joeclark

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.

Miles Newlyn said:

I tell people NOT to read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
It was a waste of time and effort for me[.]

Even mild criticism of Saint Robert here on TypeDrawers gets you hate-flagged as Troll by trolls. Saint Robert would, further, argue that the word “NOT” in your posting must be typeset in small caps.

My week is looking up. And – I can say this as a Maritimer – now so is all y’all’s.

1. ENERG

   1. Y
   2. IJA
   3. IE
   4. IA

2. Graphic Designer:

   here's a mini website and incredibly boring essay about our typeface no thx

3. “This wall” (not White Pass’s) “is reading my mind.”

4. (REPRISE w/ UPDATE) Hobo. (Hobeaux!) Hobo!

5. Worst nonsense I’ve ever read about Univers, and almost as grave a desecration of Frutiger as posthumously diagnosing him as trans*. Or swapping out Univers for Helvetica and/or Arial, as the City of Toronto actually does on “Thursday’s.”

6. You’ve heard of 88 (⑧⑧? ⓼⓼? ❽❽?) and 14. New! Neo-Nazi parentheses (“echo”).

7. Are you as bored with reading about Avant Garde as I thought I was? (“Mother [HEROIC EMBRACING AMPERSAND] Child.”) Hi-res sidescrolling scans made it interesting again, and recalled Leonidas’ dictum that one must always inspect the original object (even if here one is not).

8. Unsympathetic Michael Everson dukes it out over Georgian majuscules (mtravuli). Days later, they show up on Wheel of Fortune.

   (Somebody here write “mtravuli” in Georgian for me, please. I looked and I can’t find it.)

9. Журнальная рубленая, the poor man’s Futura. I don’t see anybody trying to transgender this one.

10. “ОУР ЦЛУЕ ИС WРИТТЕН ИН ТХИС АЛПХАБЕТ.” Meanwhile, Jeopardy type actually looks better on Black Jeopardy.

11. 😜: First emoji on a death notice? (Discussion.)

    (“Emoji are not worth the forced line[‑]height increase.”)

12. “[S]ome Tweets [sic] suggest that Tarek Atrissi Design agency [sic] is the designer of the new Arabic font being used on Apple.com[/ae‑ar/],” declares credulous Apple blog without bothering to use Web Inspector to identify the typeface used as Gulf (which in turn identifies as five genders weights).

13. For the love of G‑d don’t ax Adam Curtis about fonts.

14. Trump Mediæval(l)ed. Ax me sometime about how I schooled the highly receptive late artiste Félix González-Torres about the fake italic Trump on his stacks.

    Such “LTypI,” an acronym you couldn’t even typeset behind the Iron Drapery of Bringhurstian party ideology, is derided as unimaginative, including by one great mind. I shatter consensus. In point of fact Ell Type Eye never gets better than with Brothers.

    I used to have a lousy photo of George Howe Colt’s Brothers. I could easily borrow that (audio)book from the library and take another couple of lousy photos. But I would direct your attention to a phenomenon that 88ers would seek to eradicate from the earth: Gay rugby.

    Every team consists of gay males trying to be men and seemingly every team has an awesome name. (Spot the name in Occitan [mtravuli?].) One of the Top 3 feared gay ruggerses, Muddy York here in Toronto, just had personalized jerseys produced. Typeset, obviously, in Brothers.