Letterforms, and the making of pages
Over nine hundred of Van Gogh’s letters survive, and the famous ones are written with the same cut reed he drew with. They are the best free lesson in what a broad-edged tool does when nobody is performing: a working hand, at speed, on cheap paper.
Háček nad malým písmenem se vejde. Nad velkým se nevejde nikdy, a počítat se s tím musí dřív, než se nastaví proklad — jinak se Ř z jednoho řádku dotkne účaří řádku nad ním.
Nearly every serif on your screen is a frozen record of a flat nib held at an angle. Hold a pen at thirty degrees, write an O, and the thick and thin you get is the same modulation a type designer spends a year redrawing.
The roundest letters in the Latin tradition were written by scribes who had all the time in the world and no lower case to write with. What they left is a hand with almost no ascenders and a rhythm nothing since has matched.
The Renaissance hand that became our italic, reduced to four shapes and one angle. Ninety minutes gets you a legible page; the remaining decade is spent making it look easy.
A scribe ruled the page before writing a word, and the ruling was arithmetic: nib widths in, line height out. Every margin on this site comes from the same calculation, done by a stylesheet instead of a lead point.
Nét chữ đẹp không đến từ cổ tay. Nó đến từ chỗ người viết quyết định dừng lại, và từ nhịp thở giữa hai nét — thứ không cây bút nào dạy được cho người đang cầm nó.