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When Fonts Fall

figma.com

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Re: When Fonts Fall

#11

Post by davidbarker »

crazygringo wrote: post #4

Really cool article. But over the past few years/decades, as glyphs have exploded in number, I've been finding myself wanting a totally different system of font definition. I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc. An entire…

Have you looked into Prototypo [1] before?

I was about to suggest you try it, but I just went on the website and it seems it has been sunsetted, which is a shame. It was a very interesting idea — you could create your own fonts by changing sliders which would change all the different features of the font.

I backed their Kickstarter project [2] in 2014, but never really used it after their development builds. I suppose I imagined myself being able to design all these different typefaces, but when I was actually given the ability to, I preferred to stick to ones other people had created.

[1] https://www.prototypo.io/ [2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/prototypoapp/prototypo-...

Re: When Fonts Fall

#12

Post by crazygringo »

Someone wrote: post #8
crazygringo wrote: post #4

Really cool article. But over the past few years/decades, as glyphs have exploded in number, I've been finding myself wanting a totally different system of font definition. I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc. An entire…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern : The most unusual characteristic of Computer Modern, however, is the fact that it is a complete type family designed with Knuth's Metafont system, one of the few typefaces developed in this way. The Computer Modern source files are governed by 62 distinct parameters, controlling the widths and heights of various elements, the presence of serifs or old-style numerals, whe…

Yes -- I think Knuth's work is a great first draft of this.

In my mind, however, the concept is less about providing parameter values (like Computer Modern), but more about actually drawing the parts. In other words it's less about variable/multiple masters, but "here's what the end of a vertical serif looks like at this weight", "here's what a full vertical stem looks like". (Though if you're extrapolating from Latin to Arabic where virtually nothing is in common, then it might be closer to a multiple masters situation.)

Maybe it's too hard to do, I can't be sure. But I've also seen deep neural-network-generated fonts posted here that have intrigued me... and even if it's too hard to simply "assemble" fonts from pieces and get a good result, I can't help but wonder if deep learning applied to 10,000's of typefaces couldn't be a tool in making that happen effectively.

Re: When Fonts Fall

#13

Post by davidbarker »

davidbarker wrote: post #11
crazygringo wrote: post #4

Really cool article. But over the past few years/decades, as glyphs have exploded in number, I've been finding myself wanting a totally different system of font definition. I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc. An entire…

Have you looked into Prototypo [1] before? I was about to suggest you try it, but I just went on the website and it seems it has been sunsetted, which is a shame. It was a very interesting idea — you could create your own fonts by changing sliders which would change all the different features of the font. I backed their Kickstarter project [2] in 2014, but never really used it after their development builds. I suppos…

Also, here's a video from Adobe MAX 2015 where they show off a similar tool (called Project Faces) on an iPad. [1] As far as I know it never actually got released, though…?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcUo9ULvVq4

Re: When Fonts Fall

#16

Post by xfalcox »

At Discourse we generate a default avatar that is a circle with the first letter of the username in a colored background[^1].

When we wanted to add support for Unicode usernames, we had to include support for generating avatar images with those extra possible characters. It was quite fun creating the fallback system this blog post talks about and trying to support as many real languages as possible. The Noto project was really helpful, not only the fonts but also the pythons scripts they provide for dumping the codepoints covered by a font[^2].

You can check the fallback logic at https://github.com/discourse/letter-avatars/blob/master/lib/...

1. https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-html-cs...

2. https://github.com/googlei18n/nototools/blob/master/nototool...

Re: When Fonts Fall

#17

Post by derefr »

> But the internet leaves no room for someone with a pencil.

I've never personally seen it done, but couldn't you do this with the Unicode Private-Use Area? Assuming you have your own blog where you control the CSS, you could sprinkle in a few private-use codepoints, and then add a custom web font to the CSS font fallback that defines glyphs for those same codepoints.

(I know putting a document with Private-Use codepoints up on the public web would go against the philosophy of Unicode; and that the correct thing to do here would be to email the Unicode Consortium about the need for your character. [They'll probably agree!] But, ignoring the philosophy, in practice this would still work. And at least you're not directly confusing machines that try to extract semantics from the text, the way e.g. Wingdings fonts do.)

Re: When Fonts Fall

#18

Post by airstrike »

> font-family: Joanna, Helvetica Now, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Why would someone fallback from a serif font (Joanna) to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif?

Re: When Fonts Fall

#19

Post by wffurr »

uyt wrote: post #15

I'm on ubuntu and see tofus a lot. Is there some way to make it use the same fallbacks mac/windows use? For example stuff in this article doesn't render well for me (see the caption of the image): https://imgur.com/a/aFDSKyG

Could you install the Noto fonts? They are free to download.

Re: When Fonts Fall

#20

Post by TheCoreh »

crazygringo wrote: post #4

Really cool article. But over the past few years/decades, as glyphs have exploded in number, I've been finding myself wanting a totally different system of font definition. I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc. An entire…

Glyphs (the font authoring app for macOS) supports this workflow via their Smart Components feature. [1] The resulting outlines are "baked" when you build the final font, so this is a "compile time" feature, but the principle is the same. With variable fonts, you can get even interpolation between resulting forms "at run time".

[1]: https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/smart-components

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