Best Of

Hrant,


Not any more. The environments that ignore hints to advance widths are too many and too pervasive. We lost that ability around the time that sub-pixel rendering with sub-pixel positioning became the dominant model.

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With regard to the design of Spectral, what I'm mostly struck by is that it seems a nice, traditional book face, in terms of its proportions and style. That strikes me as an odd choice in something that is ostensibly designed for online document use. Some of the illustrations of it in use remind me of pre-Calibri/Cambria MS Office documents, and can't help seeming old-fashioned as a result.

[Disclosure: I suggested to Dave Crossland a few years ago developing a suite of fonts for Google Documents, which would have included both serif and sans, as well as a condensed face especially for spreadsheets. Would still like to do it.]

Here is an attempt to make a systematisation of the local forms in Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian compared to Russian (or better say – traditional Cyrillic script). I use the font Vollkorn for the presentation of the local features. Please do notice that in Bulgaria are still used both the modern form of Bulgarian Cyrillic script (shown in Table 1) and the traditional form (which is same as Russian Cyrillic or traditional Cyrillic script).

Table 1


Source: Cyrillic alphabets at WIKIPEDIA


Table 2



Table 3

Please notice that in my oppinion the italic form of Macedonian Cyrillic „г“ (uni0433.loclMKD) is still in a process of standardisation. It is influenced by the Serbian form on one hand and on the other hand it is influenced by the Bulgarian form. But if we look at the italic form of Macedonian Times – a font prepared by Macedonian designers obviously in the early 90th of the 20th century (the font is not in a Unicode standard) – the „г“ is traditional italic with macron above. The same could be said for the Macedonian Cyrillic „б“. According to Lasko Dzurovski the regular form of Macedonian Cyrillic „б“ could have two forms (traditional and Serbian one – see Table 2), but the italic form of Macedonian Cyrillic „б“ could have only one form (which corresponds to the Serbian one – see Table 3).

In the period in question, children in German-speaking countries typically learned two different scripts at school, “Lateinisch” (roundhand) and “Deutsch” (Kurrent, a cursive form of Fraktur). These were used side by side, for different purposes. In a nutshell, Kurrent was the default, while “Lateinisch” was used for foreign languages, loan words, but also proper names and other sorts of emphasis. Unsurprisingly, hybrid forms were quite common.

In this roundhand manuscript, the writer introduces the form of ‘d’ that you describe as oldstyle, and which is associated with Kurrentschrift, as a stylistic alternate. There were no rules for this as with ſ/s. The ‘d’ without downstroke simply lends itself more to being used at the end of words, where it can end in a fancy loop. The form with the stem that returns to the baseline may be more suitable when you want to join a subsequent letter like ‘e’ or ‘i’.

The “stemless d” is not exclusive to Kurrent or Fraktur. It can also be spotted in italics like Cochin’s, among others, and even in Antiqua or Grotesk. It is quite common in German (roundhand) script typefaces from the 1950s, like Paul Zimmermann’s Impuls, Heinrich Pauser’s Petra (1954), G.G. Lange’s Boulevard (1955), Georg Trump’s Time Script (1956), or Helmut Matheis’s Verona (1958). Older examples with this form include Walter Höhnisch’s Skizze (1935), Erich Mollowitz’s Forelle (1936), and Carlos Winkow’s Gong (1945).

Firstly, don't leave all the decision making up to us. It's your design, and it's okay to have some doubts now and then, but whether you like it or not, you will have to make the final calls.

Secondly, in order to make those calls it is vital to look at the letters in context. Try them out in words, see which shapes are harmonious, which are legible, which stand out too much, etc. Then, if you still have doubts, show some samples of words (multiple different words per doubt) here, and see what people think.

Good luck!

Windows PostScript myth: busted! Am I the only one who's heard this tall tale or am I the sole recipient of this bullshit?

Also: I heard that Windows 2.1 vector fonts can be used as effective homeopathic remedies.

This isn't science but...

I think Dafont's popularity has been steady or increasing. I get about 20,000 downloads a day. If I average the number of daily downloads over the last 12 years, it's 13,256. And my fonts are much lower on the charts than they used to be. But I think you're right about web ads.

The number of legitimate (not deliberately pirate) free font sites has decreased. In 2011, I received a C&D and was required to contact every free font site and ask them to remove a certain font. It took a solid 3 weeks. There were hundreds of them. Many of these were a "free font site in a box" that was being sold on eBay based on a mangled site rip of 1001freefonts.com. People who run free fonts sites are often very elusive. So many free fonts sites have broken contact forms or no contact information at all. Folks, be extra careful about trademarks in your font names because cleaning up the mess is no fun.

In 2014, I received another C&D and had to do the same thing all over again. This time it took less than a week to have the font removed from every free font site. I think over a hundred of them had vanished and new ones hadn't popped up to replace them. I suspect those clone sites earned their owners zero dollars.

The number of free font sites who take the latest dafont releases and post them on their own sites has dwindled to around a dozen. Not that long ago, a new Dafont release would spider out to over 50 sites now it's consistently less than 10 sites for the last 3 years.

Libraries.

Hi!
We, at Tipo e, have recently released How To Create Typefaces, originally written in Spanish by Cristóbal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer and José Scaglione, and now translated by Christopher Burke and Patricia Córdoba. 

It is focused on type design only, on the whole process of designing typefaces. 

МДКЭ ДМЭЯIСД GЯЭДТ ДGДIИ

@James Puckett  You're correct, of course, about complexity being something to avoid but you're wrong about what constitutes complexity.  You're also probably wrong about what keeps people from reading EULAs.  

People don't read EULAs because they have a preconceived notion of what legal documents are and that they are hard to read.  Complexity doesn't keep people from reading EULAs because they largely don't get far enough to know if the document really is complex.

Complexity is amorphous clauses about "large volume" use or similar, rules with caveats or exceptions, hard to understand concepts, or disconnected ideas that require memorization.  

A simple request to credit the font designer is superfluous but it doesn't add complexity.  
The problem with complexity is that it is a tool used by crooks and scoundrels to trick people.  Everyone knows this and so even when those of us who mean well allow ourselves to be complex we sow mistrust.  Trust is very important in a negotiation so it's best not to throw it away before one even starts.  Since a lot of the people who read a font EULA are doing so as a first step in a license enforcement settlement the goal of a good EULA should be to make sure that person reads it and doesn't think it's complex and confusing.