Body-text fonts, pt. 37: Bembo

(I agree with C. S. Lewis here – enthusiastically – insofar as languages make genuine or at least plausible distinctions. But what if, e.g., loving just is liking? Probably not; but the point is, languages might (a) encode different ontologies or inventories of acceptable concepts rather than (b) differ in expressive facility.

Anyway.)

Bembo is one of the oldest and greatest fonts. It’s common in books but less so in desktop publishing. I believe some text editing programs provide Bembo; if yours doesn’t, consider obtaining one of these free variants of the typeface:

(1) Borgia Pro (a clone of this standard version of Bembo, with gratis regular, italic, bold, and bold italic font files);

(2) Cardo (in Google Docs);

(3) fbb (an enhancement of Cardo);

and (4) XETBook (rather like Bembo Book).

Cardo/fbb is the closest thing to the above sample from Lewis. It’s not bad: I see it in some professionally typeset books, e.g. this book requiring lots of extra glyphs for the author’s (Nigerian) name. Tonight I learned that fbb has added a “swashed” Q to its character set. I once wrote a thirty-page research paper with Cardo, using Google Docs (which I don’t recommend for a paper of that length). The typesetting was arduous but, ultimately, successful; the paper wasn’t.

March’s poems

… are astronomically themed.

(To make each image bigger, click on it to go into picture-viewing mode; then, right-click on the image and select the option to open it in a new tab; and, finally, in that new tab, click on the image again to magnify it.)

First, “Mars” by Patrick White:

(Image credit: Poetry, Dec. 1976, p. 134)

Next, “El Caracol” by Brian Klimkowsky:

(Image credit: Poetry, Dec. 1976, p. 136)

And my favorite, “Galileo” by Amy Grant:

(Image typeset with Google Docs)

Writing, packing, babysitting

This Easter has been the Easter of church nursery duty. I didn’t get to hear any sermons. I didn’t get to tour the Stations of the Cross (not even the ones erected in my church’s sanctuary). I did get to hold some tiny babies.

It’s also been the Easter of packing books – into egg boxes, which is fitting. In two weeks, we’ll’ve moved into our new home.

What to do with the furniture? The couches, we’ll keep for now. The kitties have shredded them. They would shred any new couch.

Karin owns a heavy cedar chest. She just tried, with all her might, to raise its lid. Jasper took this as an invitation to jump onto the lid. Jasper involves himself in all our packing.

Ziva, though, is frightened by the packing. She hides under our bedcovers.

Now to abruptly change the subject: Recently, it’s become possible to use these Roman, Italic, and Bold fonts in Google Docs:

Bookman Old Style
Century Schoolbook
*Palatino Linotype
*Times (not Times New Roman)
Twentieth Century

(* denotes the availability of standard ligatures)

This makes Google Docs a better choice for writing papers. If I were to do grad school all over again, I’d use Google Docs, not LaTeX. LaTeX is a powerful free typesetting system, but the process of writing in code and compiling PDFs over a slow Web connection has swallowed up who knows how many of my most vigorous years.