relation to the lowercase in a rotated font? I would be lying to say that FYL Rotated provides any answers to these questions, as the characters are simply aligned by eye. The vertical alignment is based on what makes the best sense visually, but there is no system behind it.

Adjusting metrics/kerning of the rotated typeface is an even bigger issue: instead of the usual exercise of solving the familiar spacing puzzle of vertical, oval and diagonal shapes (finding the optimal metrics for balancing character pairs like "nn", "no", "oo", "on", "nv", "vn", "ov", "vo", "vv", etc.), you are presented with innumerable amount of spacing combinations and the only good solution here is, probably, to go one step back and adapt the lettershapes themselves for the new rotated cond­itions. Maybe, it will be done one day, but for now FYL Rotated tries to fix the spacing issue with an uninventive force of 4462 (class-)kerning pairs.

INTERNATIONAL
ITALIC STYLE

I can imagine, that an English-language typographer is so rooted in the idea of italic that it’s hard to keep in mind, that other writing systems (in fact, the absolute majority of them) don’t even have the concept of italic. After all, we are all familiar with this iconic button trio: Will the italic button just not work on the Chinese text? Or will it just slant the words automatically, ignoring thou­sands of years of typographic tradition? Well, of course it will slant:

它會自動傾斜文字嗎

In the case of right-to-left writing systems (Arabic and Hebrew), this forced slant presents a curious question: in which direction should the text be slanted (considering that there is some reason to slant the text in the first place)?

It is natural for italic text to lean for­ward. Which way is forward, though? In the cases of Arabic and Hebrew, "forward" is left, the opposite of Latin way, so the angle of Arabic Italic should be the opposite of Latin Italic.

Adobe Arabic, published by Adobe, leans right.

"The closest thing to a true italic in Arabic; instead of forcing a lean, Lyon Arabic Slanted redraws letter­forms based on a cursive script." — Sarah Saroufim

According to Wikipedia, «In the 1950s, Gholamhossein Mosahab invented the Iranic font style, a back-slanted italic form to go with the right-to-left direction of the script». It is a curious concept. Indeed, if we have a style that leans right, wouldn’t a style that leans left also be useful in some occasional world­wide app­lications? Apart from the Right-to-Left/Left-to-Right consideration, wouldn’t it be nice to have a greater variety of italics purely for aesthetic or expressive reasons? Maybe the Marinetti’s Revolution should be not mere «4 colors and 20 typefaces», but «4 colors and 20 typefaces with a dozen of different "italics" each»? For example, italic for emphasis and iranic for irony?

With these considerations in mind, four new styles were designed for Panama: Monospace Italic, Mono­space Iranic, Proportional Italic and Proportional Iranic. As in the case of straight cuts, proportional versions use the same outlines and letterforms as the monospace ones, only the spacing is different.