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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

#71

Post by aikinai »

idoubtit wrote: post #47
twic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like tabular numerals. But you really need a small set of other glyphs to be tabular to really make them work. In particular, you need the plus and minus signs to be the same width, so that in a table like: gold +1.2% oil -6.4% corn +5.2% everything lines up and looks nice. At the moment, with CSS, there's no way to make that happen, and in normal typefaces the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus…

> the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus signs with a wider dash, but that is semantically wrong and also a pain in the arse. In this case, an alternative to "-", U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, is "−", U+2212 MINUS SIGN. On Linux, I considered mapping the keypad substract key to it, but instead I configured a xcompose alias. gold +1.2% oil −6.4% corn +5.2%

It vexes me that almost no one uses the real minus sign. But you also can't blame them since it's never been made readily-available. So you really have to be pedantic and spend time going to get it if you want to use it.

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

#72

Post by omnimus »

wseqyrku wrote: post #63

Fascinating that it's just now that someone got curious about this enough to write a post. I know if you looked for it you'd probably find this stuff but it is definitely scarce IMO. Thing is, not enough developers and designers that worked on this for many years bother to blog about it perhaps for reasonable reasons but still.

Hate to break it to you but there are whole conferences, 100s books and indeed websites about this stuff. https://www.typewolf.com/resources Maybe it might seem like nobody is talking about this but if you are designer/student you know about this

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

#73

Post by omnimus »

ashton314 wrote: post #11

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…

Swiss typefaces https://www.swisstypefaces.com/ have similar licensing and are one of the highest quality foundries period

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

#75

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

twic wrote: post #41
airstrike wrote: post #4

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

I like tabular numerals. But you really need a small set of other glyphs to be tabular to really make them work. In particular, you need the plus and minus signs to be the same width, so that in a table like: gold +1.2% oil -6.4% corn +5.2% everything lines up and looks nice. At the moment, with CSS, there's no way to make that happen, and in normal typefaces the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus…

The easiest solution is to make a custom font with all the glyphs you want to be tabularized given the same advance width. Then you aren't subject to the vagaries of getting advanced font rendering to work.

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

#76

Post by inferiorhuman »

system2 wrote: post #60
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does font type influence SEO and speed!?

Loading a font can cause multiple things including load time delay. For example, connecting to Google and downloading a Lato font is around 4-5 requests + js + CSS files + 500kb added download. Processing the font itself also is at least 500ms to a second depending on the device type. We keep the total requests under 25, which cannot be done after multiple 3rd party fonts are added. Additionally, some fonts can intro…

  Processing the font itself also is at least 500ms to a second
  depending on the device type.
I think that's off by quite a lot.

On my MacBook Pro I can dump one of the Helvetica Neue faces in one second with ttx (fonttools). If a python script can parse a font, create an XML representation, and write a pretty printed version of that to disk in a second then yea 500 ms seems really slow.

Hell, typst (rust) can render a PDF with two subsetted fonts (Apple Color Emoji + Cambria Math) in about 750 ms. I certainly hope Harfbuzz is at least that fast.

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

#80

Post by tiltowait »

aikinai wrote: post #71
idoubtit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus signs with a wider dash, but that is semantically wrong and also a pain in the arse. In this case, an alternative to "-", U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, is "−", U+2212 MINUS SIGN. On Linux, I considered mapping the keypad substract key to it, but instead I configured a xcompose alias. gold +1.2% oil −6.4% corn +5.2%

It vexes me that almost no one uses the real minus sign. But you also can't blame them since it's never been made readily-available. So you really have to be pedantic and spend time going to get it if you want to use it.

Most people aren't even aware there's a "real" (or rather, fake) minus sign. I didn't know until reading this thread. The hyphen is right next to the +/= key, so it's not unreasonable at all to think the _/- key is minus.
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