Hz-program
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hz-program is a typographic composition computer program, created by legendary German typeface designer Hermann Zapf. The goal of this program was "to produce the perfect grey type area without the rivers and holes of too-wide word spacing."
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[edit] History
In a famous essay [1], Zapf explains the history of hz-program as follows:
In 1964 at Harvard University I talked about programmed typography. This was too early in the sixties, and the industry ignored such ideas. The manufacturers of typesetting machines were only interested in computerized production, and not at all in aesthetic questions of typography. In 1970 the University of Texas wanted me to teach computerized typography in Austin, Texas. But in spite of very attractive offers by the administration my wife refused to move to Texas. That was the end of that story. The next invitation was from Alexander Lawson in Rochester, New York. The School of Printing Management and Sciences at RIT, the Rochester Institute of Technology, was the first university in the world to establish, in 1976, a chair for research and development on the basic structures of typographic computer programs. Since 1977 I have been teaching at RIT.
We worked with variable combinations of typographic elements—we called them bricks—as modular units and creative tools. By means of instruction commands these elements could be arranged and rearranged in many variations and combinations for books and magazine layouts. With these pre-programmed units we worked step by step—but always limited by the memory of the computers. At Rochester in the beginning we did not get any help or technical support from the typesetting industry. Every new idea was killed by the costs of programming and by the restrictions of space at that time. I must confess we had a lot of difficulties with coding to simplify the keystrokes. Don’t forget, in the seventies there were no PCs or windowing systems to use. With the late Aaron Burns in New York in 1977 I founded a company to develop programs for ‘Office Communication’, as we called it. Also Herb Lubalin joined in with our crazy ideas. All these first developments had been on a menu basis which allowed a solution to be selected from a list of illustrated examples.
The next big step: in 1984 Steve Jobs with his Macintosh started in a completely new direction. New software was needed, and typographic presentation on the screen could be more varied and easier to handle. The possibility of getting various typefaces without any big investment enlarged the typographic palette very quickly in the following years. More and more quality was wanted, and plenty of computer space was now available and cheap for everybody. Software was offered for all kinds of solutions from many new companies. This was the time forme to begin work again on a high-level typographic computer program. People now took such ideas seriously and not just as the dreams of a perfectionist. What was tailored at RIT in the seventies has been refined in a final version together with URW in Hamburg since 1988. Our goal was to include all the digital developments available.
[edit] How it works
Little is known about the composition algorithm created by Zapf and implemented in hz-program; in the same essay, Zapf explains:
With the hz-program you have optical margin compensation at the left and right sides of text columns. It is a complete aesthetic program for micro-typography with a maximum of two consecutive hyphenated words. Good typography allows us up to three hyphenations. The hz-program automatically finds the best solution. Kerning in roman, and even more so in italic, was the biggest problem for metal type. It was not possible at all on a Linotype machine, and in hand composition it was a hard job if kerned letters did not exist in a font.
How the hz-program works: it is partly based on a typographically acceptable expansion or condensing of letters, called scaling. Connected with this is a kerning program which calculates kerning values at 100 pairs per second. The kerning is not limited only to negative changes of space between two critical characters, but also allows in some cases positive kerning, which means the addition of space.
Hz-program was patented by URW, Hamburg: later it was acquired by Adobe company, to be included as the compositon engine in Adobe InDesign application. It is not known if the hz-program algorithm is still included in latest releases of InDesign.
[edit] Myth
The quality of the text composition produced by hz-program, together with the lack of details of its inner working, created some mythology about it. Zapf greatly contributed to this, claiming to have reached the same level of Gutenberg, in the work cited before [1]:
What we wanted to produce was the perfect grey type area without the rivers and holes of too-wide word spacing.
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But we could get help through the versatility of modern electronics, and through software and formats to achieve a better type area in our productions, so that we get closer to Gutenberg’s standards of quality.
Due to the close relationship between Zapf and Donald Knuth, there are speculations that TEX typesetting systems makes use of a composition engine equivalent (at least in terms of results) to hz-program.
