All About Color

Carl Shank • September 5, 2022

All About Color. In modern typography and printing, the use of color, once thought too expensive, is now commonplace. Color laser printers are found in many offices, churches and certainly printer shops. Not many people, however, understand the science of color and how we get colored images and scans to the printed page. So, while I am certainly no expert in color technology, here are a few definitions and pointers in color printing.


DPI vs LPI. Let's start at the beginning. Every laser printer has a DPI, or dots per inch, that it places on a sheet of paper. Many older laser printers are rated at least at 300 DPI, with many more today at 600 DPI and above. What is DPI? Dots Per Inch (DPI) is literally a measurement of the maximum number of dots any printer has access to per inch. The dots reference the unit in which all printers and computers are measured, namely, binary code. As such, each dot is either off or on. These dots make up a grid pattern which can only print in black and white. There are no colors or shades of colors (such as grey). The higher the DPI the "smoother" the print looks to the human eye.


LPI, or Lines per Inch, is a measurement of the number of rounded dots that are in an inch. LPI is also known as a screen, and is given its name because each rounded dot has a centre point that’s created in varying sizes. The LPI is directly related to the DPI which is directly related to resolution. Depending on the resolution, one may acquire a picture that seems ‘grainier’ than others – that is, pixilated. For instance, to get a dot that actually appears round rather than square, or pixilated, one must have a DPI of at least 600. A glossy magazine is usually printed with an LPI of 150; as it relates to DPI, which means that the resolution was 2400 DPI or higher. 53 LPI is typical of an office laser. Newspapers are about 90 LPI.


Halftones. We use halftones to print tints. This uniform field of small dots lets paper show through. The more paper that shows through, the lighter the tint. The bigger the spots, the darker the tint. A halftone is measured in lines per inch (LPI). The more lines per inch, the finer the halftone (See Sample Below). To camouflage the rows of spots, a halftone is printed at an angle. If we printed a black halftone at 0 degrees we would see the rows of dots. So printing at an angle tricks our eyes so that we do not realize we are seeing rows and columns of dots at all. Now we are ready to talk about color.


About Color. Color exists as an effect of light. The white light from say the sun is made up of a rainbow of impulses that our brain interprets as colors. All the colors of the rainbow, when added up, make a white light. They are called primary additive colors. (See "All About Color" below.) Computer monitors use three primary colors —Red, Green and Blue—otherwise know as RGB. Since the colors of objects are really white light minus the waves absorbed by the object, they are called primary subtractive colors, otherwise knows as printing colors, or CMYK colors—Cyan, made up of blue and green, Magenta, made up of blue and red, Yellow, made up of red and green. (See "All About Color" below). The K color is actually Black, usually added to give strength and body to a printed picture or image.


Color separations are used for each of the four process colors by a professional lithographic printer. The final result of a color separation is four sheets of film, one for each of the process colors. The films are then used to create the four plates of a process-color printing press.


Going back to halftone angles. Black, the most visible, is printed at a 45 degree angle, Cyan at a 75 degree angle, Magenta at a 15 degree angle, and Yellow at a 0 degree angle. Four halftones are superimposed on each other. To minimize any interference patterns (called "moirés") the halftones are angled 30 degrees apart, yielding a tight, nondistracting compilation. Technological improvements now create microdots that don't use any angles at all. The spots now fall side by side, not atop one another and fit so neatly together that the viewer is unaware spots even exist in their image or photo.

Read More:  Difference Between DPI and LPI | Difference Between http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-dpi-and-lpi/#ixzz7dy33lfNT. I am indebted to Jan V. White as well for his "Understanding Color Separations." See his book, Color For Impact. Also Mix & Match: Designer's Colors, Quarto Publishing, 1990. Also, credit to John McWade, Before & After, Vol 4, No. 2, 1994.


Successful Layout & Design

Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble?

By Carl Shank • February 12, 2026
Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble? The latest Google estimate of available fonts is over 300,000 and counting. Other estimates have catalogued over 550,000 fonts. There are over 36,000 font families, over 4,000 type designers and over 2,700 professional font foundries, not counting smaller font entrepreneurs like CARE Typography, which provides restored fonts from yesteryear. (Quora source https://www.quora.com/How-many-fonts-are-there-in-existence-Does-any-group-attempt-to-keep-a-record-of-all-the-fonts-that-exist ) There are commercial fonts from sources like Adobe and MyFonts (Monotype) which require payment for their use in various platforms. Both provide a subscription service, which usually requires a substantial monthly or yearly fee to download and use their fonts. When I began using Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, font manufacturers like Adobe and Monotype would “sell” the right to use a number of their fonts for thousands of dollars. And, by the way, you never really “own” the font. You have paid only for the use of the font for a specific purpose or machine. Moreover, the price varies for print use, or web use, or a digital ad use. Even today, the font Trinité Titling by Bram de Does, used in a number of Bibles and biblical studies, costs over $4,000 for the use on a single computer and much more for a number of computer users. Individual users of such fonts are mostly priced out of their budget. Why the seemingly extravagant cost? We had a valve on one of our household plumbing lines go bad. I called the plumber, and he replaced the valve — at a cost of several hundred dollars, while the valve itself cost only a few dollars. Was that fair? Yes, because I was paying for the time and training and effort going into replacing that valve in my house. The same holds true for professional font designers. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in font development. We are paying for their livelihood. Font licenses cover four basic parameters around font usage — “The What: The weight and style of the typeface; The Where: Literally where you’ll use the font – a website, digital ad, or in print; The Who: The number times a font can be installed on a computer (aka the number of people who can use it); The How many: For example, web font licenses describe the number of allotted page views, and app and digital marketing licenses set similar parameters.” (Monotype Report) Companies like Monotype are rarely concerning with an individual using a font for a home, individualized project, but rather an entire design company or printer using that font for commercial gain and advertising dollars. There are fonts available “for personal use only,” prohibiting their use for commercial or money-making projects. There are what have been called “shareware” fonts, fonts with a minimal cost which require attribution of the type designer or provider on projects. Most fonts provide a EULA, or font license, which outlines and determines the legal restrictions and ramifications for their use. What about free fonts? Monotype warns against using unlicensed or what are called “free” fonts for several valid reasons, but, in my opinion, this is an obvious ploy to get the user to buy or subscribe to their font services. One Monotype report cites six issues associated with what are deemed “free” fonts. Free fonts may pop up in similar ads or designs to industry competition, perhaps prompting a lawsuit or cease-and-desist actions. Free fonts often have the inability to scale, add special characters, or even different alphabets. Free fonts have limited creative scope. They may be saddled with malware or software viruses. Poor font design can be a problem with such fonts. A sixth problem with so-called free fonts is that they can be actually “pirated” fonts, copied from legitimately designed fonts. “Aside from branding issues, free fonts also suffer from a whole host of performance issues. Fonts are software files that interact with applications and the operating system on which it’s installed; without the guidance of a skilled font engineer, rendering issues may arise from crashing glyphs, or a lack of proper kerning (the space between glyphs) text in certain scenarios. A free font downloaded from a random website might not support a broad range of languages and or complex scripts (e.g., Japanese or Arabic), or basic diatrics to cover commonly used Latin languages.” (Monotype Report) Monotype maintains that free fonts won’t give a company the individual style it deserves to help it stand out in the marketplace. They also point to the legal ramifications involved with font licensing, not a glamorous subject but one in which company attorneys are hired to examine for possible litigation. Types of Free Fonts There are four sources of free fonts — Open Source fonts with an SIL Open Font License (SEE https://openfontlicense.org ); OS fonts, fonts that come with your operating system and hardware; Subscription add-on fonts that come as an add-on to a subscription service; and, advertised free fonts by independent font designers, such as CARE Typography. Many or most of such free fonts come from freeware, shareware, public domain or demo fonts downloaded or reconstructed from an archive or library, like Internet Archive. Companies such as Website Planet offer free “commercial” fonts, fonts that can be used in business and corporate applications. See https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/. Several cautions, however, are still in order here. First, a font that “looks like” a standard, business font is not the same thing as its “older brother.” An example is Website Planet’s Playfair Display font, both a variable and static font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen licensed under the SIL Open Font License agreement. Yet, this font looks a lot like the standard Bodoni font, created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1767 and revived by Morris Fuller Benton in 1911 under Linotype’s commercial license.

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
Show More