I've occasionally wondered about this in nautical book titles. "H.M.S. Surprise" would be italicized as a ship's name, and also as a title, because it wouldn't make sense to "flipback" the whole italic title into Roman, right?
But then would Mutiny on the Bounty also be fully italicized? Or would it be best to have just "Mutiny on the" in italics?
My mom always gives money to homeless people she passes if they have a dog with them. Only sometimes if they have a child, but always if they have a dog.
Another place you might see long paragraphs set in italic is in an abstract or summary at the beginning of a chapter, often in academic or technical work. I've never liked it; too hard on the eye, even when I had young eyes.
It's possible, by the way, to modify the distance of an underscore from the baseline so it doesn't crash with the descender, in InDesign, at least. But then you might have an underscore so far down that it looks like an overscore above the line below, which could be fun. In any event, the example you provided would be hideous even with a well placed underscore, partly because it could be confused for a hyperlink, as in footnote 1, which at first glance confused me (quotes and underscore?). Also, it's ugly.
And that Q: many typefaces have alternate letters that can be plugged in for just such a problem, so you can use something designed within that family instead of going too far afield.
Had a t-shirt that read “Fly the Friendly Skies of Vietnam” with a F-4 Phantom fully loaded depicted. Wore it to Junior & Senior HS. Probably got it at a garage sale. Lot’s of Navy aviators in my hometown…
Never knew what font the words were in. Odds are- Helvetica.
You write: 'the whole thing fails miserably the first time a descender goes crashing through the underscore'. Some layouts provide gaps in the underscoring to allow the descenders to descend freely. But too many descenders and the underscoring is shredded. I recall seeing an article where the underscoring was indicating hyperlinks (the intrusiveness of link indicators on a page is a separate issue) and the underscored text for one link comprised just numbers. However, because the designer had chosen a number style that had many descenders (a style I dislike in nearly all settings), this particular underscore was shredded so much that only one or two tiny dots remained. I expect that many readers would have missed that link.
I too have thoughts about the intrusiveness of hyperlink indicators, plus about the overuse of hyperlinks entirely, including in articles that seem to me to be not doing their own work and are just, essentially, saying: Look over there! Look over there! Like: Do your own writing. (I know that I use them here sometimes to cross-reference other entries of mine, but I hope I'm not being lazy about it.) (If you follow me.)
Thank heaven there are people like you who care about and take care of these things. I appreciate them when my attention is called to them but am blind to them the rest of the time. Perhaps I'll learn.
I came across this in my own writing recently. I was recounting a two sentence thought, so I italicized it, but there was one word that needed to be stressed. Otherwise the reader wouldn’t read it the way I wanted. I scratched my head and wondered how do I italicize something that’s already italicized? So I un-italicized it. I didn’t know if that was correct. It is, per you. But, yeah, I agree, it looked horrible.
I feel you on the Q. In the typeface Baskerville it looks like it’s x-height followers are vassals. Especially so if you type the word Queen. Trajan typeface has a good example of the Q reaching its arm under the belly of the “u” as if it’s putting it to bed.
Related: As a graphic designer the 21st century could not come fast enough for me. I think I was the only person on earth kerning the 1 closer to the 9. I’d see ads, commercial literature, newspapers, you name it that left the 1 on an island. It was heartbreaking.
Good riddance 1999. Except computers back then were not as wise as whoever designed Substack, because it looked like this > 1 999. Sorta.
You also prompt me to recall that whatever book it was that had all those capital Q's in it, the Q-beginning name that showed up most frequently belonged to some very virile military person, so those daft loopy capital Q's looked even sillier.
This is standard in legal citations if you're doing it right--the parties are in italics, but vs. is a Latin word, so it's in Roman. I'm not a lawyer or a copyeditor (but I've written out Roe vs. Wade many times) so I don't know what it's called, it just is.
Whatever legal style may or may not be, "versus" has been English for six or so centuries, and thus so is vs. And to be sure one will see Roe v. Wade a lot more than one will see Roe vs. Wade, at least these last few decades.
I'm always happy to read these answers to burning questions that my writing partner and I have. She is a slave to CMOS. Because I am not at the moment writing for publication, I do whatever I please. I despise big blocks of text in italic. Also, in some modern novels, setting supposed emails or texts in bold. Wearying to the eye indeed. Glad you are having good weather--it's fairly miserable here, a good day to be inside with tea.
I like bold about as much as I like underscoring. And if you really must choose a separate font for texts and emails, and I'm not sure you really must, maybe just pick something nice in a sans serif and call it done.
When I did academic world publishing stuff, we were in the midst of a shift between large quantities of text in italics and chunky word being set off as a block, nicely indented. So much more elegant, so much cleaner.
The weather here is singularly inclement. Much ballet has been administered to the younger child, and I got to revisit Peau d'Âne and my favourite quote:
"As t'il un secret?"
"Pas que je sache."
("Does he have a secret?" "Not that I know of.")
Comments fields do not allow any of the normal formatting I'd use to arrange quote + translation of quote nicely.
>"When I started in publishing in the early ’90s, one fairly often ran into block/extract text set in italics. It was, simply, the fashion then [...] and now one rarely encounters that"
I wonder to what extent the behavior(s) of early web browser(s) — especially their default way of rendering paragraphs, blockquotes, etc. — started influencing typographic thought. Not that the aesthetic was good (um, no), but that people started getting used to how web pages looked (for better or worse) and this influenced page design overall.
This would not necessarily have applied to professional book designers, but the sheer volume of good-enough-for-the-web/it's-the-best-we-can-do layouts might have had some weight. Dunno. Then again, a) the timing of this change in fashion might be coincidental and b) it is, after all, fashion, and that consists in some part of doing things in a new ("fresh") way, i.e., not the way it's been done up to now.
Oh, and the underline thing, as someone mentioned above — I'm guessing that our latter-day shunning of this style (originally a convention established as a result of the limitations of the typewriter?) REALLY was accelerated by the use of underlines to mark links online. It would be ... un–user-friendly ... to publish something on the web that used underlines for, like, emphasis or (basically) a substitute for italics.
I can’t really say what’s led to various evolutions in book typography. Over the years, of course, younger designers joined our RH crew, and they had their own styles. I guess I’ve viewed the changes overall as: Let’s go elegant, let’s go simple, let’s go readable. In which there is a lot of room for possibility.
Dreyer’s English, it might amuse you to know, was designed by the head of our design department, who was also by far the seniormost person on board. And when I saw Carole’s design—which struck me as a kind of classic mid-twentieth-century Random House design beautifully spruced up for the twenty-first century, I was absolutely delighted. Sometimes authors request little tweaks in display type or whatever (or larger overhauls). All I had to say on the subject was: Yes.
Slainte!
The “flipback” flops badly in its flip flops.
I've occasionally wondered about this in nautical book titles. "H.M.S. Surprise" would be italicized as a ship's name, and also as a title, because it wouldn't make sense to "flipback" the whole italic title into Roman, right?
But then would Mutiny on the Bounty also be fully italicized? Or would it be best to have just "Mutiny on the" in italics?
For the love of heaven, Lucretia, let him have it. And loudly! Your silence is taking up too much space!
I rather love those swoopy Qs. De gustibus et cetera …
Yep. The bum sitting beside the highway gets twice as many contributions when he is accompanied by a pooch.
My mom always gives money to homeless people she passes if they have a dog with them. Only sometimes if they have a child, but always if they have a dog.
Another place you might see long paragraphs set in italic is in an abstract or summary at the beginning of a chapter, often in academic or technical work. I've never liked it; too hard on the eye, even when I had young eyes.
It's possible, by the way, to modify the distance of an underscore from the baseline so it doesn't crash with the descender, in InDesign, at least. But then you might have an underscore so far down that it looks like an overscore above the line below, which could be fun. In any event, the example you provided would be hideous even with a well placed underscore, partly because it could be confused for a hyperlink, as in footnote 1, which at first glance confused me (quotes and underscore?). Also, it's ugly.
And that Q: many typefaces have alternate letters that can be plugged in for just such a problem, so you can use something designed within that family instead of going too far afield.
Yeah, I wish that hyperlinks here could be, I dunno, bright blue or something; that would be nicer.
And thank you for the helpful type information!
Hmm, are you (light) bluish?
I'm surprised they didn't design hyperlinks with a different color. It's not hard at all in the code. Maybe we need a petition.
I do appreciate type designers that anticipate unsightly combos and design certain characters a couple ways.
And for you ‘Fontologists’ out there- ‘Helvetica’ the movie is an interesting watch.
Was it the ‘Domino theory’ or the viral spread of the font Helvetic that led to the Vietnam war?
No, I believe it was either PanAm or Air America that led to Vietnam War.
Had a t-shirt that read “Fly the Friendly Skies of Vietnam” with a F-4 Phantom fully loaded depicted. Wore it to Junior & Senior HS. Probably got it at a garage sale. Lot’s of Navy aviators in my hometown…
Never knew what font the words were in. Odds are- Helvetica.
The Pan Am livery from 1970–1973 used the Helvetica font
You write: 'the whole thing fails miserably the first time a descender goes crashing through the underscore'. Some layouts provide gaps in the underscoring to allow the descenders to descend freely. But too many descenders and the underscoring is shredded. I recall seeing an article where the underscoring was indicating hyperlinks (the intrusiveness of link indicators on a page is a separate issue) and the underscored text for one link comprised just numbers. However, because the designer had chosen a number style that had many descenders (a style I dislike in nearly all settings), this particular underscore was shredded so much that only one or two tiny dots remained. I expect that many readers would have missed that link.
I too have thoughts about the intrusiveness of hyperlink indicators, plus about the overuse of hyperlinks entirely, including in articles that seem to me to be not doing their own work and are just, essentially, saying: Look over there! Look over there! Like: Do your own writing. (I know that I use them here sometimes to cross-reference other entries of mine, but I hope I'm not being lazy about it.) (If you follow me.)
Thank heaven there are people like you who care about and take care of these things. I appreciate them when my attention is called to them but am blind to them the rest of the time. Perhaps I'll learn.
I came across this in my own writing recently. I was recounting a two sentence thought, so I italicized it, but there was one word that needed to be stressed. Otherwise the reader wouldn’t read it the way I wanted. I scratched my head and wondered how do I italicize something that’s already italicized? So I un-italicized it. I didn’t know if that was correct. It is, per you. But, yeah, I agree, it looked horrible.
I feel you on the Q. In the typeface Baskerville it looks like it’s x-height followers are vassals. Especially so if you type the word Queen. Trajan typeface has a good example of the Q reaching its arm under the belly of the “u” as if it’s putting it to bed.
Related: As a graphic designer the 21st century could not come fast enough for me. I think I was the only person on earth kerning the 1 closer to the 9. I’d see ads, commercial literature, newspapers, you name it that left the 1 on an island. It was heartbreaking.
Good riddance 1999. Except computers back then were not as wise as whoever designed Substack, because it looked like this > 1 999. Sorta.
You also prompt me to recall that whatever book it was that had all those capital Q's in it, the Q-beginning name that showed up most frequently belonged to some very virile military person, so those daft loopy capital Q's looked even sillier.
I need to adopt daft into my vocab.
This is standard in legal citations if you're doing it right--the parties are in italics, but vs. is a Latin word, so it's in Roman. I'm not a lawyer or a copyeditor (but I've written out Roe vs. Wade many times) so I don't know what it's called, it just is.
Whatever legal style may or may not be, "versus" has been English for six or so centuries, and thus so is vs. And to be sure one will see Roe v. Wade a lot more than one will see Roe vs. Wade, at least these last few decades.
Hunh. I must needs rethink all those italicized diary entries and handwritten letters.
Especially the ones about me—I gave a valid alibi, honest!
I'm always happy to read these answers to burning questions that my writing partner and I have. She is a slave to CMOS. Because I am not at the moment writing for publication, I do whatever I please. I despise big blocks of text in italic. Also, in some modern novels, setting supposed emails or texts in bold. Wearying to the eye indeed. Glad you are having good weather--it's fairly miserable here, a good day to be inside with tea.
I like bold about as much as I like underscoring. And if you really must choose a separate font for texts and emails, and I'm not sure you really must, maybe just pick something nice in a sans serif and call it done.
When I did academic world publishing stuff, we were in the midst of a shift between large quantities of text in italics and chunky word being set off as a block, nicely indented. So much more elegant, so much cleaner.
The weather here is singularly inclement. Much ballet has been administered to the younger child, and I got to revisit Peau d'Âne and my favourite quote:
"As t'il un secret?"
"Pas que je sache."
("Does he have a secret?" "Not that I know of.")
Comments fields do not allow any of the normal formatting I'd use to arrange quote + translation of quote nicely.
>"When I started in publishing in the early ’90s, one fairly often ran into block/extract text set in italics. It was, simply, the fashion then [...] and now one rarely encounters that"
I wonder to what extent the behavior(s) of early web browser(s) — especially their default way of rendering paragraphs, blockquotes, etc. — started influencing typographic thought. Not that the aesthetic was good (um, no), but that people started getting used to how web pages looked (for better or worse) and this influenced page design overall.
This would not necessarily have applied to professional book designers, but the sheer volume of good-enough-for-the-web/it's-the-best-we-can-do layouts might have had some weight. Dunno. Then again, a) the timing of this change in fashion might be coincidental and b) it is, after all, fashion, and that consists in some part of doing things in a new ("fresh") way, i.e., not the way it's been done up to now.
Oh, and the underline thing, as someone mentioned above — I'm guessing that our latter-day shunning of this style (originally a convention established as a result of the limitations of the typewriter?) REALLY was accelerated by the use of underlines to mark links online. It would be ... un–user-friendly ... to publish something on the web that used underlines for, like, emphasis or (basically) a substitute for italics.
I can’t really say what’s led to various evolutions in book typography. Over the years, of course, younger designers joined our RH crew, and they had their own styles. I guess I’ve viewed the changes overall as: Let’s go elegant, let’s go simple, let’s go readable. In which there is a lot of room for possibility.
Dreyer’s English, it might amuse you to know, was designed by the head of our design department, who was also by far the seniormost person on board. And when I saw Carole’s design—which struck me as a kind of classic mid-twentieth-century Random House design beautifully spruced up for the twenty-first century, I was absolutely delighted. Sometimes authors request little tweaks in display type or whatever (or larger overhauls). All I had to say on the subject was: Yes.