Simon Cozens

This morning I got a notification from haveibeenpwned.com that my credentials at dafont.com have been exposed due to a data breach. Zdnet has the story. If you have a dafont account, please change your password, and if you use that password on other sites too... don't do that.

Yeah. I hate to be totally negative but this isn't working for me at all. The different slants  and curved strokes in the original lowercase, and the second one of your new lowercases, mean that my eyes are forever being led in different directions. It reminds me of one of Akiyoshi Kitaoka's anomalous motion illusions.

I know a number of people are rather hoping that the macron is aligned to the left, but I think you'll find that in practice it naturally finds its way towards the center.

I find Windows Postscript gives a grittier, more bassy outline than the warmer, more natural curves produced by Mac Postscript. You can reproduce some of the warmth by reversing the directions of all the paths, to avoid interference from the computer's power supply frequencies.

This may be a bit pie-in-the-sky, but I wonder if all this discussion is a symptom of a broader problem about updating and revising fonts. And a related issue is that the difficulty of updating and revising fonts leads to a situation where fonts do take ages to develop and release because this can't be done iteratively and bug fixes can't be easily fielded.

Let's imagine a situation where, when you install a font, the OS's font manger checks to see if the font is already installed. If it isn't already installed, no problem. If it is already installed, it compares the glyph outlines, coverage and metrics with the previously installed font, and makes the following determinations:

• Is the new font a superset of the old? Does it merely add new glyphs, without changing existing ones?
• Does it change the metrics of existing glyphs or global font metrics? If so, warn the user that this could cause document reflow.
• Does it change the outlines of existing glyphs? If so, warn the user that the font will be visually incompatible.

Having determined the nature of the update, you can now offer the user a choice:

• Cancel the install
• Overwrite the old font
• Rename the old font
• Rewrite the name of the new font to add a custom suffix. ("FooFont for SomeClient Project 2017-05")

We are far from that situation at the moment but it's technically possible; wouldn't it fix most of these issues?