Typographic approximation


A typographic approximation is a replacement of an element of the writing system with another glyph or glyphs. The replacement may be a nearly homographic character, a digraph, or a character string. An approximation is different from a typographical error in that an approximation is intentional and aims to preserve the visual appearance of the original. The concept of approximation also applies to the World Wide Web and other forms of textual information available via digital media, though usually at the level of characters, not glyphs.
Historically, the main cause of typographic approximation was a low quantity of glyphs available for printing.
In the age of World Wide Web and digital typesetting, especially after the advent of Unicode and enormous amount of computer fonts, typographic approximations are usually caused either by low ability of humans to distinguish and find needed symbols or by inadequate replacement patterns in word processors, rather than by lack of available characters.

Typewriter and line printer approximations

Merger of characters

On typewriter, several characters were merged due to limited size of glyph repertoire. Several modern computing characters appeared by merger of different symbols, such as the "typewriter" apostrophe,, which can denote a proper apostrophe,, a single quotation mark, or the prime symbol.

Non-spacing modifiers

Some typewriters have non-spacing keys for use as diacritical marks. After the typist pushes, say, acute accent ◌́ the caret does not move. This allows the typist to overstrike this mark by a spacing letter, say, e and obtain é, an accented letter. Due to geometrical restrictions of a monospaced font, the result could not always be perfect. For example, overstriking was unlikely to be a feasible method to produce uppercase accented letters, such as É.
Overstrike was used on line printers for the same function. This contributed to standardization of such characters as.
Overstrike of the same letter was used to simulate boldface letters on line printers.

ASCII approximations

The US-ASCII character set and other variants of ISO/IEC 646 contains 95 graphic characters. It is comparable with a typewriter and insufficient for a quality typography. But high availability and robustness of ASCII character encoding prompted computer users to invent ASCII substitutes for various glyphs.
The following ASCII characters are used to approximate certain characters. Note that there are many Latin letters that are homographic to letters of other scripts, however those Latin letters are not listed below.

Approximation of non-glyphs

There exist various approximation for typographic alignment. For example, justification may be emulated with inserting of spaces, and flush-right alignment may be done by padding with spaces.
There are various techniques for approximation of tables, such as box-drawing characters.