On Setting Valéry in Mincho

The blueprint, in §3.2, makes one of its most contested decisions explicit: Valéry’s French is to be set in Shippori Mincho’s Latin glyph set, not in a French serif and not in Söhne. This note is the longer argument behind that single line.

Why a Japanese face for a French line

Shippori Mincho’s Latin letters were drawn in Japan, by Japanese designers, to harmonize with Mincho strokes. They share brush-derived contrast and weathered hairlines with the kanji forms. Setting Valéry in those letters is the typographic equivalent of Hori Tatsuo’s 1937 translation: French that has passed through the East. The form mirrors the literary history.

The alternative — a French serif like Garamond, or a neutral Swiss face like Söhne — would render the line accurately but rob it of what makes it interesting on this site. The line is not being quoted; it is being received.

The diacritics, at 400 percent zoom

Before any final build, the closing line must be inspected at four hundred percent zoom. The grave on è must align with the cap-height baseline pattern of the rest of the font. The em-spaced ellipsis must use regular periods with hair spaces, not the Unicode ellipsis character — Valéry’s ellipses are temporal, not truncative.

If the diacritics fail inspection, the fallback is Tunera Tenez or GT Sectra Fine. Both have East-influenced weathered contrast. That fallback is a defeat. Document it.