Emphasis (typography)

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." Therefore, one can differentiate between types of emphasis according to whether the emphasis changes the "blackness" of text, sometimes referred to as typographic color.

A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on blackness is the use of italics, where the text is written in a script style, or oblique, where the vertical orientation of each letter of the text 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). This is used for marking passages that have a different context, such as book titles, words from foreign languages, or internal dialogue. For multiple, nested levels of emphasis, the font is usually alternated back to (upright) roman script, or quotation marks are used instead, although some font families provide upright italics for a third visually distinct appearance.

By contrast, a bold font weight makes letters of a text thicker than the surrounding text. Bold strongly stands out from regular text, and is often used to highlight keywords important to the text's content. For example, printed dictionaries often use boldface for their keywords, and the names of entries can conventionally be marked in bold.

Small capitals (thus) 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, it is also possible to highlight words by setting them in a sans serif face. This practice is often considered archaic in Latin script, and on computers is complicated since fonts are no longer issued by foundries with a standard baseline, so switching font may distort line spacing. It is still possible using some font superfamilies, which come with matching serif and sans-serif variants, though these are not generally supplied with modern computers as system fonts. In Japanese typography, due to the reduced legibility of heavier Minchō type, the practice remains common.

Of these methods, italics, small capitals and capitalization are oldest, with bold type and sans-serif typefaces not arriving until the nineteenth century.

Capitalization

The house styles of many publishers in the United States use all caps text for:

• chapter and section headings;
• newspaper headlines;
• publication titles;
• warning messages; and
• words of important meaning.

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

All-uppercase letters are a common substitute form of emphasis where the medium lacks support for boldface, such as old typewriters, plain-text email, SMS and other text-messaging systems.

Socially, the use of all-caps text in Roman languages has become an indicator of shouting when quoting speech. It was also often used in the past by American lawyers to flag important points in a legal text. Coinciding with the era of typewriter use, the practice became unnecessary with the advent of computerized text formatting, although it is still found on occasion in documents created by older lawyers.

Letter-spacing

Another means of emphasis is to increase the spacing between the letters, rather than making them darker, but still achieving a distinction in blackness. This results in an effect reverse to boldface: the emphasized text becomes lighter than its environment. This is often used in blackletter typesetting and typewriter manuscripts, but by no means restricted to those situations.

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 emphasized word and also one before and one after the word.

For black letter 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 letter-spacing was common, sometimes different typefaces (e.g. Schwabacher 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 than anywhere else, the custom of letter-spacing 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. This use of spacing is also traditionally found in Polish.

German orthographic (or rather typographic) rules require that the mandatory blackletter ligatures are retained. That means that ſt, ch, ck, and tz are still stuck together just as the letter ß, 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 letter-spaced type. This practice for Cyrillic has become obsolete with the availability of Cyrillic italic and small capital fonts.

Rotation

In Devanagari typography, letters may be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, which breaks up the shirorekha.

Shirorekha styling

In Devanagari typography, the shirorekha (horizontal line that connects letters into words) may be styled heavier, shaped into a wavy line, or doubled.

Underlining

Professional Western typesetting usually does not employ lines under letters for emphasis within running text. In proofreading, underlining (or underscoring) is a convention that says "set this text in italic type", traditionally used on manuscript or typescript as an instruction to the printer. Its use to add emphasis in modern documents is a deprecated practice. In web pages, hyperlinks are often displayed with underlines – to identify them as such rather than to emphasize them. Underlining is also used for secondary emphasis, i.e. marks added to a printed text by the reader.

Overlining

In Arabic, it is traditional to emphasize text by drawing a line over the letters. This is seen in the Quran, where the word at which Sujud Tilawa is performed is overlined.

Punctuation marks

Sometimes quotation marks are used for emphasis. However, this clashes with the general understanding of how the marks are properly used, particularly scare quotes, and can leave the reader with a different impression than intended.

In Chinese, emphasis in body text is supposed to be indicated by using an "emphasis mark" (着重號／着重号), 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 using most computer software. Consequently, methods used for emphasis in Western text are often used instead, even though they are considered inappropriate for Chinese (for example, the use of underlining or setting text in oblique type).

In Japanese texts, when katakana would be inappropriate, emphasis is indicated by "emphasis dots" (圏点 or 傍点) placed above the kanji and any accompanying furigana in horizontal writing and to the right in vertical writing. Japanese also has an "emphasis line" (傍線) used in a similar manner, but less frequently.

In Korean texts, a dot is placed above each Hangul syllable block or Hanja to be emphasized.

In Armenian the շեշտ (šešt) sign ( ՛ ) is used.

On websites and other Internet services, as with typewriters, rich text is not always available. Asterisks are sometimes used for emphasis (as in "That was *really* bad"). Less commonly, underscores may be used, resembling underlining ("That was _really_ bad"). Periods can be used between words (as in "That. was. really. bad.") to emphasize whole sentences, mimicking when somebody slows down their speech for impact. In some cases, the engine behind the text area being parsed will render the text and the asterisks in bold automatically after the text is submitted. Markdown is a common formalization of this concept.

Color

Colors are important for emphasizing. Important words in a text may be colored differently from others. For example, many dictionaries use a different color for headwords, and some religious texts color the words of deities red, commonly referred to as rubric. In Ethiopic script, red is used analogously to italics in Latin text.

Post-print emphasis added by a reader is often done with highlighters which add a bright background color to usual black-on-white text.

Syntax highlighting also makes use of text color. In medieval manuscripts, the practise of writing important text in red ink is called rubrication.