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Emphasis (typography)
In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
The most common methods in Western typography fall under the general technique of emphasis through a change or modification of font: italics, boldface, and small caps. Other methods include the alteration of letter case and spacing as well as color and additional graphic marks.
The human eye is very receptive to differences in "brightness within a text body." Therefore, one can differentiate between types of emphasis according to whether the emphasis changes the "blackness" of text, sometimes referred to as typographic color.
A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on blackness is the use of italics, where the text is written in a script style, or oblique, where the vertical orientation of each letter of the text is slanted to the left or right. With one or the other of these techniques (usually only one is available for any typeface), words can be highlighted without making them stand out much from the rest of the text (inconspicuous stressing). This is used for marking passages that have a different context, such as book titles, words from foreign languages, or internal dialogue. For multiple, nested levels of emphasis, the font is usually alternated back to (upright) roman script, or quotation marks are used instead, although some font families provide upright italics for a third visually distinct appearance.
By contrast, a bold font weight makes letters of a text thicker than the surrounding text. Bold strongly stands out from regular text, and is often used to highlight keywords important to the text's content. For example, printed dictionaries often use boldface for their keywords, and the names of entries can conventionally be marked in bold.
Small capitals (thus) are also used for emphasis, especially for the first line of a section, sometimes accompanied by or instead of a drop cap, or for personal names as in bibliographies.
If the text body is typeset in a serif typeface, it is also possible to highlight words by setting them in a sans serif face. This practice is often considered archaic in Latin script, and on computers is complicated since fonts are no longer issued by foundries with a standard baseline, so switching font may distort line spacing. It is still possible using some font superfamilies, which come with matching serif and sans-serif variants, though these are not generally supplied with modern computers as system fonts. In Japanese typography, due to the reduced legibility of heavier Minchō type, the practice remains common.
Of these methods, italics, small capitals and capitalization are oldest, with bold type and sans-serif typefaces not arriving until the nineteenth century.
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Emphasis (typography)
In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
The most common methods in Western typography fall under the general technique of emphasis through a change or modification of font: italics, boldface, and small caps. Other methods include the alteration of letter case and spacing as well as color and additional graphic marks.
The human eye is very receptive to differences in "brightness within a text body." Therefore, one can differentiate between types of emphasis according to whether the emphasis changes the "blackness" of text, sometimes referred to as typographic color.
A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on blackness is the use of italics, where the text is written in a script style, or oblique, where the vertical orientation of each letter of the text is slanted to the left or right. With one or the other of these techniques (usually only one is available for any typeface), words can be highlighted without making them stand out much from the rest of the text (inconspicuous stressing). This is used for marking passages that have a different context, such as book titles, words from foreign languages, or internal dialogue. For multiple, nested levels of emphasis, the font is usually alternated back to (upright) roman script, or quotation marks are used instead, although some font families provide upright italics for a third visually distinct appearance.
By contrast, a bold font weight makes letters of a text thicker than the surrounding text. Bold strongly stands out from regular text, and is often used to highlight keywords important to the text's content. For example, printed dictionaries often use boldface for their keywords, and the names of entries can conventionally be marked in bold.
Small capitals (thus) are also used for emphasis, especially for the first line of a section, sometimes accompanied by or instead of a drop cap, or for personal names as in bibliographies.
If the text body is typeset in a serif typeface, it is also possible to highlight words by setting them in a sans serif face. This practice is often considered archaic in Latin script, and on computers is complicated since fonts are no longer issued by foundries with a standard baseline, so switching font may distort line spacing. It is still possible using some font superfamilies, which come with matching serif and sans-serif variants, though these are not generally supplied with modern computers as system fonts. In Japanese typography, due to the reduced legibility of heavier Minchō type, the practice remains common.
Of these methods, italics, small capitals and capitalization are oldest, with bold type and sans-serif typefaces not arriving until the nineteenth century.
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