Why don’t catchword fonts include indefinite articles?

Question

I’m currently browsing through a plethora of catchword fonts¹, trying to find a good fit for the title on a book cover.

Most of these catchword fonts contain many of the same words—some only in English, some also in other languages—but as far as I can tell so far, there is one thing that they all, with only one exception so far, have in common: no indefinite articles.

All of them contain the definite article the (as well as le/la/les if they include French, der/die/das/dem/den if they include German, etc.), but only a single one contains a or an (or its equivalent in other languages).

Though there’s much overlap, there’s also a fair bit of variation in which words are included, so it seems like more than just pure coincidence that this particular word—the fifth- or sixth-most common word in the language—should be completely absent from pretty much all catchword fonts. In the type of situation where you’d want to use a stylised catchword to write the or of, it seems highly probably that you would want to do the same with a(n).

Is there some specific reason that I just cannot grasp for omitting a(n) in particular from catchword fonts?

 

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^{1 Fonts which have special, predesigned glyphs that represent common short words like ‘the’, ‘for’, ‘of’, etc., usually with some kind of visual border or similar effects, especially made for use in logos, titles, and such things.}

Answer 1

There is no definitive answer to your question, but one line of reasoning on behalf of the type designer is that catchwords usually shorten a string of text. When a “and” is designed to sit within two arbitrary words it allows for making a shorter headline or word mark or catch phrase. A reason short words like “a” or “an” being absent could be the perception that they do not shorten but instead bloat up the text and thus their use and designing for that use does not come intuitively.

To further underline this reasoning look at how many fonts have a Numero or Female and Masculine ordinals, all of which shorten the text and are abbreviations found in handwritten language.

Answer 2

The catchwords, in addition to having a decorative function, they have a practical origin as described in this answer.

At the time of the manual typesetting, the characters were placed on a line, one by one and the other way around, following the order of reading. This tedious process forced to create new methods of composition to accelerate the process. This is how the linotype, monotype, and much later photocomposition arose until our days.

But while the system was only to use metallic mobile types and placed manually one by one, some homemade inventions arose.

In 1775 a metal type founder named Barletti has the idea of ​​fusing more than one character into the same metal piece, looking the ease of connection between shapes or the greater number of times a group of characters were used.

Such is the case of the double "f", or the syllable "fi", or the union of "st".

To this new metal type that contains more than one character, Barletti gives it the name of logotype (from Greek logos: word) or polytype. These polytypes eventually give way to special types with the initials of the companies or trademarks and short words used very often.

If this whole process was used to achieve something totally functional, such as speeding up the process of manual typesetting, it makes no sense to create a special metal type for a single character that already exist, such as the case of the neutral article a or for short words with infrequent use.

Currently the meaning of a catchword is totally different from a metal type, so neutral articles can be added as a special design. But I think that would not be a catchword but an alternate glyph.

Perhaps the font designers follow the characters pattern of a designed font and it may not have alternate glyphs but just the traditional catchwords.