121–130 of 139 posts
For a version of the Fell fonts that is variable with cleaner shapes, see Elstob, https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/ You can play with the sliders and it is easy to get the same spacing effect as what the article talks about.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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?
This is exactly what I miss about modern computer-typeset sheet music. There's a lovely organicness to the very slightly splotchy noteheads etc. in old sheet music, and modern scores feel very antiseptic to me by comparison.
I tried a similar approach but via CSS for my "medieval content farm" ( https://tidings.potato.horse ), but for perf. reasons ended up only randomising the opacity and tint of its individual characters and removed the transforms. My next step is to add those little padded areas hiding the empty spaces on the right side of the text[1][2], so the column of the text feels neater (horror vacui was a big thing then it see…
If you haven't yet, you should play Pentiment. It's set in the early 1500s as the printing press is spreading across Europe, and each character's dialog text reflects how they would write (or print, for the people who operate presses). The text rendering is truly beautifully done, the ink dries a few moments after the text is written out and everything. I've been hoping for a technical blog on their text rendering te…
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If you haven't yet, you should play Pentiment. It's set in the early 1500s as the printing press is spreading across Europe, and each character's dialog text reflects how they would write (or print, for the people who operate presses). The text rendering is truly beautifully done, the ink dries a few moments after the text is written out and everything. I've been hoping for a technical blog on their text rendering te…
There is a post about their font design actually. It's by Lettermatic, the font design house that helped them with the game. https://lettermatic.com/custom/pentiment
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.
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Thanks for the recommendation!
You're welcome. If you liked that one, go up a level in the github link and check out the other fonts, especially Junicode.
The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe. See https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').") Also, Founder's Caslon is commercially…
That really stuck out to me too. Given the author's care with other things and the fact that the quote marks in the dissertation itself look fine, I assume it's just an unfortunate accidental error and not the result of ignorance.
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Probably the majority of the software I use to write code is open source, but font authors will routinely ask for exorbitant amounts for a license, they often refuse to charge a flat fee, insisting that they get a higher cut if your app has a certain number of users. Just because an app is popular, doesn't mean it's raking in the dough to spend six figures on a font license. It's just bizarre that I can build an app…
It's more comparable to illustration or photography, or even to a written body of html or js, than it is to the programming language. It's the output of an applied specialist technician for a specific purpose. So similar to those other things you can find a free or cheap generic off-the-shelf one that suits your use, open source fonts exist. Or you can pay for a specific one that suits it better. Font design is a dom…
Yeah again I can download about a few hundred thousand open source tools like ffmpeg, git, Linux, Chromium, web servers, databases, queues, web libs, etc and almost always the best stuff is open source. Almost never is there some kind of per user fee just for copying code, and if it is, almost nobody is using it.
It's not shitty for me to call out greedy excessive licensing practices.