Script typefaces are based on the varied and often fluid stroke created by handwriting. They are generally used for display or trade printing, rather than for extended body text in the Latin alphabet. Some Greek alphabet typefaces, especially historically, have been a closer simulation of handwriting.

Styles

Script typefaces are organized into highly regular formal types similar to

cursive Cursive (also known as joined-up writing) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionality and m ...

writing and looser, more casual scripts.

Formal scripts

A majority of formal scripts are based upon the letterforms of seventeenth and eighteenth century writing-masters like George Bickham, George Shelley and Charles Snell. The letters in their original form are generated by a quill or metal nib of a pen. Both are able to create fine and thick strokes. Typefaces based upon their style of writing appear late in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Contemporary revivals of formal script faces can be seen in Kuenstler Script and Matthew Carter's typeface Snell Roundhand. These typefaces are frequently used for invitations and diplomas to effect an elevated and elegant feeling. They may use

typographic ligature In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature ...

s to have letters connect.

Casual scripts

Casual scripts show a less formal, more active hand. The strokes may vary in width but often appear to have been created by wet brush rather than a pen nib. They appeared in the early twentieth century, and with the advent of photocomposition in the early 1950s, their number rapidly increased. They were popularly used in advertising in

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

into the 1970s. Examples of casual script types include Brush Script, Kaufmann and Mistral. Some may be non-connecting like Freestyle Script.

Technology

Script typefaces place particular demands on printing technology if the letters are intended to join up and vary like handwriting. A typeface intended to mimic handwriting, such as Claude Garamond's grecs du roi typeface, will require many alternate characters. In digital type these (once drawn) can be substituted seamlessly through contextual ligature insertion in applications like InDesign, but this was complicated in metal. Another complexity in metal type was that sorts had to have delicate overhanging parts to interlock. This required careful design and casting for the sorts to fit together without gaps or the sorts breaking, or leaving gaps to be filled in by the natural spread of ink on paper. Script typefaces have evolved rapidly in the second half of the 20th century due to developments in technology and the end of widespread use of metal type. Historically, most signwriting on logos, displays and shop frontages did not use fonts but was rather custom-designed lettering created by signpainters and engravers. As

phototypesetting Phototypesetting is a method of Typesetting, setting type which uses photography to make columns of Sort (typesetting), type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publ ...

and then computers have made printing text at a range of sizes far easier than in the metal type period, it has become increasingly common for businesses to use type for logos and signs rather than hand-drawn lettering. In addition, phototypesetting made overlap of characters relatively simple, something very complicated to achieve in metal type. Matthew Carter has cited his 1966 Snell Roundhand typeface as deliberately designed to replicate a style of calligraphy hard to simulate in metal. An additional development enabling more sophisticated script fonts has been the release of the OpenType format, which most fonts are now released in. This allows fonts to have a large character set, increasing the sophistication of design possible, and contextual insertion, in which characters that match one another are inserted into a document automatically, so fonts can convincingly mimic handwriting without the user having to choose the correct substitute characters manually. Many modern script typefaces emulate the styles of hand-drawn lettering from different historical periods.

Unicode

For most conventional usages, the regular alpha-numeric codepoints for ordinary text should be used, irrespective if their presentation. Script presentation is specified using (for example) the

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

command. For mathematical use, there are sets of dedicated codepoints with both capital and small letters. Few fonts provide support for all 52 characters, and their presentations vary in style from roundhand to chancery hand and others. These characters are: * Some characters are named "SCRIPT ..." in Unicode: :: :: (actually a misnomer, name is corrected into )

References

* Blackwell, Lewis. ''20th Century Type.''

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and ope ...

: 2004. . * Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. . * Thi Truong, Mai-Linh; Siebert, Jürgen; Spiekermann, Erik. ''FontBook: Digital Typeface Compendium.'', FSI FontShop International: 2006, * Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .

External links

Columbia University online facsimile of writing manuals including ''The Universal Penman''

Allan Haley article on using digital versions of script typefaces
{{Typography terms Calligraphy Typography