Design
admin June 14th, 2007
So, the snark is great in theory, and you like the idea of making the written word work for you. But the font you want doesn’t have a built in snark! Here are five ways to make add a snark to your punctuation. The first methods are quite simple and are intended for casual users, hobby typographers and punctuation enthusiasts. Following this are more advanced methods, targeted at typographers, type designers and developers. If you want the most well designed and easily accessed snark, you may need to contact your font vendor or designer.
Type Users
- Making a basic snark (simple)
- Setting a more evolved snark in design software (moderate)
Developers
- Kerning the components to create a better basic snark (moderate)
- Designing the snark as its own ligature (advanced)
- Encoding the snark in a font (advanced)
- Adding the snark to an OpenType font (advanced)
1. Making a basic snark (top)
A snark is very simple. At the end of the sentence where you want to finish with the mark, add a ~ (tilde) after the . (period).
2. Setting a more evolved snark in design software (top)
After typing a snark, you can adjust the spacing in many applications to overlap the parts of the snark and even give them a little room to breath. In the first example, using Adobe Photoshop, the period was selected and adjusted to a tracking of -200, and the ‘g’ was adjusted +50. To achieve the same effect in Microsoft Word, you expand and condense spacing similarly, from the Format>Font>Character Spacing tab. Many applications offer similar methods to alter the spacing of the glyphs. Although this can quickly become tedious it is an effective way to make the snark behave more consistently with the flow of text.
Additionally, some applications allow a scaling of the width of the characters in a document. The Snark Organization generally reccomends that a snark’s swash be slightly narrower (75-80% width) than a standard ASCII Tilde symbol, and this can be simulated closely with character scaling. Discretion must be used, as some tildes do not take the squeezing well, and some fonts look better without it.
1. Kerning the components to create a better basic snark (top)
Perhaps the easiest way to “create” a snark capable font is to add a kerning pair to the font’s existing set of kerning information. By doing this the font itself stores exactly where to place the tilde in relation to the period.
The disadvantages of this method is a developer would probably not want a negative kerning greater than the with of the period and the snark may appear too close to the preceding character. And naturally, since there are new new glyphs created, the designer is limited in what the snark can look like.
Adding a new manual kerning pair is a relatively trivial task with FontLab or FontCreator, which both include sliders to make it a very visual process. If further details on this method are required, please comment below.
2. Designing the snark as its own ligature (top)
The fun one! There is no other punctuation mark that offers the opportunities of the snark. While a dot-tilde may function well enough to get the meaning across, the field is wide open for innovation and impressing your own visual style upon the young mark. Unlike the EU’s attempt to dictate the exact metrics of the Euro, for example, The Snark Organization encourages customizing the snark to suit the typeface. There are a few suggested guidelines to take as a starting point, but as many possibilities as there are fonts. There can even be more than one style in the same font.
The same typeface: one approach,
and another.
The exact mechanics of designing a new glyph is beyond the scope the scope of thesnark.org, and varies from application to application. If you are unfamiliar with creating glyphs already, you may want to seek a professional to add the design to your font. Commonly the original designers or vendors of typefaces have retained the right to do so themselves, and may perform such for little, if any fee. Even if you are licensed to do so yourself, who would better than the original architect of the letters to update the font? Send them here if they need to learn more!
Design Specification: Snark (to link)
3. Encoding the snark in a font (top)
Now that you have created a snark, what to do with it? There must be a way for people to reach it. If it is encoded in the Unicode Private Use Area, then it won’t get in the way of any official characters. People can select it from a character-picker application and past it in to documents where they want to use it.
While you have the discretion to name a character virtually anything, and to encode it where you like, this can make it difficult to work with others, or even find your own glyphs in a large list. The snark organization has two recommendations that should make it easy for developers to work, share scripts and communicate about the snark.
Glyph Name: snark
PUA Codepoint: #E2D2
4. Adding the snark to an OpenType font (top)
So you kerned the tilde closer to the period, and that was great. Then, you decided the snark need a little tuning to really look right? Now you have drawn, scanned, and redrawn with curves the perfect snark for your font. It cuts and pastes perfectly into your documents, but that is not anywhere near as convenient. What are you to do?
If you design typeface or develop fonts, you have very likely heard of OpenType. It is a popular format for fonts that allows you to include many refined typographic features. One of the things OpenType does best is glyph substitutions, like replacing ‘f’ and ‘i’ with a nice ‘fi’ ligature. This can be used many different ways to make adding the snark painless for the end use of a font. Some parts of the OpenType specification are very broadly supported by “high-end” desktop publishing software like Quark and InDesign, as well as other graphic and typesetting programs. Another strength of OpenType is the ability to have the same font behave differently for different languages.
The most sensible way to add an OpenType powered snark is to make it appear whenever a period is followed immediately by either the ASCII tilde symbol or a diacritical tilde. This way, the period+tilde is stored in the original “text” behind what the user sees, for easy editing later or machine reading. Since period+tilde is an unusual pairing in virtually every language, this is easily contained in the default set of OpenType behaviors. Should a language later define it’s own alternative form of the snark, it could later be included, and referenced by the OpenType language tags.
There are two features that are well-suited to containing a snark substitution:
default ligatures <liga> and discretionary ligatures <dlig>.
The Snark Organization encourages broad adoption of the snark, and therefore wants to make it as intuitive and acceptable to all types of punctuation users, casual and professional. We therefore recommend using the Discretionary Ligature feature for adding OpenType snarks. We want to affirm that the “plain” dot-tilde approach creates an equally valid snark. Also, we are aware that there is a community of users with very specific, finite expectations of what is to be included in the default ligatures. Discretionary ligatures are nearly equally available to most users, and allow more control.
Fancier snarks
These may included as stylistic alternates, or in stylistic sets. They should be added as alternates to the original snark, not to the period or tilde, to maintain data coherence.
