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Ink trap

en.wikipedia.org

220 pointsmxfh44 comments

I remember learning about ink traps when Opera changed logo [1]. It was quite controversial among font nerds that the font used to write "software" had ink traps, since it was mainly to be used for screen and not print. Nobody else cared, of course.

[1] http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/423/33204/vers...

Those are much more subtle than the ones in the wiki article. As a non-font nerd, had I not been looking for them, I wouldn't have seen them. The W looks a tiny bit funny.

They're noticeable in the "f" and the "t", on the left side.

When I was younger, I always wondered what the big deal is with creating fonts and stupidly thought I could throw together something on my own without any training.

These sorts of things fascinate me in that the average non-designer has little knowledge over the intricacies involved in producing a beautiful typeface that scales to many dimensions accurately and produces a printout that works around the physical limitations of ink. My attempt to create a typeface resulted in a font that looked very good at 10pt and started to fall apart a few points larger or smaller. I gave up and decided to leave that to the professionals. Of course, back then, there weren't large collections of high quality and free fonts sponsored by large players like Google and Microsoft, so the novelty of having a monospaced programming/terminal font with just the right size dot in the zero, slash in the 7 and serifed 1 was worth the few days of nerding around to make a janked up version I could enjoy at precisely the size I wanted to see it.

NBC used a face with insanely big ink traps in their titles for Sochi coverage. It looked like a modified version of Stratum. They looked really strange to me on screen. I'll see if I can find some samples.

EDIT: OK, check these out: http://i.imgur.com/0ovnO49.png

if you browse the tag "ink traps" at MyFonts[1] quite[2] a[3] number[4] of[5] them[6] are using them solely as an artistic element and clearly not for their originally intended use case.

[1] http://www.myfonts.com/search/tag%3A%22ink+traps%22/fonts/

[2] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/capearcona/ca-uruguay/

[3] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typeco/trapper/

[4] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/madtype/hydrochlorica/

[5] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mugur-mihai/indento/

[6] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/yess/

[edit] Here's your NBC Sochi font: Register in Bold or Condensed Bold by Device http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/device/register/bold-condensed/

Very interesting, thanks! I've seen some apparently decorative ink traps before but hadn't really seen fonts really built around them.

And good find on Register -- I think part of my confusion or displeasure with that face is that I was already familiar with Stratum, and in all-caps they are pretty similar (lowercase characters are pretty distinct between the two), so I thought someone had added traps to Stratum just to be different or cool. I now see that Register predates Stratum by a few years, which is interesting also.

I still prefer Stratum …

Register (2000) still has bragging rights other Stratum (2004) for being 4 years it's senior and being designed by Rian Hughes, who has one of the most unique job interview experiences retold on his Wikipedia page:

He arrived late at his very first job interview at an advertising agency with a lump of dog excrement stuck to the bottom of his portfolio, managed to transfer some of it on to the white shirt he was wearing and the rest onto the meeting-room table. Directors had to open windows to let the stench out. Despite this, he got the job.

Yet they all owe a lot to Morris Fuller Benton's 1932 ATF Agency Gothic, which was extended in 1995 by David Berlow as FB Agency[1] which is similiar to the influential Bank Gothic[2] which he designed two years earlier in 1930.

From there you can venture into that Star Trek TOS typeface (now called Horizon[3]) and into adjacing Microgramma/Eurostile[4][5] territory. It's the future we used to know.

[1]http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontbureau/fb-agency/

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Gothic

[3]http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/horizon/

[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)

[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile

Perhaps that was to simulate a feeling of Cyrillic script.

I'm sort of thinking what you're thinking, but I'm thinking of 20's-30’s "Soviet" graphic design, rather than Cyrillic script.

This really reminds me of the way you cut a metal sheet (with lasers) that you're going to fold afterwards : You leave a small "circle" at the corner where the sheet will be folded because otherwise you'll have excess metal that will damage your sheet.

Nice. This means a true WYSIWYG application should simulate ink flow! Does any existing app have such feature?

Metafont, the scalable font system for TeX, had per-printer definitions to adjust the font's bitmap rendering for a specific printer. This stackexchange answer briefly describes those parameters:

   http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/120414/what-are-gf-and-pk-font-files#answer-120419

inDesign has a variety of previewing modes, including a 'printed' simulation as well.

Consider when you're designing for print you aren't limited to CMYK channels, you can have 6 inks (hexachrome), or any number of custom palettes (1 spot colour, 2 spot colours, 3 spot colours, etc) or any combination of a colour process plus additional spot colours. Since you're printing things on all channels it's important to be able to predict (before printing) how different ink layers and transparencies will eventually flatten down on the page.

I do most of my work for screen, but inDesign is truly the most advanced software for taking a print piece to press (in PDF format). Even to designers trying to use Adobe Illustrator for print work I STILL steer them toward inDesign because of the print-related extras and better opentype support.

FWIW, inDesign is the only Adobe product I'll 'miss' now that I've stopped upgrading. I'm not going to Creative Cloud and I can do all of my work using nonAdobe software EXCEPT for inDesign.

It's not optimal, but Adobe does have a single-app plan, so you could get InDesign CC for $20 per month, every month, for the rest of your life…

I wonder if you've tried TeX and family. XeTeX has full OpenType support.

Unfortunately, TeX and sons pretty much begins and ends with typesetting; graphical nuance is not its strong suit. It's easy enough to illustrate a text-oriented document, but it's a real bear to create magazine-style or brochure layouts, spreads, gatefolds and so on. For that sort of thing, you really need something that is tied much closer to output than to content in the working space, and TeX is pretty heavily biased the other way around.

I'm told that QuarkXPress was once the leader in page layout for magazines etc. I wonder if it's still a viable alternative. Apparently you can get it for $850.

Probably more reasonable approach than true ink-flow simulation would be using separate font (or hinting) for screen and print for the same typeface. Similarly like some typewriter fonts (eg. FF Trixie[1]) would emulate the ink spread from the typewriter, whilst the actual typewriter would have clean-cut shapes.

[1] http://trixiefont.com

TrueType fonts, at least, had the concept of "engine compensation" [0] during hinting. When specifying a relative distance to move points on the glyph outline, the hint program would classify the distance as "white", "black" or "grey" depending on whether it crossed over whitespace, ink, or a mix of the two. The interpreter could then round or tweak the distance slightly depending on the physical characteristics of the output media.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ttrefman/RM02/Chap2.html#e...

It would depend on what medium you were printing.

http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-the-... is probably a better article on the topic.

You're right. Just submitted the Wikipedia link not to spam the new submissions page.

Here is my original comment under the ink-saving story of the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7488218

Reminds me a lot of OPC to improve feature resolution in photolithography. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction

I thought this wiki page was going to describe selling ink jet printers as a loss leader while charging exorbitant amounts for ink cartridges.

You'll find that one under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades .

I have always wondered what those were. Always thought they were ugly. Surely these only apply to certain types of printing. Why are they still shipped with fonts?

It's post modernism. One of the principle elements of post modernism is that the structure becomes the decoration. The internal becomes external. The scaffold becomes external. The walls are stripped back and the plumbing is visible, and you might even add some extra scaffolding and pipes that serve no real purpose anymore.

Serifs themselves are another example of this phenomenon. When the first "Sans Serifs" were produced, as part of the modernism movement (unlike post modernism, modernism is about stripping back decoration and reducing things to their pure functional nature) they were called "Grotesk", and the hacker news of the day widely panned them for being useless and illegible and stupid.

Now it's just boring and normal.

In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it is and what its attributes are.

It's a cheeky rebellion against art history. It's embracing the absurdity of our technological ignorance.

It's the teenager saying the word "LOL" out loud like it has no history or context.

> In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it is and what its attributes are.

Wow, that really highlights the ugliness of the "scaffolding" we use. Maybe we should design something better than HTML, so we can have scaffolding that we're not ashamed to show.

Or make better designs that don't assume the scaffolding will be hidden.

The only reasons I can think of is that they are still used either for consistency, or for "backwards compatibility" with the reprinting of documents.

They apply to inkjet printing too. Maybe not laser.

I've always heard that sans-serif fonts are easier to read on a screen and serif ones are easier to read on paper, but I wonder if there's a similar rule for laser vs. inkjet printing.

Fonts with ink traps for small point inkjet printing, and fonts without ink traps for everything else?

I'm a trained graphic designer, let me take a crack at explaining it:

Serifs make it easier to identify individual letters. When you are new to an alphabet (ESL, learning latin-based lettering, or a child) having the serifs makes it easier to identify letters.

Serifs are also better than sans-serifs for reading in low lighting situations, or the holy grail of legibility: when the page you're reading is moving as much as you are (e.g. reading a newspaper on a bus/subway, reading a book on a train, etc)

Sans-serifs USED to be recommended for digital displays because digital displays had a much much lower resolution than print (72-96 dots per inch, compared to print resolution of 300 dots per inch) so that meant that on old personal computers serifs looked chunky and heavy. They weren't thin and elegant, and because of this the sans-serif fonts just looked 'cleaner'.

Fast forward to 2014 when the screens most people have in their pockets have 324+ dots per inch and are actually a higher resolution than much printed material. Does the rule still apply? I'm not so sure anymore…

Can you provide a cite for serifed letters being easier for children to learn or recognize?

This page says no:

"Sans serif is better for children learning to read"

Books produced for children are often printed with sans serif text as teachers claim that the simplicity of the letter shapes makes them more recognisable ( Coghill, 1980) , Walker, 2001 ). But studies with child participants have found no difference in their ability to read either style of typeface. ( Coghill, 1980) ; Zachrisson, 1965 , Walker, 2001 )

http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...

http://designarchives.aiga.org/#/entries/%2Bid%3A440/_/detai...

Here is a very interesting example of this.

This looks like version 1 of using interference to produce feature sizes smaller than the wavelength of the light used for the lithography.

A physical process distorts the "clean" image in the final product, so the distortion is mapped and doubly reversed, so that a "clean" final product is generated from an intentionally distorted original. As long as the physical distortion is consistent and predictable, you could do this with anything.

I'm thinking the same technique could be applied to improve volume printers. Instead of ink traps you have thermoplastic traps.

Why can't the printer detect areas likely to be distorted, and apply the transformation itself?

Then, you send the printer what you actually want it to look like, which makes more sense to me.

The ink traps are definitely larger than the wavelengths of light used for making lithographic plates for printing. Or are you making a comparison to semiconductor lithography?

It seems at first that this would have little application in a digital format. On the other hand, maybe there is some anti-aliasing benefit.

A digital format is never going to be printed with fluid inks? ;-)

Very rarely hot-lead printing (and analogues), which I assume is the exclusive use for ink traps.

I will certainly give you "very rarely", but you can also make photopolymer plates of a digital file, and then print it using letterpress printing. That's how I did my wedding invitations. Unfortunately, the font I used didn't have ink traps.

Thanks guys. Let me try again. I don't care about printing, as there are clearly others worrying about that. How does it look on my ~2K screen, since I don't have the cash required for the ever emergent 4K coding revolution? Any help? None? Okay. Cool. At least I learned something, even if about printing. :-)

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