Swash (typography)

A swash is a typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph. The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi's La Operina, which is dated 1522. As with italic type in general, they were inspired by the conventions of period handwriting. Arrighini's designs influenced designers in Italy and particularly in France.

Typefaces with swashes

Most typefaces with swashes are serif fonts, among which (if present) they are often found solely in italics. Advanced digital fonts often supply two italic designs: one with swashes and a more restrained standard italic.

Among old-style typefaces, some releases of Caslon, such as Adobe Caslon, and Garamond, including Adobe Garamond Pro and EB Garamond, have swash designs. Old-style typefaces which include swashes but do not follow a specific historical model include Minion by Robert Slimbach and Nexus by Martin Majoor.

Swash

Swash, in geography, is known as a turbulent layer of water that washes up on the beach after an incoming wave has broken. The swash action can move beach materials up and down the beach, which results in the cross-shore sediment exchange. The time-scale of swash motion varies from seconds to minutes depending on the type of beach (see Figure 1 for beach types). Greater swash generally occurs on flatter beaches. The swash motion plays the primary role in the formation of morphological features and their changes in the swash zone. The swash action also plays an important role as one of the instantaneous processes in wider coastal morphodynamics.

There are two approaches that describe swash motions: (1) swash resulting from the collapse of high-frequency bores (f>0.05 Hz) on the beachface; and (2) swash characterised by standing, low-frequency (f<0.05 Hz) motions. Which type of swash motion prevails is dependent on the wave conditions and the beach morphology and this can be predicted by calculating the surf similarity parameter εb (Guza & Inman 1975)