![]() ![]() While the capital letters haven’t changed, the default form of Minion Greek now features a lowercase with reversed stress, which is traditional in Greek handwriting and typography. ![]() Minion 3 addresses the problem using both non-decorative ligatures and contextual alternates, keeping text free from distracting elements that might disrupt the reader. One of the characteristics of the Armenian alphabet is the occasional occurrence of awkward letter pairs where opposing elements overlap or nearly collide, requiring either a ligature or a contextual alternate to correct the situation. It features a number of contextual alternate forms for situations where descenders of adjoining characters tend to collide these have much the same purpose as f-ligatures in Latin. Opticals give it a full range of expression at the largest and the smallest sizes. Slimbach’s humanist Armenian type design flows easily in text passages, and it is also designed to function smoothly as a companion to the Latin. The IPA range rounds out Minion 3’s support for multilingual typesetting. The addition of a reversed-stress Greek supports traditional and classical Greek typography, and revised glyphs and stylistic sets add new refinements to the Cyrillic. The début of a full Armenian type family adds a whole new language and writing system. Minion’s already-robust support for composition in multiple languages and scripts is extended and enhanced in Minion 3. Slimbach actually used six masters in creating Minion 3’s revised optical sizes - a technique that anticipates the flexibility of variable fonts, where appropriate master designs will be able to be used automatically for each size of type. The Subhead and Display designs have more delicate and elegant features and a lighter appearance, so as not to overpower accompanying text. The more robust Caption fonts are designed to maximize the white space in and around the letters for maximum clarity through letterspacing and by enlarging letter counters. Each size range is carefully calibrated to the core Regular text design, which is optimized for reading at normal reading sizes. While not as ideal as a fluid range of sizes, this arrangement allowed the optical sizes to be used within a familiar set of usage guidelines. These ranges correlate directly to the previous multiple master “primary fonts,” which allowed users to quickly access useful optical size instances without having to manually generate them. When Minion Pro was released in 2000, as an OpenType font, specific instances along the optical axis continuum were assigned to point-size ranges: caption, regular, subhead, and display. In the original work for Minion, Slimbach drew a 72-point master, for very large display, and a 6-point master, for very small text, and then used multiple master software to interpolate all the sizes in between. The optical sizes are directly tied to Minion’s initial creation as a multiple master typeface. Minion 3’s Opticals, set at the same apparent size, to demonstrate the subtle size-specific variations in the design. One of Minion’s great strengths is its optical sizes, which originated with the earlier multiple master release, and have been refined in Minion 3 and extended. Optical sizes, multilingual support, and a host of advanced typographic refinements make it possible to fine-tune text and display designs to perfection. While Minion is an effective type choice right out of the box, using only its defaults, the many refinements built into Minion 3 give designers the typographic tools for truly excellent composition. ![]()
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