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A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

linyangchen.com

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Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#71

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ilya_m wrote: post #39
GMoromisato wrote: post #37

What I wish for is rather than encoding the wavy imperfections in the font, they should be procedurally generated at rasterization time. This way, the graininess can stay at the same resolution regardless of the font-size. As it is now, if you have a 120pt font, the rough edges are magnified. Is there a way to specify something like that in the font language? Or does the rasterization engine have to implement that?

Anything procedurally generated is antithetical to professional font design. Fonts at different sizes are carefully fine-tuned exactly for the reasons that you mentioned, i.e., small features at larger sizes start looking wrong.

so how do SVG fonts handle this? Or do they?

on edit: asking as you probably have in depth technical knowledge on this it would be nice to get some pointers on.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#72

Post by tylercrompton »

Timwi wrote: post #68

For someone so deeply into typography, they sure seem to have trouble distinguishing a single open quote (‘) from a grave accent (`).

In LaTeX, the open quote is denoted by a grave accent and the close quote is denoted by the apostrophe. Look back at the article and you'll find that the author consistently uses these characters in this manner. Why they didn't get processed to the proper Unicode characters, however, is beyond me.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#73

Post by gdwatson »

gdwatson wrote: post #48
Tainnor wrote: post #34

This font is slightly too messy for me, but I agree that "modern typography" is often too soulless. I'm also hoping for a renaissance of serif fonts - I'm not really buying the narrative that they're not suitable for the web. Not a big typography expert, but one font I like and try to use often, is Baskerville. On the other hand, while I love LaTeX, I absolutely abhor Computer Modern. Maybe it's not the font's fault,…

Computer Modern is okay on paper, but I find it very frustrating to read on screen. I wonder if the Fell types are similar ‐‐ the scan of the thesis, where the letters aren't fit to the pixel grid, looks a lot nicer. I do like Baskerville, but I am a little sad that the only open source version I know of, Libre Baskerville, changes the design so much for the screen. Caslon is in the same boat.

Too late to edit, but I was thinking of the lorem ipsum screenshots when I said the thesis. That'll teach me to reply off the cuff.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#76

Post by zimpenfish »

cperciva wrote: post #43
Tainnor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did spend at least 1-2 weeks at the beginning of my thesis solely tweaking the typography. ;)

Doesn't everyone spend a couple weeks figuring out their latex template?

I spent a good couple of weeks writing some Perl and TeX macros to handle noweb forward-references for my 3rd year Uni project report.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#77

Post by twic »

juujian wrote: post #8
twic wrote: post #4

When I was trying to avoid writing my thesis I just played video games

It's amazing what kind of epic projects a thesis can motivate you to take on (rather than your thesis).

Thinking about it, i suppose what i actually did to avoid working on my thesis (and pay the bills) was get a part-time programming job, and then that job became full-time, and i never finished the thesis. So, in a sense, fifteen years later, i am still procrastinating.

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#78

Post by isametry »

Tainnor wrote: post #34

This font is slightly too messy for me, but I agree that "modern typography" is often too soulless. I'm also hoping for a renaissance of serif fonts - I'm not really buying the narrative that they're not suitable for the web. Not a big typography expert, but one font I like and try to use often, is Baskerville. On the other hand, while I love LaTeX, I absolutely abhor Computer Modern. Maybe it's not the font's fault,…

> I'm not really buying the narrative that they're not suitable for the web.

Good, because from a technical perspective, you don't need to. The legibility argument has been less and less relevant as screen resolutions have gotten good enough to display serifs in a reasonably print-like manner. (Which was arguably around 2010–2014 when Apple normalized “Retina” displays above 200 dpi, but is especially true today, now that the majority of web browsing occurs on mobile devices).

What makes the difference is of course the cultural and branding associations with serif typefaces. But actually thinking about it now, I feel like I've been seeing a lot more serif typography on the web recently, even in modern, tech-related contexts. And looking at the big example of theverge.com with its quirky redesign, I think you might just get your renaissance soon :)

(Related: http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s...)

Re: A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis

#79

Post by adrian_b »

p-e-w wrote: post #59
pgeorgi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under US law, typefaces aren't copyrightable, and even in other copyright regimes, they only get a shorter protection duration. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... for an overview. The digital workaround is to have bytecode in font files that is copyrightable.

Interesting, I didn't know that some countries don't give protection to typefaces. Does that mean that if you take a commercial font file and strip the bytecode, retaining only the glyph shapes, you can do as you wish with the result? And does that mean all bitmap fonts are actually public domain in the US?

Stripping the bytecode may make the font look ugly at low display resolutions, though many modern font rendering programs use various auto-hinting algorithms to alleviate that (which were invented in order to circumvent the patents that could forbid the execution of the bytecode).
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