History is cruel to typefaces—especially text faces—and very few stand the test of time. For every Caslon or Garamond there are a hundred also-rans left along the road for reasons of taste, economics, or technology. The craving—and craze—for new faces has led to the revival of scores of old metal typefaces, but many deserving faces have been ignored. Here, I’d like to call attention to my top ten candidates for faces that ought to be available in digital form but aren’t. In a future column, I’ll train the same lens on display faces.

The last time I wrote about signage in the developing world (Go on a Type Safari, 4/1/10), I was roasted by some readers for failing to distinguish between setting type and hand lettering.

Certain keyboard shortcuts are universal across programs (and often platforms), and many of these have become second nature, just tripping off our fingers without a thought: Command/Ctrl-s to save, Command/Ctrl-c to copy, or Shift-Command-b (Mac) or Ctrl-b (Windows) to shift between bold and regular-weight faces. But while that automatic finger twitch produces predictable results for the first two of these, toggling into and out of bold can lead you to unexpected places.

It’s normally taken as an article of faith that you should use ligatures in text whenever you can. Like most articles of faith, though, this one too comes with an asterisk. In practice, the importance of ligatures is measured on a sliding scale from mandatory down to undesirable.

How a change in papermaking technology caused a revolution in type design, upsetting some delicate sensibilities in the process.

The appearance of ascending and descending characters is largely an accident of history, but they now define the texture of what we find comfortable and easy to read.