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What you can get out of a high-quality font

sinja.io

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Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#11

Post by ashton314 »

If you like typography, check out Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/ It's full of good, pragmatic advice on how to make printed and digital documents look wonderful.

I've bought two fonts from him and his font license is easily the most permissive of any paid professional font I've seen: no restrictions on the number of page views or anything, unlike most other pro fonts. Are his fonts open source? No. Are there good open source fonts? Of course. But are his fonts beautiful? You bet. I've got Valkyrie and Concourse. Concourse is particularly flexible when it comes to contextual alternatives and such.

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#12

Post by bloopernova »

Not really related: to get VSCode to support comments, jsdocs, other syntax highlighting features using different fonts, you will probably have to use the extension vscode-custom-css from be5invis: https://github.com/be5invis/vscode-custom-css

Mine is:

  .mtki {
    font-family: 'IosevkaNFM-ExtraLightItalic', monospace !important;
    font-style: italic !important;
    color: #757575 !important;
  }

  .comment {
    font-family: 'IosevkaNFM-ExtraLightItalic', monospace !important;
    font-style: italic !important;
    color: #757575 !important;
  }

  .comment:not(.punctuation) {
    font-family: 'IosevkaNFM-ExtraLightItalic', monospace !important;
    font-style: italic !important;
    color: #757575 !important;
  }
Which looks like the last picture in this comment: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/36512#issuecommen...

Just be prepared to experiment a lot, VSCode's (Electron's?) font handling is buggy.

Why are font features so difficult to support correctly?

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#13

Post by matheusmoreira »

jfdjkfdhjds wrote: post #5
jsheard wrote: post #2

Caveat: Google Fonts, and by extension Fontsource which mostly just mirrors Googles files, strips out nearly all of the advanced OpenType features to reduce the filesize. It's worth checking the upstream version of your font to see which features it actually offers. e.g. Wakamai Fondue lists 11 features for Googles version of Inter (some essential ones plus fractions, tabular numbers, numerators, denominators and con…

it's the year of the lord 2024 and OSes still don't ship with a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode like nerdfonts. shameful. I wish all the effort the big four wasted fighting for emoji supremacy would have been used to normalize a decent set of full unicode fonts once and for all.

Proprietary OS problem. Linux distributions package and distribute all the fonts they're legally allowed to ship. Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories. And they don't strip out features either. I get to customize everything about Fira Code.

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#14

Post by 3836293648 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #7
jfdjkfdhjds wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the year of the lord 2024 and OSes still don't ship with a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode like nerdfonts. shameful. I wish all the effort the big four wasted fighting for emoji supremacy would have been used to normalize a decent set of full unicode fonts once and for all.

Can't expect the big four to use their immeasurable wealth for the common good, now can we? If anyone, then distro creators and maintainers will have to make that step. Google surely enjoys getting so much information due to hapless users loading Googlefonts on websites.

Which is why France's interpretation of the GDPR banned it

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#16

Post by jmcmaster »

creata wrote: post #10
jfdjkfdhjds wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the year of the lord 2024 and OSes still don't ship with a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode like nerdfonts. shameful. I wish all the effort the big four wasted fighting for emoji supremacy would have been used to normalize a decent set of full unicode fonts once and for all.

> a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode I am (clearly) clueless here, but isn't that what Noto's supposed to be?

Noto doesn't ship with OS, and users need multiple fonts for different use cases.

Grandparent comment is saying that Microsoft, Google, Apple could settle on a common set of open licence fonts and bundle them with the OS (and Linux distros / other OSS OSes could also do the same). Then web design & dev could rely on those fonts without having to locally serve them, or embed with Google fonts, etc. Noto could indeed be one of the bundled fonts in this alternate reality.

But no real incentive for any of those big players to do so, and disincentive for Google who gain surveillance data from font embeds as noted elsewhere in thread.

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#18

Post by jsheard »

jmcmaster wrote: post #16
creata wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a common set of open license fonts with most of unicode I am (clearly) clueless here, but isn't that what Noto's supposed to be?

Noto doesn't ship with OS, and users need multiple fonts for different use cases. Grandparent comment is saying that Microsoft, Google, Apple could settle on a common set of open licence fonts and bundle them with the OS (and Linux distros / other OSS OSes could also do the same). Then web design & dev could rely on those fonts without having to locally serve them, or embed with Google fonts, etc. Noto could indeed b…

Although if you're not too picky about the finer details or being perfectly consistent across every platform, the system fonts are generally good enough nowadays to put together a pretty decent stack without having to resort to serving web fonts.

https://github.com/system-fonts/modern-font-stacks

Even if you are using web fonts, those stacks make for good fallbacks.

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#19

Post by TheRealPomax »

The real power of variable axes is that it's not related to weight in the slighted. That's the most obvious use-case, but it's just a mechanism to control "which points in a glyph's outline go where based on what one or more variables are set to", so just using it to change weight is... kinda obvious and boring? Let's kick it up a notch:

https://v-fonts.com/fonts/extendomatic-variable

https://v-fonts.com/fonts/tatras-shaded

https://v-fonts.com/fonts/wavefont

Re: What you can get out of a high-quality font

#20

Post by OlegWock »

CharlesW wrote: post #6
jsheard wrote: post #2

Caveat: Google Fonts, and by extension Fontsource which mostly just mirrors Googles files, strips out nearly all of the advanced OpenType features to reduce the filesize. It's worth checking the upstream version of your font to see which features it actually offers. e.g. Wakamai Fondue lists 11 features for Googles version of Inter (some essential ones plus fractions, tabular numbers, numerators, denominators and con…

Wow. Do you happen to know if that just for API-based usage, or for downloads too? > The Google Fonts API currently does not support requesting the inclusion of optional (also known as discretionary, or opt-in) OpenType Features, such as Stylistic Sets (salt) or Small Caps (smcp, c2sc). Instead the glyphs contained in these features may be published as a separate family… https://googlefonts.github.io/gf-guide/require…

I think that might depend on particular font, but from what I tested, manually downloaded fonts do include OpenType features like smcp or swsh
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