Re: The name of the typeface


"John J. Chew, III" <jjchew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:0OidnQNYQffRwCHfRVn-hw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Danny Wilde wrote:

The word "gothic" apparently was used for
sans-serif fonts, a Japanese web page claims, in America, and it comes from
that. 

That's correct.  I worked for a typesetting company/type foundry
in the late 1980s (for among other reasons, it was a good way to
get free USENET access, and we had a direct dialup connection to
utgpu), and I think the old hands would still sometimes cringe
when we talked about "sans serif fonts" instead of "gothic
typefaces".

Thank you for confirming that about "gothic". The Japanese word is still current though.

My father was a graphic designer, so I often heard discussions about "typefaces" when I was younger, and I still find the word "font" rather strange. When I grew up a "font" was a place where a baby was christened, and a style of lettering was called a "typeface".

In Europe, they were called grotesque fonts, which
makes about as much sense.

Sans-serif was "groteque"? I don't remember that. I remember my father used to have typeface catalogues and I seem to remember something called "grotesque" but it wasn't "sans-serif". I'm pretty sure that sans-serif was called "sans-serif" even then. "Helvetica" was the big name in sans-serif typefaces. There was a famous April-Fool joke in the Times once about the island of Sans Serif.

Danny's list of styles 

That's fascinating and very useful.  Maybe you could add it to
the Wikipedia to make it easier to find?

Thank you. It's going on a web page, but not Wikipedia. I hope to link the web page to Google Images as well.


.

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