Metagrams
From Hrant H Papazian to the Typo-L Type Design mailing list, 17 February 2002 (via Microsoft Typography)
In evaluating a font, it would be nice to have a good test phrase.
Pangrams (like "The quick brown fox …") are nice, but they tend to sacrifice too much for compactness; a somewhat more elaborate sample text would make evaluation much richer.
So I started thinking about what constitutes a good test phrase, and here are the factors which I think need to be balanced against each other:
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It should be short.
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It should show each letter in the middle of other letters. This is to facilitate evaluation of spacing, noting that by "propagating" the evaluation chances are much better for arriving at a firm conclusion. For example, in the word "major", if the "aj" is loose, you could look at other words that have an "a*" (and so on) to figure out where the problem is. It's not water-tight, but it helps.
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The letters should occur alphabetically (for easy location).
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It shouldn't necessarily have a self-contained coherent meaning, but it should be a "normal" English sentence: using words that occur frequently, and no kinky Egyptian sex, please. But some awkwardness is probably inevitable.
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It should contain some extras like: punctuation, quotes, apostrophe*, hyphen, and some special-case words like "the", "I" and "a"" (the latter two especially helpful in evaluating an italic).
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It should be easy to memorize.
The most frequent words containing an apostrophe are: "don't", "it's", "I'm", "that's", "I'll", "couldn't", "can't", "you're". And I think "I'll"" provides the biggest spacing challenge.
In trying to maximize the "normalness" of the phrase, I talked to my good friend, Linguistics, and compiled the list of the most common English words containing each letter (as a middle letter):
a: that
b: about
c: which
d: made
e: they
f: after
g: through
h: the
i: with
j: major
k: like
l: all
m: some
n: and
o: for
p: people
q: require
r: are
s: these
t: with
u: but
v: have
w: two
x: next
y: system
z: size
Since the more common letters occur in many words, I managed to reduce this list down to 16 words. (BTW, this is where I decided that it should be two sentences - that and wanting to put in more punctuation.) However, in the case of frequent letters, this list was more of a hindrance than a help, and it was more effective to just think of common words myself; but for the less frequent letters, it helped a lot.
So, after a good amount of wrestling, here's what I've ended up with:
Incredibly, he makes a major life-change! For example: "I’ll require that the system have two sizes."
Comments? Improvements? A name for this thing (is "metagram" OK)? Other languages?
hhp