Onion fish (letterpress)
Zwiebelfische call typesetters and printers individual letters within a text from another font or another font style , for example, a fat e in a set with a normal thickness word. The term comes from lead type ( hand type ).
The term is said to go back to the onion fish Alburnus lucidus , which was considered an inferior fish and therefore became a synonym for inferior goods in the early modern period. An inattentive composer was also called an onion fish stall, analogous to the little-regarded market stalls of the onion fish traders .
Were individual letters when resolving a set column (fachsprachlich drop ) entered into the wrong type case back sorted so thus could come later letters a different font or another font style in texts that have been reassembled for this type case.
Demarcation
In desktop publishing and computer typesetting in general, analog effects occur, but they are not called “onion fish”. In these cases there is no mistake on the part of the typesetter, rather they arise from the fact that the glyph stock of the font used does not contain all the characters required for the text. Here the typesetter has to systematically set the missing glyphs from another font, which can appear more or less noticeable in the finished sentence, depending on the degree of similarity between the fonts. Before composing a text, you should therefore check whether the selected font contains the characters required for the text. In German-language instructions for use set elsewhere, for example, Greek beta “β” are printed instead of sharp “ß”.
The use of individual technical or mathematical characters, which in principle or very often independently of the basic font used in the text, are set from special character sets for special characters, is also not an onion fish. An example of this is the diameter symbol .
When a browser interprets HTML code, missing characters are often automatically replaced by corresponding characters from a different font. This shows a limitation of sparingly equipped standard character sets and no typing errors. The effect can be observed, for example, when writing exponents : The superscript digits 0 to 3 are available in numerous fonts, the superscript digits 4 to 9 in comparatively few. Here - if available - a substitute font is used so that a comparison can show a noticeable difference in character size, line width and the extent of the baseline offset: ⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹.
Trivia
Onion fish is the name of a famous pub in Berlin-Charlottenburg , where typographers , artists, journalists, professors and politicians have been meeting since 1967.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Eberhard Dilba: Typography Lexicon . 2nd edition, BoD, Düsseldorf 2004, ISBN 978-3-83342-522-6 , p. 106.
- ↑ Friedrich Forssman, Ralf de Jong: Detail Typographie , 4th edition, Schmidt, Mainz 2008, ISBN 978-3-87439-642-4 , p. 9
- ↑ onion fish. In: Berlin for the blind. Conveyor belt e. V., 2017, accessed March 24, 2019 .
- ↑ We meet in the onion fish . In: BZ , October 26, 2007.
- ^ Michael Henderson: Berlin: The best bar in the world . In: The Spectator , November 16, 2013.
- ↑ Karl Gruenberg: Axel Mierwaldt (Born 1950). The anchor in the neighborhood . In: Der Tagesspiegel , June 14, 2018.