Talk:roman font

RFV discussion: March–April 2021

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roman font

Rfv-sense "a font supporting (often exclusively) Western European languages (often capitalized Roman)".__Gamren (talk) 02:13, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

cited Kiwima (talk) 04:37, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

@Kiwima No, all of those cites are for the sense "font of Roman characters", which is arguably SOP.__Gamren (talk) 01:35, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Which are the characters used by Western European languages. Kiwima (talk) 01:53, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

... As well as a large part of the languages of the whole world, including Latin. You know, the language of Rome? As in "Roman"? Besides, what about Yiddisch, or extinct languages like Primitive Irish and Old Norse, are they Western European?__Gamren (talk) 02:19, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

To start, the proper typographical terminology is “roman typeface”; a font means, traditionally, the characters of a typeface in a specific point size and weight. I don’t know what we should do about this. As far as I can make out the intended meanings of senses 3 and 4, I think they are the same. The term “Roman characters” used in the definition of sense 4 is IMO an awkwardly ambiguous formulation for “characters of the Latin alphabet” (also known as “the Roman alphabet”), used for the Germanic languages including English and German, and the Romance languages such as French, Italian and Spanish. After fixing sense 4, the (inadequately formulated) sense 3 is superfluous.

Additionally the following – not directly germane to the issue of verification. According to the Wikipedia article Serif, some typography sources refer to serif typefaces as “roman”. The Wikipedia article Roman type makes a distinction between “Roman” as referring to letters dating from classical antiquity, and “roman” for typefaces developed from the Italian typefaces of the Renaissance period. It states, “Popular roman typefaces include Bembo, Baskerville, Caslon, Jenson, Times New Roman and Garamond.” All are old-style serif typefaces. This also holds very much for the 15th-century typefaces designed by Aldus Manutius,^[1] so as a quotation supporting the rather recent sense 1 this is a less felicitous choice. I think it is better to move this to sense 2. Also, the first known use of a sans-serif full-fledged typeface (with both majuscules and minuscules) for a running text is from 1900. They were initially not considered a roman typeface; this indiscriminate designation for all upright typefaces originated with digital typefaces, also misnamed “fonts”, and is not common among typographers. Therefore I’d swap senses 1 and 2.  --Lambiam 19:51, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

@Lambiam By all means, feel free to improve on my wording.__Gamren (talk) 02:59, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

All quotations for sense 4 were at least as appropriate for sense 3, so I have now simply merged them. The phrase "the Roman characters" was kicking the can down the road and potentially circularly ambiguous, so I have adjusted the definitions.  --Lambiam 10:29, 21 April 2021 (UTC)