John Roberts wrote:
Just an aside question on this general topic. What is considered to be a
reasonable point size for vocal text, say, in Times?
I think it depends upon the music and upon the musician. A fair amount
of old choral music had lyrics set in 8 point; with most of the rest
being 9 or 10. Many old hymnals have lyrics set in 6 point. These, of
course, are conventionally used by a single person, and held at about
arms length. Besides size of the typeface, the distance between lines of
the lyric also come into play. Older hymnals were sometimes composed of
8 point type set 9 points apart (that is, it was 9 points between the
baseline of one line, and the baseline of the next. The trend has been
towards larger type in both hymnals and in sheet music, for lyrics.
Also, of consideration in choosing a typeface (font) for lyrics is what
a typographer calls the "x-height". The size of the font is based upon
the distance between the top of a an "ascender", letters such as "l" or
"h", to the bottom of a descender, letters such as "g" or "y". The
"x-height", as the name implies, is the distance of the top of the
letter x.from the baseline. Different faces have different x-heights,
and one trick that can be used in music is to use a font with a larger
x-height relative to the point size to make the lower case letters
appear larger. There are also faces where two faces with the same point
size and x-height has a have different letter widths. Note here, that I
am not talking about "condensed" or "narrow" faces. Typefaces refer to
families, for example Times, Palatino, Caslon, Helvetica, Century
Schoolbook is yet another. Some of these families have a dozen or more
individual faces: Extra narrow, condensed, Roman, wide, extra wide,
Bold condensed, Bold, Italic, &c. This gets further confused by the
fact that there are typefaces which are / were made by different
manufacturers, where two faces had very similar appearances and
different names. One example of this is Arial / Helvetica, which are
very similar in appearance.
For my own purposes, my choice of type face depends upon the size of the
edition. If I am preparing an edition that I consider will likely be
printed in A4 or letter size paper, I'll use a point size which produces
lyrics close to twelve points, if I expect the edition will be printed
octavo sized, I will use a size close to ten points. So I start with
the size I want the text to be, divide by the system scaling factor, and
then divide by the page scaling factor.
ns
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