Hoefler Text
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How to use
Hoefler Text
Designed to help push the boundaries of what early digital fonts could do, Hoefler Text has a diverse and extensive character set, with deep roots in classical typography.
Hoefler Text’s core styles are offered in the three weights Regular, Bold, and Black, each in roman and italic, along with small caps and swashes.
Hoefler Text offers two options to emphasize text: a Bold weight that’s sufficiently heavier in most circumstances, and a Black weight that’s preferable under adverse press conditions, or at very small sizes:
Use Hoefler Text’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
For more contrast, use the small caps:
Use the alternate swash caps and swash small caps in Hoefler Text’s italics to incrementally decorate the typography by degrees:
As its name suggests, Hoefler Text is designed for extended reading, its drawings, spacing, and schedule of weights all chosen to suit small sizes. The family includes two sets of engraved capitals, designed for slightly larger sizes, and a font of ornaments and arabesques, for both small and medium sizes.
The following table offers some conservative guidelines for the smallest sizes at which the fonts can comfortably be reproduced and read, assuming typical reading conditions, and conventional contrast between type and background colors. The recommendations for sizes on screen are based on the coarser resolutions of older, entry-level monitors: at the higher resolutions available on modern phones, tablets, and laptops, type is viable at even smaller sizes.
Text
Headlines
Fleurons
2.2Using Optical Sizes
The robust construction of Hoefler Text recommends it for reproduction at small sizes. At larger sizes, the Hoefler Titling family (available separately) offers the finer details and smaller lowercase more typical of headline typography.
Hoefler Text has four types of numbers: old-style figures, lining figures, fractions and fraction parts, and superscripts and subscripts.
Many of Hoefler Text’s special characters and alternates are grouped into Stylistic Sets, an OpenType feature available in many applications that makes it easier to apply related substitutions together.
4.1Stylistic Sets
4.2Additional Characters
4.3Stylistic Sets Roman Styles
4.4Stylistic Sets Italic Styles
4.5Graphic Characters
4.6Stylistic Sets Hoefler Text Fleurons
In addition to its ornamental leaves, acorns, and graphic devices, the Hoefler Text Fleurons font contains a collection of parts designed to be used to create repeating patterns.
5.1Using Arabesques
Hoefler Text includes a collection of decorative material designed to lock together to create patterns. An S-shaped leaf, a spiraling vine, and a set of dotted saltires can be connected in countless ways to create ornaments and headpieces. Included in the Hoefler Text Fleurons font, these parts are mapped to the letters A through P.
5.2Creating Borders
Hoefler Text’s arabesques are provided in both solid and engraved forms, and in eight different orientations; its dotted saltire has three different degrees of ornamentation. All 35 of these pieces are square, and occupy the full em square, so that they correctly align and tessellate when set solid (with zero leading.)
Hoefler Text automatically adjusts spacing and character choices to improve typography.
6.1Ligatures
Collisions with the lowercase f are resolved by ligatures that are automatically substituted for the combinations fb, ff, fh, fi, fj, fk, fl, ffj, ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, and ffl.
‘Quaint’ ligatures, with a flourished connection, are included for the roman and italic combinations ct and st, and the italic combinations sp, as, es, is, us, ns, nt, tt, gg, ij, ll and Th. Quaint ligatures are decorative additions that should be used sparingly.
For historical settings, the archaic long s included in Hoefler Text is provided in ligatured forms with the b, h, i, k, l, s, and t.
When letterspacing the lowercase, ligatures should be disabled.
6.2Kerning
Hoefler Text is spaced and kerned to perform in most circumstances without the need for manual intervention. In applications that offer multiple options for kerning type, always use the default kerning that’s native to the typefaces (labeled auto in Illustrator, and metrics in InDesign) — never use the setting for optical kerning.
So-called ‘optical kerning’ was originally developed as an automated assist for fonts that lack kerning. But applied to a professional typeface, it overrides the visual decisions made by the font’s designers, and instead spaces characters using a mathematical model. It routinely misjudges common pairs and ignores important context, creating erratic and disruptive rhythms. Because its algorithms are subject to change with each software update, ‘optical kerning’ can cause text to be reflowed without notice.
6.3Capital Punctuation
Some design applications include an all caps option that not only capitalizes lowercase letters, but invokes the feature in Hoefler Text that substitutes capital-aligned numbers and punctuation. This raises characters such as dashes and enclosures so that they center on the caps, and substitutes the forms of symbols designed to accompany Hoefler Text’s lining figures.
Hoefler Text features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Hoefler Text supports 503 languages including Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgeois, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Scots Gaelic, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Welsh, and Zulu.
