Introduction to English calligraphy

I have a material here, which I don't quite agree with in some places. However, this material is quite rigorous. Send it to you for a look. English Calligraphy Before the invention of typewriters, English was also very particular about calligraphy, which means "beautiful handwriting", and it was also called calligraphy because of the pen that copied for a living. Dostoevsky described it in the third chapter of Idiot: Well, this is an ordinary, ordinary and pure English font, and it can't be written beautifully. It's really clever and exquisite, and the words are brilliant, but it's a variant and French I copied it from a French mobile salesman: it's still in English font, but the black line is a little thicker. Style requires different tastes, but as long as it is well written and well proportioned, it will be unparalleled and even lovable. (1) The evolution of Latin fonts can be divided into six stages in ancient philology: firstly, during the Roman period, the Roman Empire spread Latin to all parts of Europe during its expansion, and the Romanesque style was popular until the 4th century. With the demise of the Western Roman Empire (AD 476), Europe entered the Middle Ages; In the 5th-8th century, with the gradual awakening of national consciousness, characters began to diversify, and many varieties evolved from standard Ansel (semi-Ansel), such as English Insular, German Runes or Futhark, and French Merovingian characters. Spanish visigothic lowercase, etc. This paragraph is called former Caroline; Charlemagne achieved the prosperity of Caroline Dynasty in the 8th century. During this period, Alku invented the famous Caroline lowercase letters, and formally distinguished the case of letters. This beautiful and clear set of words spread rapidly in Europe. Although the kingdom declined rapidly after Charlie's death, this font has been affecting the Renaissance hundreds of years later. The Eastern Frankish Kingdom split from Charlemagne Empire developed into a holy Roman Empire in the 1 1 century, which dominated the situation in Europe. As a result, the Gothic font, a special font used by these Gothic descendants in religious sacrifices, became popular, but this decorative font was not suitable for writing and reading, so many variants appeared, such as Anglicana (because it was widely used in Britain, in the14th century, the Renaissance, which started in Italy, swept Europe, and the humanistic characters adopted by humanists became the mainstream, although the characters based on Caroline lowercase still had some Gothic styles. 1450 After the invention of letterpress printing in Gutenberg, Germany, the old-fashioned black characters were not suitable for this new technology. Italian publishers printed a large number of works with their local popular fonts and became famous for their Italian style. Germany has also absorbed some advantages of humanistic writing, formed a variant of Gothic writing, that is, cursive writing, which is used for printing, and also produced its own handwriting Kurrent in daily writing, and its modern version of German writing is commonly known as "cursive writing"; In modern times, there are many printing fonts, artistic fonts and advertising fonts, such as English round hands for copperplate printing and Suetterlin fonts developed by German designer Suetterlin. Having said so much, in fact, only Italian (Figure 2), fancy and round are often written. This technique, which uses the rotation of the flat-headed pen tip to produce changes in line thickness, is quite different from the writing tradition of Chinese characters (somewhat similar to Jinnong's lacquer book). Because there are only 26 letters, it is very easy to use, but because of the lack of font changes, it often looks dull. At this time, the layout of the composition is particularly important. Finally, several websites are introduced: IAMPETH, the website of the International English Calligraphy Federation, which provides a series of free resources such as many members' works, scanned PDF books, online courses and even demonstration videos, which is very helpful. In addition, English Handwriting in Cambridge 1500- 1700: An online course provides an older material and provides a glimpse of English in that year. For the study of Italian style, you can refer to "Opina" by Arrighi,16th century pamphlet, which provides an excellent model and is distributed free of charge. Note: This paper refers to Kenny Kan's Origin and Development of Latin Fonts in the 2nd issue of Packaging and Design in 2004.