This Week in Type: I Left My 💝 in ‑apple-system-body

joeclark

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.

Stephen Coles

I'm not sure what No. 24 means. Antonio clearly stated in his WWDC talk that he was “a member of the team” at Apple who designed the family. I don’t see any evidence to the contrary. There’s no reason to believe it wasn’t a collaborative effort with Antonio as a lead.