Old-style serif fonts, such as
Garamond, contained two capital Qs: one with a short tail to be used in short words, and another with a long tail to be used in long words.
[17] Some early
metal type fonts included up to 3 different Qs: a short-tailed Q, a long-tailed Q, and a long-tailed Q-u
ligature.
[14] This print tradition was alive and well until the 19th century, when long-tailed Qs fell out of favor: even recreations of classic typefaces such as
Caslon began being distributed with only short Q tails.
[20][14] Not a fan of long-tailed Qs, American typographer
D. B. Updike celebrated their demise in his 1922 book
Printing Types, claiming that Renaissance printers made their Q tails longer and longer simply to "outdo each other".
[14] Latin-language words, which are much more likely than English words to contain "Q" as their first letter, have also been cited as the reason for their existence.
[14] The long-tailed Q had fallen completely out of use with the advent of early
digital typography, as many early digital fonts could not choose different glyphs based on the word that the glyph was in, but it has seen something of a comeback with the advent of
OpenType fonts and
LaTeX, both of which can automatically typeset the long-tailed Q when it is called for and the short-tailed Q when not.
[21][22]
Owing to the allowable variation in the Q, the letter is a very distinctive fea
