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More Type Design Knowledge Dumping

Small Capitals: Small capitals are capital letters designed to only be as tall as the x-height of the lowercase characters in a typeface. They are not simply scaled down normal capitals, as they have the same stroke weight as their larger cousins. This allows them to be easily read within blocks of text alongside many lowercase letters.

• My typeface, Meta, contains small capitals.

Ligatures: These are combinations of two or more characters into a single character, in order to increase legibility. When two characters overlap one another, it can create an awkward and difficult to read blemish in text. When using metal type, certain letters sometimes did not fit beside one another without creating awkward spacing. Ligatures are / were specially designed to fix these problems.

• Meta does contain ligatures
• Common ligatures: ff, ffl, ffi

Distinguishing Foot and Inch Marks from Apostrophes and Quotations

Both foot and inch indicating marks are simply straight, vertical hatch marks. The foot mark has one vertical line and the inch mark has two. Apostrophes and Quotation marks are distinguished by their curved or tailed nature. They are not simply straight lines. Similarly to the foot and inch marks, the apostrophe has one marking and quotations have two. It is important to note that unlike inch marks, quotation marks have separate opening and closing marks.

Hyphens, En Dashes, and Em Dashes

• Hyphens: The shortest of the dashes, hyphens are used primarily to break apart words. They can also be used however, to separate sections in a date or to distinguish when two consonants or vowels are not pronounced at a dipthong, such as with bowl-like or anti-intellectual
• En Dash: Slightly longer than a hyphen, en dashes are used to separate parenthetical thought or to indicate a sudden change in thought direction. These dashes are also used to represent ranges of values, as well as the minus sign.
• Em Dash: The em dash is used to set aside parenthetical thought. It is important to note that em dashes are not to be used with spaces on either side.

Sources:

Everything I have presented in this post I either learned from my grade school education, or gathered further details on from the book Letter Fountain by Joep Pohlen.