joeclark

I have a few examples of monospaced ligatures on my Flickr, none of them entirely convincing.

As I recall, the practice in such typefaces as Palatino and Optima, where by design f never collided with i in roman, was to simply encode exactly the letters fi in default spacing in the fi slot.

For “branding” purposes, the answer to your question is no. Nor should there be a “reference font” (that’s a new one to us) that “supports all of these formats,” especially given that Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, and Greek, all of which are capitalized proper nouns, constitute languages, not “formats.”

Multilingual typography in the same script is somewhat tricky. Across scripts it is a recipe for disaster without having on board somebody, or a team of somebodies, who are expert and accomplished.

Purely based on what you have shown us here (an ill-written request to solve your problem for you for free), you should recuse yourself from this project before you cause an international incident.

I fixed the DNS on Screenfont.CA, and it now works again.

Two of my responses in this thread have “mysteriously” disappeared. I am the last remaining lifer in the captioning business and am the only actual expert on caption and subtitle typography. But if what I write here is going to get deleted behind my back, Fabio will have to mail me directly.

Upon closer inspection, I see these two issuances from Ray:

• I’ve designed a typeface based on FCC closed caption specifications.

  That’s like reconstructing a human face from a driver’s-licence photograph. Ray’s contribution can be disregarded, I think.

• I’m not sure what the difference between captions and subtitles is. I’ve never looked into that. I’d also like to know.

In other words, Ray Larabie designed a captioning font from a specification book and without being able to differentiate captions and subtitles. Yet my responses are getting voted down.

Do you want my help or not?

Katy Mawhood said:

True malice is rare.

Someone not routinely victimized by it would think so, yes.

needed? needed.

1. Prince sure has been dead a long time. Writing his icon in Unicode. (Imagine the unsympathetic response to a proposal to add that pictograph to Unicode. You can guess who would be most unsympathetic.) Prince-logo “floppys” and “legend.” Undocumented: Font format; characters replaced with symbol; if it still works in the 21st century. No, actually, that was documented (knowledgeably).

2. ATypI IPA: fixed.

3. Rod McDonald (misrendering in breadcrumb UI: MCDONALD) further undermines the legitimacy of griping about that horrific Arial G.

4. Hi still can’t keep up with the kidz (now pushing 50) at LettError KTHXBYE

5. TeleRead, easily one of the stupider blogs (in a wide field), still cannot wrap its head around the concept of single-pixel stems and how those may affect legibility and readability of E‑books, even after I told them same over and over again. The actual problem is “bold text,” Dr. Einstein informs us.

6. 1ilI|!

7. LettError used to ax “Does ‘PDF’ stand for ‘public-domain fonts’?” Similarly: LostType or LostRevenue? (“Lost Type is the first of its kind, a Pay-What-You-Want type foundry[™©®].”)

8. Last Resort or NotDef?

9. Burmese in Unicode (but Buginese).

10. Hi iA this is really rather a non-starter even by rebus/emoji/Prince-in-Unicode standards KTHXBYE

11. (REPRISE w/ UPDATE) Hobo. (Hobeaux!) Hobo! Rococeaux!

12. б (Zhukov alert) but gesäß.

13. I was never going to finish this overlong article on UI fonts and for once I doubt I am unique.

14. “4 ½ new Unicode characters” (sic): We did it! (Also shows the perils of failing to use a custom WordPress slug. Like top-posting, that separates men from boys.)

15. EISENHOWER (1952) but 3689 (1943) (also 1888).

16. BAGLEY PALMS (but ONTARIO’s Lakelands).

17. “[W]e will continue to develop FontFonts with their fair designer contracts.”

18. “Hard to imagine, but not long ago, the type design industry was a quiet people using loud machines.” Epitaph?

19. My single aperçu about blackletter is worthier and more substantive than this entire Times piece that quotes Bierut. Even the title shouts “ignoramus” (in “gothic”).

20. I have the letter I wrote to the author of the Scientific American article on the multilingual typesetting capacity of the Xerox Star. That letter was circa 1984 and asked why there weren’t two cursors in mixed Arabic/English text, because – logically – you never know what the next keystroke will be. I thought then and still think that was a pretty smart question for a 19-year-old, and look where all that got me. (The answer was the system uses one cursor for simplicity but does the right thing with any input. Oh? How about digits and parentheses, I wonder now? Or less-than and greater-than?)

21. Variable fonts? Déjà passé.

22. Tired of Tufte? (Tufté[e]?) Try the TSO. Or compare Dublin trams de l’époque to Euclid.

23. Not passé: Bladé Runnère. Still, nothing’s more futuristic than Italian futurism.

24. Who really designed the Apple San Francisco font? Now we may never know.