A New Type.lol - A type foundry index—and more!

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  • MarkJohnson
    MarkJohnson Posts: 14
    @Nick Shinn Done. If you ever change your mind you can let me know or re-submit. Best of luck to you and your endeavors.
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,479
    edited March 5
    @MarkJohnson I mentioned earlier that automation doesn’t really work for Wikidata, though to be fair that might just have been my experience. I spent about a week trying different approaches to automate entries and mostly ended up wandering down dead ends.

    That said, if you can get batch submissions working reliably, there’s no real reason you couldn’t transform your data into the required format and push it through. If you’re planning to experiment with that, it’s worth starting sooner rather than later; there’s a bit of a waiting period involved before you can run larger batches, and having an established Wikimedia account helps.

    One practical tip: AI tends to explain how these tools worked in the past, not necessarily how they behave now. It’s better to look for recent, real-world examples of working submissions and follow those.
  • MarkJohnson
    MarkJohnson Posts: 14
    Good call. Question for you on that @Ray Larabie, have you tried using playwright for any of your exploration? That was my fall back idea in my mind this morning if there's no API or connection I can make myself. But again, I've not really gotten through what's possible there. I can't imagine it will be wildly fast and immediate, but...maybe possible through that if nothing else?
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,479
    No, I didn't use playwright, I was using Quickstatements. There are structural fragilities to say the least. Cryptic failures, opaque limbo, and from my guess, a thin wrapper over a brittle backend. And pile on some mid-job token expiries, and mysterious timeouts!

    I couldn't even get it to successfully upload more than a couple of entries.
  • Johannes Neumeier
    Johannes Neumeier Posts: 401
    edited March 13
    MarkJohnson said:
    Then you will sell this platform to Monotype or some such corporate investor.
    This is completely antithetical to the purpose of type.lol. While I understand the concern, I run a foundry and don't sell through any other resellers despite the potential to make more literal money, but with far worse terms, conditions, and financial incentive. 
    Could you (regularly) make a database dump of your foundry/font data available with a CC/open source license?

    I don't agree with @Nick Shinn, but I also don't disagree. The only way to dissuade the critisim of this data eventually vanishing (into the abyss, or into the corporate behemoth) is if the data isn't yours alone.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,336
    That was my point, Johannes.
    Good intentions are worthless in the long run, if one is creating instrumentality that subsequently enables unwanted, unintended outcomes.
  • MarkJohnson
    MarkJohnson Posts: 14
    @Johannes Neumeier Yeah, for sure. Open data aligns with what I'm trying to do ultimately, I just want to be safe about it and be careful and intentional with what is shared.

    On one hand I've created a resource to find information out about foundries, designers, and typefaces which has so far gotten relatively positive feedback despite imperfect data currently. On the other hand some folks don't want their info openly shared if it's not accurate—which not all of it is yet, nor would I imagine it to be accurate in perpetuity.

    Like, even in this thread, does @Nick Shinn want his data public or not? Who should be able to edit data about him, his type, his foundry? Only Nick? Who gives that management permission? Right now by having it on type.lol, at least everyone can point at me and say, "I hate you Mark, specifically you—for this data being inaccurate." I can live with that.

    I would hate to just open it all up to produce even less accountability or responsibility to making a good end product. So I'm thinking about what the right version of this looks like. What data should be open? Under what license? With what governance? Not opposed, just want to do it right.
  • Typedesigner
    Typedesigner Posts: 84
    edited March 17
    @MarkJohnson On my website https://typedesigner.de you can browse my font families and see the available licensing options and pricing for each typeface if you would like to list them in your directory.

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