Manual of Diacritics

There are more than seventy languages in Europe using the Latin script. Some have disappeared, others are spoken by only a small part of the population, and there are only a few dozen of the most used ones. The 1990s, a time of rapid growth in digital typography, did not bring the same growth in interest in conceptual language support for typefaces, i.e., the creation of characters with diacritics. This gave rise to a situation well known to all graphic designers: A typeface they wanted to use in their design does not contain all the characters in their language.

With a few exceptions, the drawback of literature devoted to diacritics is that they are predominantly textual and often lack sufficient illustrations. Because most type designers work visually, a textual description of how something should be correctly done and how the result should look is not very helpful. Examples should primarily be shown, specific approaches visualized and clearly demonstrated. This is why, instead of complicated descriptions of the problems associated with diacritics, this book presents a set of clear visual examples of possible solutions. A good resource for anyone making type or looking closely.