Hey all, just an observation, I was wondering if anyone had some insight.
It seems to me that fonts advertised as having lots of alternate glyphs (usually script fonts) only come with one set of numerals, so if I am setting some text with the number 484 both 4's would be identical.
Is my observation correct? If yes, is there a common reason?
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Anyway, good question. Are there any script type drawers here? Some script designs use letter (and letter pair) frequency to target the most important characters to create alternates for. In theory, number frequency is random, making it impossible to prioritize or target key characters. I'm curious what the actual frequency of numbers and number pairs is IRL though, has anyone crunched that?
That leaves random alternates, words, roman numbers, OS figs and other vertical options, and diagonals, as well as hybrids. Sign painting shows lots of this.
And of course, as “smart quotes” have demonstrated, it’s dysfunctional to have single right quote and apostrophe sharing the same Unicode point.
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typodermic/chickweed/regular/glyphs.html
I think I got the idea for positive kerning quotes from you, Nick. I've been doing it to all my fonts for years. I even went back and posikerned quotes in my old fonts. I don't add a lot of space; just enough so readers can differentiate the single from the double quote - break up the cluster.
Perhaps one could make them language-specific in the feature.
To bring this discussion back to alternate figures; the coding I did for FF Fontesque made do with only one alternate, on the principle that there are almost no words in which a letter repeats thrice consecutively (a few oddities in German, IIRC). However, that doesn’t apply to figures, you really need at least four sets. But that means you have to have four of every character for the random effect to work…
I’d have to look back through my notes to remember exactly how I did it.
I find, with fonts that are supposed to look hand drawn, seeing a sequence of identical glyphs is visually jarring. If you just want to make hand drawn letters look natural, then 3 variations is the key.
With 2 glyph variations, the pattern is slightly noticeable in a sequence of 3 repeating glyphs and a bit obvious in a sequence of 4. If you have 3 variations, you can go with a longer set before the pattern jumps out at the reader.
Even if you have 5 glyphs in a row, the reader probably won't pick up on the pattern unless they're looking for it.
In other words:
12121=a bit obvious. An easily detectable "wave" appears.
12312=probably good enough. The sequence doesn't repeat in it's entirety and it doesn't jump out at the reader.
12341=slightly better than good enough.
If someone's really looking for the pattern, they can see it but, to me, what matters is that the pattern isn't visually distracting to the reader. I can't see a justification for the 4th variation unless it's an effect when the repeats are really, really obvious - like maybe a ransom note font. I doubt that there are enough situations with more than 5 identical glyphs in a row to justify the extra work and font bloat. I'm not setting out to fool forensics - just to make a font more visually pleasing.
Here is a nice article about a slightly more sophisticated application of the principle:
http://fontfeed.com/archives/new-fontfonts-ff-dupers-letter-carousel-turns-larger-rounds/
http://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/features-part-3-advanced-contextual-alternates
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* Creating these classes involved actually randomising a list of context glyph names, then cutting the list into blocks and creating a number of classes with names like x.random1, x.random2, etc., which are then used in GSUB context statements.
The first part creates the “121212…” toggle sequence, and the second part deals with proximity situations where both “1”s are the same character.
With this system, (barring three-in-a-row characters such as figures) glyphs don’t repeat with fewer than three other glyphs between them.
I calculate that puts enough distance between the glyphs—in terms of viewing arc degrees—to remove the duplication from a single fixation in the fovea, making it imperceptible to immersive reading.
The technique is partly explained in this article, in the section about Fontesque:
http://ilovetypography.com/2011/04/01/engaging-contextuality/
Really?
As I understand the workings of the brain, different cells identify different optical qualitites. The research of Hubel & Wiesel: “By measuring the electrical impulses of cells in the visual cortex, the scientists discovered that cells respond to straight lines, movement and contrast – features that delineate objects in the environment. They further found that some cells fire rapidly in response to horizontal lines, while other cells prefer vertical lines or angles. Cells with similar functions are organized into columns, they said, tiny computational machines that relay information to a higher region of the brain, where an image is formed.”
Accordingly, I would expect that the quality of identicality would register as a particular combination of cell firings, if glyphs are in the same grab. But I doubt that small differences in character renderings, or lack therof, would make it to that “higher region of the brain, where an image is formed”, if they occur across a saccade.
Having said that, I would like to believe that vision is a more profound and mysterious phenomenon than this mere decoding process which scientists have attached to reading, and that there is some kind of mental ’bot which searches for the similarites that create large-scale patterns, as indicators of broader categoric significance, such as cultural style.
The fact that there is so much redundancy in the most successful “book” faces, in which not only do serifs vary from character to character, but, when printed by letterpress, individual glyphs of the same character vary too, suggests that identicality of letter features may in fact by problematic—perhaps because our “similarity-detector” processing is unnecessarily over-stimulated.
I've read a fair amount of text in 18th Century and earlier editions, in which the printing has been such that no two instances of a letter on the page are visually identical, and sometimes quite radically different as a result of worn sorts, uneven inking, variable thickness paper, not to mention actual variant sorts (some clearly designed for specific contexts, but not always reliably used as intended). While reading, I am not conscious of these things, nor am I conscious of what effect, if any, such inconsistency might be having on my reading in terms of speed, number of regressions, etc.. But then when reading I'm not conscious of much except the meaning of the text. That's rather the point, I think.
ie:
H I P P O P O T A M U S S M U T
1 1 1 2 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2
As a type designer, you should know that hooking up a glyph randomizer, to a universal saccade predictor, (as if that could work on everyone!?), for figures, is about as likely/useful, as this being the last post ever. In general, I think this is related to one of the basic problems of OS/UA/OT: that the user is interested in Typography and when that Typography involves non-registered OT features, who are not related to the Typography by technical or nominal hook, the work you've left the user to figure out is much more than a bad thing. Leaving Typography out of font software for software to figure out, we know how that works out.