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What you can get out of a high-quality font

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

#21

Post by emchammer »

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.

Wow, is Inter ever a beautiful typeface. A rare find when there seemed to be a glut of corporate NIH typefaces for a while.

macOS used to ship with a beautiful Hebrew typeface that was like the open-source font Shofar, but it seems to have been removed. I do not see similar Hebrew letters in one of the remaining typefaces. I imagine that it is not easy to give a typeface a consistent feel, in all Latin and non-Latin character sets, to the fluent readers of those languages.

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

#22

Post by adrian_b »

airstrike wrote: post #4

Tabular numerals are such a valuable feature. It's a bummer they're not more prevalent.

Tabular numerals are very useful in certain cases, but I find even more useful the old-style numerals.

By default, I always use old-style numerals, because they are much easier to read, especially for big numbers, for the same reason why the lowercase letters are easier to read, by having ascenders and descenders that break the uniformity of the characters.

I use lining numerals only in the same places where I would use uppercase letters, e.g. in titles or when a sentence begins with a number.

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

#25

Post by jsheard »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #19

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/tatra…

Also Recursive (https://www.recursive.design) which has the usual weight and slant axis, with cursive alternates which can be toggled explicitly or used automatically when the slant is strong enough, but also a monospace axis (which allows for semi-monospace) and a "casual" axis which changes the whole character of the font.

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

#26

Post by SkiFire13 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #13
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.

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.

> Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories.

If you have to download/install them separately then it means it doesn't ship with it. The fact that you can install it from the distro repositories means nothing to a third party website that can't assume you have done so.

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

#27

Post by WillAdams »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #15
sdwrj wrote: post #9

Crazy how most fonts don't support any of this... (update: oops, I'm wrong!)

Almost all fonts commonly used today support most if not all of this (except for variable axes, because that's still a relatively new development)

Variable Axes have been around since Adobe Multiple Masters in the mid to early 90s:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091223045132/http://partners.a...

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

#28

Post by jfdjkfdhjds »

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?

first of, currently it is impossible to cover all of unicode because, surprise surprise, we still have page table issues!

the same char in zh, tw, jp, kr might use the same unicode id but have different glyphs.

secondly, yes, but even google fonts strip most things from noto it serves because they want the fine grain data of each site/user is using wink wink.

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

#30

Post by giraffe_lady »

emchammer wrote: post #21
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.

Wow, is Inter ever a beautiful typeface. A rare find when there seemed to be a glut of corporate NIH typefaces for a while. macOS used to ship with a beautiful Hebrew typeface that was like the open-source font Shofar, but it seems to have been removed. I do not see similar Hebrew letters in one of the remaining typefaces. I imagine that it is not easy to give a typeface a consistent feel, in all Latin and non-Latin…

The number of fonts that include even two good alphabets is pretty low. I have run into needing english and greek or cyrillic in the same document. I know of like three good fonts that have a good english and a good greek. My eye isn't as practiced at looking at cyrillic fonts but it seems even rarer for that combination.

Which honestly makes sense and there may not be a solution for. Different alphabets and writing systems have their own typographical histories and conventions. It's reasonable that there is a very limited design space where you're adhering to the conventions of two separate systems as well as maintaining interior consistency.

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