Minion is a serif typeface released in 1990 by Adobe Systems . Designed by Robert Slimbach , it is inspired by late Renaissance -era type and intended for body text and extended reading. Minion's name comes from the traditional naming system for type sizes, in which minion is between nonpareil and brevier, with the type body 7pt in height. As the historically rooted name indicates, Minion was designed for body text in a classic style, although slightly condensed and with large apertures to increase legibility. Slimbach described the design as having "a simplified structure and moderate proportions." The design is slightly condensed, although Slimbach has said that this was intended not for commercial reasons so much as to achieve a good balance of the size of letters relative to the ascenders and descenders.
33-465: Minion was developed into a large family using sophisticated interpolation or multiple master technology to create a range of weights and optical sizes suitable for different text sizes. This automation of font creation was intended to create a seamless transition of styles from solid, chunky designs for caption-size small print to more graceful and slender designs for headings. It is an early member of what became Adobe's Originals program, which created
66-403: A 'Th' ligature derived from traditional calligraphy . The original release. Minion Black does not have an italic counterpart. Minion Expert is a separate font package that include fonts containing small caps , ligatures, old style figures , and swash glyphs. There are also fonts for dingbats (Minion Ornaments), and a Black-weighted font (Minion Black Expert). Swash fonts are included for only
99-620: A book font, meaning you will not get fired for using Minion ... [but] Minion succeeds so well in being noncontroversially good-looking that I find it sort of dull." The Latin glyphs of Minion are also used in other Adobe font families created to support non-Latin languages, including Adobe Arabic, Adobe Hebrew, Adobe Thai, and Adobe Song. Adobe Song is marketed as a Simplified Chinese font, but it does contain Traditional Chinese and Japanese characters. The Latin characters of Adobe Song are lighter variants of Minion's. Interestingly,
132-455: A clean, neutral book face with a very comprehensive range of features and styles. Slimbach himself has described it as "an exercise in restraint", noting that his other old-style serif designs, Arno and Jenson , are more eccentric. Type designer Matthew Butterick mildly criticised it for being overused: "Minion is beautifully made—it’s balanced, it’s clean, it’s handsome, it’s conservative. It’s easy to like. And it’s been hugely successful as
165-493: A different typeface". Font expert Stephen Coles compared it to Requiem . Designer and calligrapher Paul Shaw suggested that its design represents a different, more "lively" approach to the neutral-looking Minion , and "yet not as loose and carefree as Brioso." In 2011, the American Chemical Society began using Arno Pro for the body text of several of its journals , including the flagship Journal of
198-497: A generic term describing interpolated font design generally, not necessarily using Adobe technology. In 2016, Adobe, Google, Apple and Microsoft announced a new update to the OpenType specification, allowing variable fonts . Similar to the multiple master concept, this will allow custom styles to be generated from a single font file programmatically. Where available, most MM fonts support one or two (and occasionally three) of
231-413: A set of type families primarily for book and print use, many like Minion in a deliberately historical, humanist style. Minion is a very large family of fonts, including Greek, Armenian and Cyrillic alphabets, optical sizes , condensed styles and stylistic alternates such as swash capitals. As a standard font in many of Adobe's programs, it is one of the most popular serif typefaces used in books. One of
264-448: A trend to create an ultra-light or ultra-bold. This idea was not new, having been used by companies such as URW++ , but Adobe hoped to develop the technology to a greater extent. Adobe's goal in multiple master font technology was to allow end-users of fonts to create the exact font they needed for a situation, by adjusting parameters such as boldness or width. However, multiple master fonts proved unpopular in consumer-facing use due to
297-548: Is Adobe Jenson , which supports "weight" and "optical size" axes. This font uses three masters to represent the optical-size axis, designed for 6, 12, and 72 point type, respectively. This allows the common size of 12 points to be optimized, but requires 6 master designs for roman, and another 6 for italic. Current application support for these fonts is sparse, if not entirely absent. However, font design tools such as FontLab and FontForge can edit MM fonts, and can export into other font formats as needed. Adobe Type Manager (ATM)
330-554: Is not a full math font, as such it provides mathematical symbols in the style of Minion but not glyphs for Latin characters. A common setup is to use a TeX package which allows users to set an arbitrary font (in this case, Minion) as a math font, then supplement mathematical symbols from MnSymbol. Although MnSymbol has a packaging as OpenType, it only provides TeX font metrics for math. Multiple master fonts Multiple master fonts (or MM fonts ) are an extension to Adobe Systems ' Type 1 PostScript fonts , now superseded by
363-501: Is a serif type family created by Robert Slimbach at Adobe intended for professional use. The name refers to the river that runs through Florence , a centre of the Italian Renaissance . Arno is an old-style serif font, drawing inspiration from a variety of 15th and 16th century typefaces. Slimbach has described the design as a combination of the period's Aldine and Venetian styles, with italics inspired by
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#1732798069464396-567: Is a multi-purpose type suitable for book design, inspired by the calligraphically-inspired humanistic types of the Italian Renaissance. Slimbach described his goal as giving it "a tangible style" to be "as readable as possible". Arno has received positive reviews. Reviewing the font for Typographica , designer Mark Simonson described it as "nicely sturdy" for body text and highlighted the sophistication of its italic alternate programming, noting that when enabled Arno "almost becomes
429-409: Is not part of Minion. Version 1.026 contains about 3,300 glyphs in each font style; OpenType math features were added in version 1.020. Minion Math had a working title, typoma MnMath . The final form is expected to include all Unicode mathematical symbols and many additional symbols. A math companion to Minion is Achim Blumensath's MnSymbol, typically (but not necessarily) used from TeX . MnSymbol
462-475: Is offered by the program mminstance , which generates standard PostScript fonts from multiple master fonts. These can then be used in any application that is compatible with standard PostScript type 1 fonts. The FreeType font rendering engine also provides rendering support for multiple master (and GX) fonts. The multiple master font format has mostly been superseded by OpenType , which provides more support for different languages and glyphs, but does not offer
495-427: Is required for MM support on Windows and the "Classic" Mac OS (9 and below). Describing why the technology failed, a retrospective by Tamye Riggs, written for Adobe, noted: "Users were forced to generate instances for each variation of a font they wanted to try, resulting in a hard drive littered with font files bearing such arcane names as MinioMM_578 BD 465 CN 11 OP." Prominent Adobe font designer Carol Twombly cited
528-661: The Thesis typeface, developed by Lucas de Groot , de Groot's choice of weights to release was developed using an "interpolation theory". The optical interpolation b , in the three stems a (thinnest), b (interpolation) and c (thickest), is set to the geometric mean of a and c , i.e. b ² = ac (as opposed to the linear arithmetic mean ). All known commercial MM fonts were released by Adobe, unless otherwise specified. While these faces are discontinued, all have since been converted to OpenType standard or "Pro" formats. Arno (typeface) Arno , or Arno Pro ,
561-487: The "Th" ligature by default, while Minion 3 only does so when discretionary ligatures are enabled. Minion 3 comes with 4 optical sizes (Regular, Caption, Subhead, and Display) and 4 weights (Regular, Medium, Semibold, and Bold), each with its respective italic, totaling 32 styles. Similar to Minion Pro, although any of the fonts may be used at any size, the intended point sizes for the designs of this family are: Minion has generally received praise for its effectiveness as
594-418: The 2 lightest font weights. An 'expert set' font is used for older and simpler applications that cannot handle multiple text styles for the same letter (such as both lower-case letters and small caps) in the same font. Slimbach stated, "I saw it as being useful in text applications like newspapers, textbooks, and manuals, as well as signage and titles." Minion Cyrillic was designed in 1992 by Robert Slimbach and
627-656: The American Chemical Society after decades of using Times Roman. A light weight is included only in the display style. Slimbach commented that he felt that using light styles at text sizes would be a mistake because they would be hard to read. It was a winning entry in the Type Directors Club 2007 Type Design Competition (TDC ), under the Type System / Superfamily category. Document design expert Matthew Butterick used Arno in
660-458: The advent of OpenType and, in particular, the introduction of OpenType Font Variations in OpenType 1.8, also called variable fonts . Multiple master fonts contain two or more "masters"—that is, original font styles—and enable a user to interpolate between these masters along a continuous range of "axes." With proper application support, these axes could be adjusted on demand. The intention
693-541: The bukva:raz! 2001 award under the Greek category. A TrueType version of Minion, designed for screen use. It supports ISO-Adobe character set. Version 1.00 of the font was distributed with Internet Explorer 4.0. An updated version of Minion Web, which supports Adobe CE and Adobe Western 2 character sets. A rerelease including Armenian, redesigned Greek characters, full support for International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) , and other modifications. For example, Minion Pro provides
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#1732798069464726-439: The calligraphy and printing of Ludovico degli Arrighi . Arno was released in five optical sizes : separate fonts for different text sizes from captions to headings. In addition, Arno contains alternate letter styles such as swash italics inspired by Renaissance calligraphy. Other supported OpenType features include proportional and tabular numbers, old style figures , subscripts and superscripts, and ordinals. One of
759-495: The difficulty of writing (or rewriting) consumer desktop publishing applications to support them, and because font designers have generally preferred to release fonts in specific weights and styles, as font files that have been individually fine-tuned. However, the multiple master concept remains heavily used at font design studios, allowing designers to generate a range of weights and styles quickly and then optimise them individually. 'Multiple master' may therefore often be seen as
792-535: The following variables: For example, the Myriad multiple master font had two axes: "weight" and "width." This font therefore included four separate "master designs" of each character: light compressed, light extended, bold compressed, and bold extended. Any weight or width font in between these endpoints could be produced by interpolating between the character outlines of these master designs. The addition of italics requires another four master designs. Another example
825-409: The frustrations of the failed project as one of several reasons behind her decision to leave font design around 1999, and Adobe's Christopher Slye would later relate that he had been concerned that Adobe's principal type designer Robert Slimbach had damaged his health struggling to apply multiple master technology to Adobe Jenson in the late 1990s. Free-software support for multiple master fonts
858-480: The main versions of Minion itself (e.g., Minion Pro and Minion 3) do not include any Light weight. Typefaces included in this section are related to Minion, but are not released by Adobe. Minion Math is a mathematical font designed by Johannes Küster from typoma GmbH. It provides Minion with additional glyphs such as mathematical symbols. Minion Math family includes 20 fonts in 4 weights and 5 optical sizes. Minion Math provides an additional optical size 'Tiny', which
891-546: The most complete serif font families ever designed, Arno supports Adobe CE, Adobe Western 2, Cyrillic , mono- and polytonic Greek , Latin Extended and Vietnamese character sets with small caps , as well as dingbat and fleuron characters inspired by early printing. Part of the Adobe Originals programme, Arno is included with Adobe Creative Suite 3, Adobe Font Folio 11 and Adobe Typekit. The font family
924-547: The most famous uses of Minion is The Elements of Typographic Style , Robert Bringhurst 's book about fine printing and page layout. Modern Minion releases are in the OpenType (otf) format, allowing a variety of stylistic alternates such as small caps and ligatures to be encoded in the same font. The original release used additional 'expert set' fonts for these features, and may remain used by designers using more primitive software such as Microsoft Office that has limited OpenType support. Like many Adobe fonts, Minion included
957-401: The unique continuous controls for character shape. Typically the OpenType versions of old multiple master fonts include a selection of the most commonly used combinations of axis positions. Multiple master fonts still serve two purposes: Since in modern multiple master design the norm is to release to the user a curated collection of weights, a key question is which sizes to interpolate to. In
990-633: Was conceived as a non-Latin counterpart to Slimbach’s Minion typeface family. There were no Display-sized fonts, expert fonts, or Black-weighted fonts in this family. The Multi Master version of the original Minion family, released in 1992. Commonly used in Adobe Acrobat to replace unknown fonts. An OpenType version of the Minion Black font, but includes features found in Expert versions of PostScript Minion Black fonts. In addition, character set
1023-508: Was not included. Each font includes the expert glyphs and dingbats that were previously found in Minion Expert package (swashes available in italic fonts only), Cyrillic Glyphs from Minion Cyrillic. In addition, the font family supports Adobe CE, Adobe Western 2, Greek, Latin Extended, Vietnamese character sets. Although any of the fonts may be used at any size, the intended point sizes for the designs of this family are: Minion Pro won
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1056-400: Was that using multiple master fonts, a designer can generate a style of the exact width, thickness and optical size wanted, without losing the integrity or readability of the character glyphs . The effect is similar to morphing , as a designer can choose an intermediate between two styles, for example generating a semibold font by compromising between a bold and regular style, or perhaps extend
1089-493: Was updated to support Adobe Western 2. An OpenType update of the original family, released in 2000. The update is based on Minion MM but features slight changes to the selection of instances and modifications of the font metrics. Minion Pro comes with 4 optical sizes (Regular, Caption, Subhead, and Display), 2 widths (Regular and Condensed), 4 weights (Regular, Medium, Semibold, and Bold), each with its respective italic, totaling 64 styles. The Black weight from Minion Black Expert
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