1. To set German, English, Danish, Spanish, Suomi, French, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, etc.
2. For Croatian, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, slovenian, czech, etc.
3. Modern Greek, or monotonic, but not old polytonic Greek.
4. Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc. The italic of the Bonesana cyrillic is a real cursiv italic, not a slanted roman (fig. 16).
5. All the ligatures made with f and a following high letter (b, f, h, i, ì, î, j, k, l, etc.), the couples Tb, Th, Tk, Tl, and the ornamental ligatures ct and st.
6. Esperanto, Maltese, Irish, Same, Greenlandic, Turkish, Afrikaans, Mende, Old English, Old Icelandic, Catalan, Livonian, Welsh, Old Russian, Azerbaijani, Altai, Uzbek, Abkhaz, etc.
7. The figures, mathematical signs and currency symbols can be used in rows, without gap. This variety is the best for tables, directories and spreadsheets. The glyphs concerned by this are: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 + < = > ¬ ± * ÷ - * $ € ¢ £ ¥ # † ‡.
8. Some figures are wider than other (e.g. 1 and 0). The regular spacing of the TLF version can make ‘holes’ in the text (as in 1000). The correction of the spacing making this variety usefull mostly for texts entirely set in capitals (titling, for example). The corrections affect the same glyphs as in note 9.
9. X height is the classical name to talk about the height of lower case letters. The lower case figures fit better a line of lower case (they are big ‘breaks’ in the line), so they are generally used to set current texts (which are the most part of texts). The corrections affect the same glyphs as in note 9 and 10.
typeface
The sobriety of the Bonesana typeface, close by many points to the works of the british typefounder John Baskerville, is in fact mostly inspired by the late typefaces of Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune in Paris and the early ones of Giambattista Bodoni in Parma. Drawned in search of the Encyclopaedic spirit of the eighteenth century, it mix a tempered baroque rythm with a rising neoclassical rigor, not yet restricted by the Intransigence of the Didot types. First used for a reprint of Dei Delitti e delle pene (On crime and punishment), by Cesare Bonesana, Marquis of Beccaria, this typeface wants to be a graphic miorror of the philosophy of the century of the Enlightment, a time when universalism and humanism were not contradictory.
STANDARD VERSION
The standard version of Bonesana is made of 40 different files, distributed according to the picture above (fig. 2) which contain between 290 and 303 glyphs each. The different version are first separated by the criterion of the alphabet (fig. 3): Latin (STD)(1), Eastern Europe (CE)(2), Greek (GR)(3) and Cyrillic (CYR)(4). All glyphs are compatible with the Unicode standard.
PRO VERSION
Compared to its standard version, Bonesana pro has the great advantage to group together the three alphabets in one single file. Instead of 40 files, you here have only 10, so it’s largely usefull for professionnal users. Each file contains 476 glyphs.
PRO expert VERSION
For an even easier use, there is Bonesana pro, for the fastidious graphic designer who wants to use all the typographic refinements needed in serious book design. Beyond the glyphs already available in the pro version, it offers a wide range of supplementary(5) ligatures (fig. 4), superiors and inferiors (fig. 5), fractions (fig. 6), diacritics for more languages(6) or transliterations in latin (fig. 7) and cyrillic (fig. 8) alphabets, greek archaic signs (fig. 9) and a complete set of punctuation for small capitals (fig. 10) and capitals (fig. 11). With all these properties, the files of the Bonesana pro expert have 1648 glyphs each, so 3296 together.
STYLES
All the version of Bonesana are divided in two styles: roman and italic. The italic is slightly narrower than the roman, but not as much as in Baskerville. It owes more to the italics of Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune, solid and rough, than to the fragile and tight ones of Baskerville (fig. 12).
VARIeTiES
Excepted in the pro expert version in which all glyphs are in one single files, Bonesana is divided according to the following varieties (fig. 13). The TLF variety (for Tabular Lining Figures) has the standard upper case monospace figures, as most of digital typefaces (7). In the PLF variety (Proportionnal Lining Figures), these signs have proportionnal width: they only use the horizontal space they need (8). For current text it should be better to use the OSF variety (Old Style Figures) and its lower case figures, which are going up and down the x height (9). This variety also offers the currency symbols and mathematical signs adapted to its design. The SC variety (Small Capitals) has similar figures as the OSF one, but insted of lower case letters you will find small capitals (fig. 14). Finally, as a ’wink’ to the ornamented ’enlighted’ typefaces of the eighteenth century, Bonesana has an ORN variety (Ornaments): a set of ’white’ letters for titling in big sizes (fig. 15).
fig. 2 – The different versions of Bonesana.
fig. 3 – Basic latin, greek, and cyrillic alphabets.
fig. 4 – The supplementary ligatures of the pro expert version.
fig. 5 – Some superiors and inferiors, in use.
fig. 7 – Lower case supplementary letters of the pro expert version. (Of cours, the same letters are also available in capitals and small caps.)
fig. 8 – The supplementary cyrillic letters of the pro expert version, in roman and italic.
fig. 9 – The supplementary greek letters of the pro expert version, in capitals, lower case and small caps.
fig. 10 – Punctuation for small capitals.
fig. 11 – Punctuation for capitals.
fig. 12 – Comparison between the italic of Fournier Monotype, Bonesana and Baskerville Monotype.
fig. 13 – The possibilities of figures offered by Bonesana.
fig. 14 – Capitals, smal caps and lower case.
fig. 15 – Ornamented capitals.
fig. 16 – cursive italic in cyrillic.
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