Italic type

The name comes from the fact that calligraphy-inspired typefaces were first designed in Italy, to replace documents traditionally written in a handwriting style called chancery hand.

Aldus Manutius and Ludovico Arrighi (both between the 15th and 16th centuries) were the main type designers involved in this process at the time.

[8] Manutius intended his italic type to be used not for emphasis but for the text of small, easily carried editions of popular books (often poetry), replicating the style of handwritten manuscripts of the period.

[11] In 1501, Aldus wrote to his friend Scipio: We have printed, and are now publishing, the Satires of Juvenal and Persius in a very small format, so that they may more conveniently be held in the hand and learned by heart (not to speak of being read) by everyone.Manutius' italic was different in some ways from modern italics, being conceived for the specific use of replicating the layout of contemporary calligraphers like Pomponio Leto and Bartolomeo Sanvito.

The Venetian Senate gave Aldus exclusive right to its use, a patent confirmed by three successive Popes, but it was widely counterfeited as early as 1502.

[14] Griffo, who had left Venice in a business dispute, cut a version for printer Girolamo "Gershom" Soncino, and other copies appeared in Italy and in Lyons.

[8][12] Some printers of Northern Europe used home-made supplements to add characters not used in Italian, or mated it to alternative capitals, including Gothic ones.

"[8][16][17] Chancery italics were introduced around 1524 by Arrighi, a calligrapher and author of a calligraphy textbook who began a career as a printer in Rome, and also by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente of Venice, with imitations rapidly appearing in France by 1528.

[8][24] Particularly influential in the switch to sloped capitals as a general practice was Robert Granjon, a prolific and extremely precise French punchcutter particularly renowned for his skill in cutting italics.

[55] The printing historian and artistic director Stanley Morison was for a time in the inter-war period interested in the oblique type style, which he felt stood out in text less than a true italic and should supersede it.

"[51][c] A few other type designers replicated his approach for a time: Van Krimpen's Romulus and William Addison Dwiggins' Electra were both released with obliques.

[d] Morison's Times New Roman typeface has a very traditional true italic in the style of the late eighteenth century, which he later wryly commented owed "more to Didot than dogma".

[61] Some serif designs primarily intended for headings rather than body text are not provided with an italic, Engravers and some releases of Cooper Black and Baskerville Old Style being common examples of this.

[65] In the 1950s, Gholamhossein Mosahab invented the Iranic font style, a back-slanted italic form to go with the right-to-left direction of the script.

Font families with an upright or near-upright italic only include Jan van Krimpen's Romanée, Eric Gill's Joanna, Martin Majoor's FF Seria and Frederic Goudy's Deepdene.

[68] The Chicago Manual of Style suggests that parentheses and brackets surrounding text that begins and ends in italic or oblique type should also be italicised (as in this example), to avoid problems such as overlapping and unequally spaced characters.

An exception to this rule applies when only one end of the parenthetical is italicised (in which case roman type is preferred, as on the right of this example).

In The Elements of Typographic Style, however, it is argued that, since Italic delimiters are not historically correct, the upright versions should always be used, while paying close attention to kerning.

In Unicode, the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block includes Latin and Greek letters in italics and boldface.

Aldus Manutius ' italic, in a 1501 edition of Virgil . Italic is only used for the lower case and not for capitals. [ 1 ]
Sample of Niccoli's cursive script, which developed into Italic type.
Catherine of Siena , Epistole ("Letters"), published in Venice by Aldo Manuzio in September 1500: [ 6 ] illustrated table in which appear the first words ever printed in italics: iesus , inside the heart in the left hand and iesu dolce iesu amore inside the book in the right hand. [ 7 ]
A page from La Operina by Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi , showing early "chancery italic" typeface
Jan van Krimpen 's Cancelleresca Bastarda , a twentieth-century revival of the chancery italic style.
Example text set in both roman and italic type
The same example text set in oblique type
A common view of when to use italics and bold text. An additional option for emphasis is to use small capitals for a word or name to stand out. [ 31 ] [ 32 ]
Three sans-serif italics. News Gothic , a 1908 grotesque design, has an oblique 'italic', like many designs of the period. Gothic Italic no. 124, an 1890s grotesque, has a crisp true italic resembling Didone serif families of the period. [ 45 ] Seravek , a modern humanist family, has a more informal italic in the style of handwriting.
Straight italic type within normal italics (Latin and Cyrillic)
A 'backslanted' italic fat face typeface, made for display use by the Figgins foundry of London. The typeface is an example of the increasingly attention-grabbing, bold and dramatic fonts becoming popular in British display typography in the early nineteenth century.
4 shapes of Adobe Arabic font (Normal, Italic, Bold, Bold-Italic)
4 shapes of Farsi font (Normal, Iranic, Bold, Bold-Iranic)
Computer Modern 's 'upright italic' font.
Monotype Garamond 's italic replicates the work of 17th-century punchcutter Jean Jannon quite faithfully, with a variable slant on the italic capitals. [ 69 ]