Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Why is it that some fonts have to have some letters with a descender that are not supposed to have them such as the letter J?
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For what it may be worth, quite a few fonts have descenders on capital letters with the Q and J glyphs being the most common example. You can also find them on the numbers 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9.
Then we have overshoot which is found on such glyphs as the lower case o where the bowl can extend slightly below the baseline.
In other words, Jon, it is a
choice by the font designer and you can find examples that are centuries old. There is no carved on a stone slab commandment saying "Thou shall not have descenders on upper case glyphs".
Personally, I'm not that fond of them since I've run into crashing descenders where the descender overlaps with the ascender of a character in the next line so the fewer descenders the better for making my work easier.