Adam Savage from Mythbusters on fonts.

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John J. Blair
John J. Blair Posts: 32
in Miscellaneous News
A YouTube video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fseQtg9xAwk

Comments

  • Dyana Weissman
    Dyana Weissman Posts: 331
    Adam gets it. "There is very little bottom to that rabbit hole of font nerdiness."
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,028
    So should someone launch a Kickstarter for making a font from Laura Kampf's handwriting? I bet Adam could get it a lot of exposure. :grimace:
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,031
    Seems like he does not know about smart font technologies like OpenType layout features (or GX/AAT), and what they can do for script fonts.
  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,028
    Though he suspects their existence! :smile:
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,284
    edited May 2023
    What Thomas says.
    This video is disinformation, in as much as he eulogizes contextuality in handwriting, criticizes handwriting fonts on that basis, and yet denies the existence of contextuality in handwriting fonts, despite it having existed since Dear Sarah and Handsome Pro were published 14 years ago.
    A peek inside the rabbit hole would have helped.
  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 642
    Of course I can't speak for Adam, but personally I'm still not a big fan of handwriting fonts. No matter how many features you build into them, it's not enough, like they are just trying to be something they are not. Of course a font is more practical, but from an artistic point of view I believe that if you want handwritten text you should write it by hand.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,757
    The presentation given by Underware at ATypI last week of their new handwriting font, Scribo, also presented a variable font technique they have been working on to simulate animated handwriting with Scribo as well as some of their other fonts. It was quite mind-blowing.

    You can see it in action on their homepage with the animated video banner for Scribo. The animation you see there, where the font is being written out, as if by a disembodied hand, was actually achieved using variable font techniques—not animation software—and all user-controllable.

    Hopefully, ATypI will post Underware's presentation on its YouTube channel soon for those that didn't see it. It's well-worth looking at.

    Granted, it's still not the same as real handwriting, but it looks astonishingly close, down to stroke rhythm and speed.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,757
    More detail about how it works here: https://www.underware.nl/fonts/scribo/features/write/#feature_info

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