Aesthetics of diacritics

[MacEachaidh]

I'm curious to hear people's take on this question, specific to what're generally called the "grave" and "acute" accents.

I notice that some typefaces have these two accents symmetrical but reversed -- same thickness, same height above the baseline, same angle of inclination, simply mirror-imaged -- while others have the acute different from the grave -- often higher, more angled, and a different thickness.  I assume this is to simulate the assymetry of handwriting, but it looks strange in a typeface that isn't trying to appear handwritten.

Is there a "best" thing to do here ?  Or reasons that haven't occurred to me ?

What are people's thoughts ?

[Der FontMeister (FontLab)]

methinks Bringhurst may have some thots on this - I keep thinking in the back of my mind that I saw some reference to the proper drawing and philosophy of these characters but my mind has gone blank...

My thought is that often a font has these characters by default somewhere and oft times these are COMPOSITE characters -thus they are placed above vowels via the keyboard keystrokes and there have been sloppy designers who didn't think about this and may have a Brush script alphabet with a Roman diacritical being brought in by the keyboard.

So , yes it is something to think about and once the fact is pointed out that they need to be drawn according to the look of the typeface then all will be well../


Jimmy G.

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