Just reviving a 40 years old BASIC program. #ZXSpectrum
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Paul van der Laan
@paulvanderlaan@typo.social
mastodon 4.6.9Founding Partner and Chief Font Fixer @boldmonday@mastodon.online type foundry
Teacher at KABK @TypeMedia@typo.social
Retro computing enthusiast
296 Followers
137 Following
32 Posts
Joined November 07, 2022
location:
Den Haag (NL)
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Talking about italics during #fontstand dinner: ”Jesus was cursified for our sins!”
Sunday.
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Bloemsma’s BASIC application contains an editor to draw shapes with straight segments and then renders them as 3D wireframe models. As a purely speculative experiment I converted one of Bloemsma’s most recognisable designs – the lowercase s of FF Balance – and let it render in his own application. #ZXSpectrum #basic #programming #TypeDesign
Berlin looking pretty this morning.
Did anyone ever notice that Avenir LT has some serious errors in the descender lengths of p and q in certain weights?
Was looking for my old computer tapes. Found audio tapes instead. 😄
Jaap van Triest guiding students through the Evert Bloemsma exhibition at ESAD in Amiens.
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@justvanrossum @jlarmstrongiv Thanks for the suggestions! I'm happy to report that "fonttools subset" from the command line did the trick.
Here’s the full command in case someone else needs it in the future:
fonttools subset input.otf
--output-file="output.otf"
--glyphs="*"
--no-hinting
--layout-features="*"
--drop-tables=
--passthrough-tables
--name-IDs="*"
--name-legacy
--name-languages="*"
--no-prune-unicode-ranges
--no-prune-codepage-ranges
--legacy-cmap
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@behdad 4. Final point. I’m sure the majority of type designers have been using an interpolation based workflow since the 1990s because it’s easy and efficient. But a strictly VF workflow is not by definition easier and certainly with complex families makes development harder. (I know this is partly a tool issue.) VFs can easily become a straight jacket where more time is spent on point compatibility than actual design.
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@behdad 3. I think one of the reasons why Adobe Fonts contains so few VFs is because they offer a really bad deal for foundries. Adobe’s compensation for VFs does not compare to their real value and undercuts the foundries.
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@marsidesino@typo.social As a non-native English reader I find that character completely unreadable I’m afraid. If you put this in the locl feature it will be forced upon unsuspecting readers.
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@justvanrossum @Bahman No, that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. Sources that we need to deal with can have different glyph naming schemes. Because they can come from different font editors for example. One of the first steps that we do in that case is to rename them to our own glyph naming scheme. Those are what I call “production names”. For our tools it is important to have one consistent scheme for all source files. Because pair lists for kerning rely on it, for example. But we don’t want these names to be “final names”.
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@behdad 2. Adoption of VFs depends a lot on the tools and platforms people work in. I’m positive there are differences in adoption between Figma and Adobe CC users for example. VFs are certainly popular among web developers. But a platform like Sharepoint does not support VFs.
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@letterror @justvanrossum @Bahman Typefaces that I work on are not always my designs. I oversee and direct the process to turn them into proper font files. That is the production phase where – in my view – we use production names for glyphs.
De Grafische Werkplaats in Den Haag dreigt per 1 januari zijn subsidie te verliezen, en zal daardoor na 50 jaar moeten sluiten. Teken de petitie om bezwaar hier tegen te maken!
https://petities.nl/petitions/behoud-de-grafische-werkplaats-in-den-haag?locale=nl
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@justvanrossum @jlarmstrongiv No I couldn’t. Otherwise some unsupported tables such as “meta” would be dropped.
#Python #fonttools question: how easy is it to strip all PS hinting from an OTF file? Or are there already some tools out there that can do this?
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@TiroTypeworks @letterror @justvanrossum @Bahman Correct.
EDIT: we rarely if ever have to deal with final glyph names because those are generated on-the-fly when generating binaries.
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@justvanrossum @letterror @Bahman And final names are typically in uniXXXX format except for the ones listed in the AGLFN.
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@Typespecimens Thx! Yes, still have an NAD tape deck but haven’t used it for at least a decade. Most of this music I have digital though.
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@justvanrossum @Bahman I don’t know. To me this sounds very much argued from the perspective of a single designer using one font editor to create a new typeface from scratch. But nowadays lots of people with different skills are involved in the production phase of a typeface. And that can involve multiple sources from different times by different people using different font editors.