Italic, Part II - The minuscules

Because metal broad edge pens cannot be pushed, the strokes must differ from the accepted stroke order of the English alphabet. Strokes are often broken into two part to allow pulling of the pen. Strokes directions are indicated in the diagram below with red arrows, the red lines indicate where a stroke starts when there is ambiguity. The number of arrows correspond to the number of strokes.

The basic strokes of Italic are the straight curve and the rounded point. (This is full of Zen.) The straight curve starts at 45 degrees and flattens out toward the top. The rounded point is the other part of the straight curve which starts out at 45 degrees and goes down and up. The rounded point can also be written upside down as is in the letters b, p, h, m n and k.

For starters, ascenders and descenders both have the same height as the x height. Although this is often changed to suit the mood of each piece.

The slant (indicated by the dotted lines) should be consistent throughout the whole piece. For letters with straight portions the slant is easy to determine. For letters without straight lines running along the slant, the slant is the optical bisector of the letter (e.g. o, x, v ,w) or the bounding box of the letter (e.g. z, e, c, s). Although the proportions of the letters are not as strict as in Roman, Italic minuscules should occupy a parallelogram that has a width smaller than the height and that parallelogram should be of the same size throughout a piece.

Notice that q's should look like turned over b's and n's like upside down u's. Try to make them as similar to each other as possible. Consistency is more important than form. Two consecutive letters (e.g. those two t's in "letters") really do have to look the same to "make it work".