BBN–ANG17–183 Typography

time & place: Wed 10:00–10:45, D126
type, value: lecture, 2 credits
frequency: lectures and exams only in spring terms
host & instructors: DELG, G. Kiss Zoltán, Szigetvári Péter
description: The course aims to help students in producing usable electronic manuscripts. Almost all written work is required to be produced electronically in our society, in fact, sometimes authors become the typographers of their own work. Without some background in how to do this smartly, the result is embarrassing. Students properly participating in this course will (i) be able to produce electronic manuscripts that typographers can happily work with, (ii) have some acquaintance with typographical notions (which will make her communication with a typographer more effective), and (iii) be able to engage in basic typographical projects.
attendance: not obligatory but warmly recommended
assessment: Your mark is based on the result of a written examination consisting of multiple choice items. You must register for an exam date in Neptun. You can register for the last (retake) session only if you already have a mark from an earlier session. You can take the examination twice in a term. You can retake the examination at any date, not only the last one.

Probable exam dates

session	date	place	link to results
1	2024-05-21, Tue 11:00–12:00	Gólyavár A	☞
2	2024-06-04, Tue 11:00–12:00	Gólyavár A	☞
3	2024-06-18, Tue 11:00–12:00	Gólyavár A	☞
retake	2024-07-02, Tue 11:00–12:00	Gólyavár A	☞

lectures

topic 0: why study typography (2024-02-21): an outline of the course, an inventory of the topics to be covered (SzP) ☞

topic 1: partitioning texts (2024-02-21): breaking text into words, sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters, parts, volumes (SzP) ☞

topic 2: parts of a book (2024-02-28): obligatory and optional parts of printed books (SzP) ☞

topic 3: electronic text (2024-03-06): encoding text in electronic form (SzP) ☞

topic 4: breaking text (2024-03-13): moulding text into a given size: breaking text into lines, paragraphs into pages (SzP) ☞

topic 5: page layout (2024-03-20): raw materials of publishing, page sizes and proportions, optimal arrangement of document elements, grids, page colour (GKZ) ☞

topic 6: fonts (2024-04-03): font parameters, classification of fonts, size, typographical units (GKZ) ☞

topic 7: punctuation (2024-04-10): punctuation marks, quotes, dashes, and their ilk (SzP) ☞

topic 8: diacritics & ligatures (2024-04-17): characters with diacritics, character and stylistic ligatures (SzP) ☞

topic 9: a brief history of lettering and typography (2024-04-24/05-08): ancient writing systems, early Middle Ages, Gutenberg, renaissance, baroque, neoclassicism, romantic style, modernisms (GKZ) ☞

topic 10: digital fonts (2024-05-15): digital font formats, how does the computer handle fonts?, codepages, unicode, smart fonts and web fonts (GKZ) ☞