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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

#31

Post by jfdjkfdhjds »

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.

correct. that's why I mention the nerdfonts as the holy grail.

but without the big OSes agreeing on a new unicode, today it's technically impossible to have a single unicode font (see how noto ships 200 variants on linux, all having some 500mb and only differing a few chars from one another. it's a monstrosity)

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

#32

Post by umaar »

I made a video showcasing some advanced techniques to use fonts on the web, without compromising performance. Covers interesting font metrics like ascenders and descenders. Fascinating to see how much information is contained within a font file!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSOIbdOaKR8

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

#36

Post by inferiorhuman »

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…

Apple ships six Noto fonts (non-Latin alphabets) with the current version of MacOS.

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

#37

Post by rob74 »

> Since such numerals line up when typed on multiple lines, they're useful in, well, tabular data: tables, bills, reports, you name it.

Or things like showing a clock, countdown, whatever. A time that "jumps around" on the screen from one second to the next annoys the hell out of me...

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

#38

Post by fsckboy »

adrian_b wrote: post #22
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…

>I find even more useful the old-style numerals

A font of antiquated faſhion doth boaſt moſt excellent and ſubſtantious qualities, yet prithee, what of olde ſtyle figures doſt thou deem hath benefit that I, in mine own diſcretion, might chooſeth?

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

#40

Post by inferiorhuman »

bloopernova wrote: post #12

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: 'IosevkaN…

  Why are font features so difficult to support correctly?
Because the standards are mostly a result of slapping the name "OpenType" on existing behavior. There's maybe three or four ways to encode any given piece of information. The standards are a mess.

You can identify a font as italic in four different places with varying semantics. Off the top of my head, three different places to mark a font as bold (and this may not jive with the weight). Three different ways to specify vector glyphs (five if you include 'COLR' and SVG). Raster glyphs? Do you want PNG, JPEG, TIFF, or raw bytes? Should the raw data be bit or byte aligned?

The result of that complexity is that fonts often have all sorts of conflicting information. Depending on what behavior you're referring to specifically I'd be that the fonts themselves may be to blame. TrueType style glyphs specifically put a lot of burden for getting the hinting right on the font designer. CFF/CFF2 doesn't.

Noto went full Google. Noto Display was abandoned a few years ago. In their own words it's not intended to be what most folks would consider a display font so there's no good replacement. The metadata in last release is all kinds of fucked up.

Names are a hilarious shit show, what constitutes an appropriate name varies from font to font leaving app makers to come up with their own magic and leaving font selection a huge mess. Plus names can be encoded in any number of encodings. Apple still has MacRoman encoded strings in some of their fonts. Is Arial Black the black weight of Arial or a whole new font family?

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