In typography

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.

Methods and use

The most common methods in Western typography fall under the general technique of emphasis through a change or modification of font: italics, boldface and small caps. Other methods include the alteration of letter case and spacing as well as color and additional graphic marks.

Font styles and variants

The human eye is very receptive to differences in brightness within a text body. One can therefore differentiate between types of emphasis according to whether the emphasis changes the “blackness” of text.
A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on “blackness” is the use of italics

Italic type

In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...

, where the text is written in a script style, or the use of oblique

Oblique type

Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used in the same manner as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except distorted...

, where the vertical orientation of all letters is slanted to the left or right. With one or the other of these techniques (usually only one is available for any typeface), words can be highlighted without making them stand out much from the rest of the text (inconspicuous stressing). Traditionally, this is used for marking passages that have a different context, such as words from foreign languages, book titles, and the like.
By contrast, bold font weight makes text darker than the surrounding text. With this technique, the emphasized text strongly stands out from the rest; it should therefore be used to highlight certain keywords that are important to the subject of the text, for easy visual scanning of text. For example, printed dictionaries often use boldface for their keywords, and the names of entries can conventionally be marked in bold.
Small capitals

Small caps

In typography, small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures...

 are also used for emphasis, especially for the first line of a section, sometimes accompanied by or instead of a drop cap, or for personal names as in bibliographies.
If the text body is typeset in a serif typeface

Serif

In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface . A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”...

, it is also possible to highlight words by setting them in a sans serif face. This practice is often considered archaic in Latin script, but some professional modern font families are designed to come with matching serif and sans-serif variants. In Japanese typography, due to the reduced legibility of heavier Minchō type, the practice remains common.

Capitalization

The house styles of many publishers in the United States use capitalization

Capitalization

Capitalization is writing a word with its first letter as a majuscule and the remaining letters in minuscules . This of course only applies to those writing systems which have a case distinction...

 or all-uppercase letters to emphasise

• chapter
  Chapter (books)
  A chapter is one of the main divisions of a piece of writing of relative length, such as a book. Chapters can be numbered in the case of such writings as law code or they can be titled. For example, the first chapters of some well-known novels are titled:*"The Boy Who Lived" – Harry Potter...
  
   and section headings;
• newspaper headline
  Headline
  The headline is the text at the top of a newspaper article, indicating the nature of the article below it.It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a...
  
  s;
• publication
  Publication
  To publish is to make content available to the public. While specific use of the term may vary among countries, it is usually applied to text, images, or other audio-visual content on any medium, including paper or electronic publishing forms such as websites, e-books, Compact Discs and MP3s...
  
   titles;
• warning
  Warning
  Warning may refer to:- Signal :* Precautionary statement* Warning sign* Warning system* Warning , issued by a police officer in lieu of a citation following a traffic stop- Music :* Warning...
  
   messages;
• word of important meaning.

Capitalization is used much less commonly today by British publishers, and usually only for book titles.

All-uppercase letters are a common form of emphasis where the medium lacks support for boldface, such as old typewriter

Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

s, plain-text email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

, SMS

Short message service

Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...

 and other text-messaging systems.

Letter spacing

In blackletter

Blackletter

Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...

 typesetting and typewriter

Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

 manuscripts, a different means of emphasis is often used. To achieve a variance in blackness, instead of making the letters darker, one would increase the spacing between them. This resulted in an effect reverse to boldface: the emphasized text becomes lighter than its environment.
This letter-spacing is referred to as sperren in German which could be translated as "spacing out": in typesetting with letters of lead, the spacing would be achieved by inserting additional non-printing slices of metal between the types, usually about an eighth of an em wide. On typewriters a full space was used between the letters of an emphasised word and also one before and one after the word.

For blackletter type boldface was not feasible, since the letters were very dark in their standard format, and on (most) typewriters only a single type was available. Although letterspacing was common, sometimes different typefaces (e.g. Schwabacher

Schwabacher

The German word Schwabacher refers to a specific blackletter typeface. The term derives from the town of Schwabach.-Characteristics:The small-letter g and the capital-letter H have particularly distinctive forms.-History:...

 inside Fraktur), underlining or colored, usually red ink were used instead.

Since blackletter type remained in use in German speaking parts of Europe much longer

Antiqua-Fraktur dispute

The Antiqua–Fraktur dispute was a typographical dispute in 19th- and early 20th-century Germany.In most European countries, blackletter typefaces such as the Fraktur were displaced with the creation of the Antiqua typefaces in the 15th and 16th centuries...

 than anywhere else, the custom of letterspacing is sometimes seen as specific to German, although it has been used with other languages, including English. Especially in German, however, this kind of emphasis may also be used within modern type, e.g. where italics already serve another semantic purpose (as in linguistics) and where no further means of emphasis (e.g. small caps) are easily available or feasible.
Its professional use today is very limited in German and spacing is only still used as a means of emphasis in typographic media where only one (monospaced) font is available, e.g. in typewritten communication or on text-only computer terminals.

German orthographic (or rather typographic) rules require that the mandatory blackletter ligatures are retained. That means, ſt, ch, ck, and tz are still stuck together just as the letter ß

ß

In the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...

, whereas optional, additional ligatures like ff and ſi are broken up with a (small) space in between. Other writing systems did not develop such sophisticated rules since spacing was so uncommon therein.

In Cyrillic typography, it also used to be common to emphasize words using letterspaced type. This practice for Cyrillic has become obsolete with the availability of Cyrillic italic and small capital fonts.

Underlining

Professional Western typesetting usually does not employ lines under letters for emphasis within running text, because it is considered too distracting. Underlining is, however, often used with typewriters, in handwriting and with some non-alphabetic scripts. It is also used for secondary emphasis, i.e. marks added by the reader and not the author.

Overlining

In Arabic, it is traditional to emphasize text by drawing a line over the letters.

Punctuation marks

In Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

, emphasis in body text is supposed to be indicated by using an "emphasis mark" (着重號), which is a dot placed under each character to be emphasized. This is still taught in schools, but in practice it is not usually done, probably due to the difficulty of doing this in most computer software. Methods used for emphasis in western texts but inappropriate for Chinese, for example underlining and setting text in artificially slanted type (frequently incorrectly called "italics"), are often used instead.

In Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 texts, when katakana would be inappropriate, emphasis is indicated by "emphasis dots" (圏点 or 傍点) placed above the kanji

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...

 and any accompanying furigana

Furigana

is a Japanese reading aid, consisting of smaller kana, or syllabic characters, printed next to a kanji or other character to indicate its pronunciation. In horizontal text, yokogaki, they are placed above the line of text, while in vertical text, tategaki, they are placed to the right of the line...

 in horizontal writing

Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts

Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts can be oriented in either direction, as they consist mainly of disconnected syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space...

 and to the right in vertical writing

Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts

Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts can be oriented in either direction, as they consist mainly of disconnected syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space...

. Japanese also has an "emphasis line" (傍線) used in a similar manner, but less frequently.

In Korea

Korea

Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...

n texts, a dot is placed above each hangul

Hangul

Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...

 syllable block or hanja

Hanja

Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...

 to be emphasized.

In Armenian

Armenian language

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...

 the շեշտ (šešt) sign is used.

In Western usage, especially on handwritten signs, it is becoming increasingly popular to use quotation mark

Quotation mark

Quotation marks or inverted commas are punctuation marks at the beginning and end of a quotation, direct speech, literal title or name. Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony...

s also for emphasis (as in "“fresh” fish"), although this is still frowned upon by style guides.

Color

Important words in a text may be colored differently to others. For example, many dictionaries use a different color for headword

Headword

A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appear. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position...

s, and some religious texts color the words of deities red. In Ethiopic script, red is used analogously to italics in Latin text.

Post-print emphasis added by a reader is often done with highlighter

Highlighter

A highlighter is a felt-tip pen which is used to draw attention to sections of documents by marking them with a vivid, translucent colour.A typical highlighter is fluorescent yellow, coloured with pyranine.-History:...

s which add a bright background color to usual black text.

Design

With both italics and boldface, the emphasis is correctly achieved by temporarily replacing the current typeface

Typeface

In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

. Professional typographic systems, including most modern computers, would therefore not simply tilt letters to the right to achieve italics (that is instead referred to as slanting or oblique

Oblique type

Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used in the same manner as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except distorted...

), print them twice or darker for boldface, or scale majuscules to the height of middle-chamber minuscules (like x and o) for small-caps, but instead use entirely different typefaces that achieve the effect. The letter ‘w’, for example, looks quite different in italic compared to upright.

As a result, typefaces therefore have to be supplied at least fourfold (with computer systems, usually as four font files): as regular, bold, italic, and bold italic to provide for all combinations. Professional typefaces sometimes offer even more variations for popular fonts, with varying degrees of blackness. Only if such fonts are not available should the effect of italic or boldface be imitated by algorithmically altering the original font.

Recommendations and requirements

Larry Trask

Larry Trask

Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics....

 states: "It is possible to write an entire word or phrase in capital letters in order to emphasize it", but adds that "On the whole, though, it is preferable to express emphasis, not with capital letters, but with italics."

According to North Korea

North Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...

n writing rules, names of leaders 김일성 (Kim Il-sung

Kim Il-sung

Kim Il-sung was a Korean communist politician who led the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of Prime Minister from 1948 to 1972 and President from 1972 to his death...

) and 김정일 (Kim Jong-il

Kim Jong-il

Kim Jong-il, also written as Kim Jong Il, birth name Yuri Irsenovich Kim born 16 February 1941 or 16 February 1942 , is the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea...

) must always be set off in bold.