Fonts contain more than just letters and numbers. Designers and other font users need to know how to access special characters, extended characters, and expert characters found in many fonts. Effective use of these special, extended, and expert characters includes the proper and aesthetically pleasing use of ligatures, small caps, old style figures, and accent marks.
Although you could use an expert character set or math font that contains a wide variety of fractions, you can also create built-up fractions in graphics or page layout software. While the specific commands may differ from one program to the next, follow these general instructions to create your own typographically correct inline or diagonal fractions.
It has a name and specific usage guidelines. Learn them.
The sound recording copyright symbol isn't mapped in most standard fonts. You'll either need to find a font that does have the symbol or create your own. Learn more.
Learn the proper name and usage of a forward slash.
Elliptical periods, more commonly called an ellipsis, indicate the omission of text or an interruption or hesitation. Here's how to create them.
In addition to proper application of the various copyright symbols and trademark symbols you will often have to finetune them for the best visual appearance. Learn how to type the copyright, trademark, and registered tradmark symbols found in most standard Mac and Windows fonts.
One mark of professionally set type is the proper use of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Each is a different size and has its own proper usage. Learn how to create, modify, and typeset en dashes (–), em dashes (—), and hyphens (-) in desktop publishing.
Acute accent marks slant to the right over the top of certain vowels. Acute accent marks are found in words like café.
Characters with cedilla accent marks have a small tail on the letter C. Cedilla accent marks are found in words like façade.
Circumflex accent marks look like little roofs over a letter and are found in words like château. In the case of the lower case i, the carets or circumflex accent marks replace the dot on the i.
Grave accent marks appear over certain vowels and slant to the left. Words like voilà contain characters with grave accent marks.
Avoid the look of an amateur by properly using typographer’s quotation marks (curly quotes) and apostrophes and primes in your desktop published documents. Learn how to access the curly quotes and proper apostrophes on a Mac or Windows PC.
Tilde accent marks are a small wavy line that appears over certain consonants and vowels. Tilde accent marks are found in words like mañana.
Umlaut accent marks are two small dots over a letter, and in the case of the lower case i those dots replace the single dot. Umlaut accent marks are found in words like naïve.
Small caps are uppercase (capital) letters that are about the size of normal lowercase letters in any given typeface. Small caps are less intrusive when all uppercase appears within normal text or can be used for special emphasis.
Charts and instructions for using accents, ligatures, punctuation symbols, and other special characters. Mac and PC.
Writing for MacWorld, Kathleen Tinkel covers the use of ligatures, small caps, and more for setting better-looking text.
The Fontsite explores when to use ligatures, expert sets, fractions, including specific QuarkXPress Mac tips.
Daniel Will-Harris makes a case for not using ligatures.
Scroll down the definition of ligature for a lengthy discussion of some of the history of ligatures and the problems encounted in using them in non-Arabic alphabets (like English).
In his Logos for the Design Challenged series, Gary Priester experiements with creating your own special ligatures for distinctive logos.
From the FontSite, finetuning all caps and small caps.
Working with numbers and OldStyle Figures.
Special symbols such as Copyright and Trademark, true ellipsis.
Get a nice closeup look at dipthongs, eths, engs, eszetts and other special characters. From Tiro TypeWorks.
Daniel Will-Harris outlines specific typographic finetuning that is useful (more so than ligatures) including the use of small caps and old style figures.
