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In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
A means of emphasis that does not have much effect on blackness is the use of italic type, where the text is written in a script style, or oblique type, 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.This technique may also be used to "deemphasise" text, as in the "Concordant Literal (Bible)" (OT, ; NT, ): "The type is large and readable, with boldface representing the actual English translation of the original Hebrew and Greek and lightface showing English words added for idiomatic clarity or to reflect grammatical significance."
Small caps () 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 typesetting in a serif, 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 superfamily, 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 capitalisation are oldest, with bold type and sans-serif typefaces not arriving until the nineteenth century.
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 , 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.
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.Example: Schäfer EA, Canney EL, Tunstall JO. On the rhythm of muscular response to volitional impulses in man. The Journal of Physiology 1886;VII(2):111–117. [2] 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. Jak zaznaczyć emfazę? – PWN
German orthographic (or rather typographic) rules require that the mandatory blackletter ligatures are retained. That means that , ch, ck, and tz are still stuck together just as the letter ß, whereas optional, additional ligatures like ff and 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.Bringhurst: The Elements of Typographic Style, version 3.0, page 32
In Chinese language, 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 texts, a dot is placed above each Hangul syllable block or Hanja to be emphasized.
In Armenian the sign is used.
On and other Internet services, as with , formatted text is not always available. are sometimes used for emphasis (as in "That was *really* bad"). Less commonly, may be used, resembling underlining ("That was _really_ bad"). Full stop 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.
Post-print emphasis added by a reader is often done with which add a bright background color to usual black-on-white text.
Syntax highlighting also makes use of text color.
As a result, typefaces therefore have to be supplied at least fourfold (with computer systems, usually as four font files): as regular, bold, italic, and bold italic to provide for all combinations. Professional typefaces sometimes offer even more variations for popular fonts, with varying degrees of blackness. Only if such fonts are not available should the effect of italic or boldface be imitated by algorithmically altering the original font.
The modern Latin-alphabet system of fonts appearing in two standard weights, with the styles being regular (or "Roman"), italic, bold and bold italic is a relatively recent development, dating to the early twentieth century. Modern "Roman" type was developed around the 1470s, while italic type was developed around 1500 and was commonly used for emphasis by the early 17th century. Bold type did not arrive until the nineteenth century, and at first fonts did not have matching bold weights; instead a generic bold, sometimes a Clarendon or other kind of slab-serif, would be swapped in. In some books printed before bold type existed, emphasis could be shown by switching to blackletter. Some font families intended for professional use in documents such as business reports may also make the bold-style numbers take up the same width as the regular (non-bold) numbers, so a bold-style total lines up below the digits of the sum in regular style.
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