There is always a time and place for ligatures and fancy caps; but where you get them, and how, is another question. Well, if you are using a typeface such as Adobe Garamond and have bought the Garamond Expert set, then that is not such an easy question to answer. However, Giampa TextWare Corp. has developed a series of fonts called the Lanston Fonts which makes “being an expert” easy.
The font which I have been using is their Caslon 337 font. It includes: Caslon Oldstyle, Caslon Caps and Small Caps, Roman Quaints (Long s), Caslon Oldstyle Italic 337, Italic Caps and Small Caps, Caslon Swash, and Italic Quaints (Long s). Most of which seem to come with even more features. For example the Caslon Oldstyle comes with hanging figures, lining figures, long descenders, and short descenders. The kerning for these fonts is based on the set width of the type, and the small caps font is kerned appropriately. Each font has the entire European accented character group with re-sized accents for different characters. Other extras include the justifying hyphen, line leader, dot leader, and tied letters. All in all you get a lot of fonts—17 to be exact—and the entire set costs only $285.00.
Granted, most of us have no need for short descender fonts, but publication people do. And why would I need a set of caps and small caps when the computer can make those for me? When you ask the computer to set a line of type in small caps, the computer simply turns the lowercase letters into smaller point size large caps. The problem with this is that the proportions are now wrong between the large cap and the small caps. The strokes are different thicknesses, the serifs are different sizes, etc. When you use a “designed” small caps font the 14-point small caps are not 9-point big caps, if you get my meaning.
The reason the Giampa expert fonts are so much easier to use than Adobe’s is that you simply select your type and change the font. No fancy keystroking is needed. There is one gaping problem with this set of Caslon however, they did not include a bold version of the font. For the bold fonts you must purchase Caslon, No. 637 and 537 (Bold) a set which costs around $125.00 more.
Expert fonts are not for everyone, and many people may not appreciate all of the trouble Giampa has gone to, to make this a very well defined set of fonts with lots of little extras. If you are interested, however, Giampa offers many other fonts in the Lanston Font series, such as: Albertan, Goudy, Jenson, Kaatskill, and others. For more information and an entire list of Giampa fonts call 1-800-663-8760.
(Mac Monitor is planning a major article comparing Expert sets from several digital font suppliers.)
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