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Thomas Phinney

@tphinney@typo.social

mastodon 4.6.9

Fonts & typography. Type designer, expert witness and consultant. ATypI board member. Dad and spouse. He/his or they/theirs

669 Followers

409 Following

50 Posts

Joined November 10, 2022

Website:

https://thefontdetective.com

Occasional Blog:

http://www.thomasphinney.com

Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 3mo ago

Many major graphics/publishing apps have missed the boat with their user interface choices for variable fonts. Given the ongoing steady growth of variable font usage and availability, it seems worth fixing things. The biggest problem, and the easiest one to fix, is lacking ongoing access to axis settings while working with text. Other issues include… https://www.thomasphinney.com/2026/07/variable-font-ui-is-broken/

thomasphinney.com

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

When I was just getting serious about type design and typography VERY MANY people were helpful to me, took me seriously, and gave me useful feedback, advice, critiques, introductions to other folks... everything, really.

If you don’t know me well or even at all, but are at ATypI next month or TypeCon in August, and could benefit from any of that, OR even just want to say hello, or chat about the talks, or whatever — please introduce yourself!

(I do not bite and am largely house-trained, I promise.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Just want to say that I am massively in favor of more and stronger controls on firearms, and also believe that attempts to censor and control 3D printing (beyond making 3D printing of guns and fun parts illegal, which it already is in most states looking to impose proactive controls) such as California’s A.B. 2047, will both not stop all 3D printing of guns, AND make things worse for the average user.

Locking users into only using printer drivers supplied by their printer manufacturer and outlawing open source alternatives is an awful consequence. Whenever the manufacturer decides to stop supporting the driver software or goes out of business, the existing 3D printers become useless doorstops.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 20mo ago

The Chrome browser on Android, Linux and ChromeOS now does all its web font processing using a Rust-based library (Skrifa) instead of its old C++ library (FreeType).

This is part of a general trend. If you look at open jobs by programming language required, Rust is now #7 (up from #10 last time I looked). C++ and C# are declining drastically, Python, SQL, Java, and JavaScript/TypeScript are the top 5 and all growing rapidly. (Golang is #6, and also growing similarly to Rust.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

The past week has been a horrifying crush of massive font dev work, which would have been a total nightmare if not for the fact that the client point person has been shockingly reasonable and very aware of the workload involved.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@behdad I would not say that MOST new font families are designed variable-first. But variable fonts are nearly universally supported (although not always as well as one would like). You may be influenced by the fact that Google Fonts is at over 27% of their families being variable fonts, and has a reasonably steady upwards trend. But in contrast, Adobe Fonts seems to have more-or-less stalled in their adoption of variable fonts. They peaked at 7.6% in late 2024. Since then, they added 21 new variable font families and over 700 total font families. According to https://www.congruencemarketinsights.com/report/font-and-typeface-market 48% of newly launched websites, and 34% of all websites, use variable fonts. (Note, that is SOME variable fonts, not all fonts used by such a website need be variable to be counted)

congruencemarketinsights.com

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@btuttle@typo.social @futurefonts@typo.social You sir, are totally mad! I swear, I mean that in the BEST POSSIBLE way. Whoa.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social I came for the astronomy, but stayed for the cute animals.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

AI-generated bug reports & fixes suddenly went from junk to legit, says Linux kernel maintainer:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_kernel/

theregister.com

Are we human?

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

RE: @fontra@typo.social

Loose .exe works fine for me, but I get how a Windows installer would help the average user, for sure.

Anybody?

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@JTDType @klim I have a meta question: are you really set on having five optical size values and nothing else? If it is a variable font already, why not give it an opsz axis? Also: the variable font opsz axis is defined as being points rather than pixels, which would be a good reason to do points over pixels with your thing as well. If you go with Dan Burzo’s approach, use leading zeros on single digits such as “08x” so as to get them to sort properly with the “16x” I would love the XS to XL clothing sizes approach, except that it won’t sort well. :/ ( Unless these are just labels on a VF size axis.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@slye @frankrolf @justvanrossum As Chris says, “production” vs “final” was how we referred to them back in the 90s when the Glyph Order and Alias DB file was first conceived and used. We called the font dev process “font production” and that’s why the names used during dev were “production” names. That said, I am also the first to agree that “production” is ambiguous and I think “friendly” vs “final” is better, clearer wording.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@TiroTypeworks@typo.social @nika@typo.social @kentlew@typo.social I haven’t seen this behavior, either. I certainly would find it annoying! I use FontLab 8.4.2 Mac daily. IF it is indeed a full-screen vs system settings behavior, then see: System Settings > Menu Bar and change “Automatically hide and show the menu bar” to “Never.” (This setting used to be in System Settings > Desktop & Dock.) This of course would raise the question of why FontLab is ending up in full-screen mode when other apps are not, but I hope it might be a solution for the moment?

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@marsidesino@typo.social @kai@typo.social These are great conversations to have and great questions to ask. No question that communicating this stuff clearly is hard. If “license a font” is confusing, “invest in a font’ or ”invest in a font license” is surely more so, no? Plus, a license is what the customer is buying, and they own it afterwards. It is not a commodity whose value is likely to fluctuate or reliably increase over time. “Buy a font license” really seems like the best balance of accuracy and clarity. To the extent it confuses, it causes the person to ask exactly the right questions! If they don’t know what a font iicense is, talk of buying one will likely provoke a useful response… What do you mean I’m buying a license? Aren’t I just buying the font? Explain!

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

This is a great explanation of some key factors about how to do AI “vibe coding” better… or worse. https://bramcohen.com/p/the-cult-of-vibe-coding-is-insane

The Cult Of Vibe Coding Is Insane

Bad software is a choice you make

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@onpaperwings Whoa. The Wall was one block away... in three directions!

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jasonsantamaria I will check it out! I think this will appeal to tons of designers out there! More font management options are a good thing. (Not sure it is for me, though. At least at first glance I am not seeing the interface/viewing approaches I mostly need. Too bad! But I will check it out when time permits.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kupfers@mastodon.social @frankrolf@typo.social Wait, you foreigners have PHONES now?! What is the world coming to?

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@nika@typo.social @TiroTypeworks@typo.social @kentlew@typo.social Well, you also just described my hardware and OS. (me: Late 2023 MacBook Pro M3 Max, macOS Tahoe 26.3) So those variables, by themselves, can’t be it. I was about to suggest you post on the FontLab user forums, and/or file a bug report, and I see you have already posted on the forum. You have already got a response from the support lead, so that’s good. (Even if he did ask about the same system setting, yet again.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kai But... you only allowed one answer! For me, I think it is about 45% Keynote, 45% PowerPoint, 10% Acrobat.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@onpaperwings All true, and yet… Your “hand setting” stat necessarily includes the human input part, but (presumably) the Linotype and (definitely) the CRT stats are output numbers only. Admittedly, Linotype and later tech can better separate the input from the output, and this is incredibly useful. But the CRT is only massively faster than Linotype in *output*; input was still a bottleneck. I know you know all this. :) Just giving you a hard time for giving short shrift to your beloved Linotype, because if you include input time, the CRT is a much more modest advance in this regard. (Although of course, tons of other advantages, to be sure. There are plenty of reasons for replacing hot metal typesetting.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@erikvorhes @onpaperwings It’s in a few super-extended Latin fonts from Adobe, including Minion 3, and my own Hypatia Sans. (Even including small caps!) And of course Noto from Google. (Also: yay Doug! He will be great at this!)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@Luke @onpaperwings That really looks hand lettered to me, based on the subtle variations in some repeating letters, and expecially subtle contextual variations.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@sajatype @onpaperwings @behdad The file size part? Sure, big companies benefit. (Or: entities whose websites have lots of traffic and pay for bandwidth used by their fonts. Mostly big companies.) The design side? Anybody who cares can take advantage of those capabilities. My own love for variable fonts as a design solution has been unrelated to whether I happen to be working for a large company.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@behdad @onpaperwings Also, I agree with @onpaperwings that many (I suspect most!) type designers do their design using variable font tech under the hood. I have literally always worked that way, from the mid-90s to the present. The only exception is a typeface that has only an upright and an italic, and was ill-suited to having a range of weights.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@w__h_ Note that (although the planning began even earlier), the decision was finalized in early 2025, and announced in May 2025.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@marsidesino@typo.social @kai@typo.social I would love to see the whole process as you envision it, and then afterwards see how it played out in terms of how customers responded, and what understanding they took away from it! (That said, you literally wrote “What about saying “invest” instead of “buy” when you pay for a font license?” ... which to me said you would be removing the word “buy.”)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@jasonsantamaria@typo.social @Okay@typo.social @kai@typo.social This is great, but absolutely does NOT require ignoring all the long-developed principles of optical scaling, when resizing it.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

As always, @glennf@zeppelin.flights is right on! That said, I will point out that part of the problem is likely that the underlying text had a hard-coded ffi ligature character, instead of using the OpenType layout ligature feature. Had the feature been used, it would have gracefully degraded. Perhaps someone did that because they knew the output app was unlikely to support OpenType layout features, but they thought the Unicode approach would be a safer way to ensure the glorious ligature appeared. Problem is, while the “success mode” is more likely to happen in that case, the failure mode is much worse. Better text with the three letters and no ligature, than a notdef or no text at all. (I wonder if there was a notdef that was seen in proofing and manually deleted?) Sigh....

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 17mo ago

Replying to

@timahrens For any of these choices, but especially if not “the same as three periods,” really serious typefaces should have a ligature for period + ellipsis and ellipsis + period, to ensure consistent spacing.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 17mo ago

Replying to

@davidsudweeks @TiroTypeworks @timahrens That is dependent on the app’s linebreaking algorithms. Current versions of Microsoft Word (Mac) and Adobe InDesign don’t break any series of periods in the middle, and attach them to a preceding word if there is no space in between. Seems good to me! Apps often have additional special behaviors for extreme cases when they run out of other line break options. But in general these are working well, I think.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 20mo ago

Replying to

@thibault@mastodon.online ... these advantages are why Microsoft is migrating to Rust as well. I expect core libraries are their top priority, but just in general. https://www.techzine.eu/news/devops/116080/microsoft-continues-push-to-switch-code-over-to-rust/

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Luke Does the scanner work even when it is out of ink? 😛

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Luke@typo.social oops, yes I know The Iliad should be the first one. And actually that has kinda been done (Wolfgang Peterson’s 2004 “Troy”) but that even more thoroughly left out the gods….

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@frankrolf @letterror @malinneamtzu @drawBot Yes, 2^16 or 64K. Now to be fair, it doesn’t seem crazy to have a lower limit for the number you can use all at once in animation. It looks like that was the limitation they hit?

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@cstross@wandering.shop I am yet another person saying that they do two different things (or at least, they SHOULD), and it therefore depends on what the goal is. For example, for your poll, if it is a binary choice, they should be represented as radio buttons.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@onpaperwings Whoa. What make and model? Also: yes, I hear you. I mean, my dad was one of the co-inventors of wifi for cryin’ out loud, but I have tech problems like everybody else. (Maybe not the *exact* same problems, but equally absurd in their ways. Sigh.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 20mo ago

Replying to

@krahos@mastodon.social It is a graph in here: https://zerotomastery.io/blog/best-programming-languages-to-learn/ (One can find a lot of different analyses, with at least moderately different results. I did not specifically look for one that rated Rust highly, this was just the one that I happened on. Nor is Rust super highly ranked here, for that matter.)

zerotomastery.io

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 20mo ago

Replying to

@thibault@mastodon.online FreeType renders glyphs from fonts. HarfBuzz determines what glyphs you want to render & how to position them. The latter can be very complicated and language-dependent. I am sure you know this (and likely better than I do), but for other readers… Rust is much more secure than C++ by default, so a lot of core system libraries are moving to Rust. There are also other advantages for maintenance and stability (though gosh, is compile time ever slower for Rust!).

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

RE: @evacide@hachyderm.io

It is a travesty that this person did not get jail time.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 17mo ago

Replying to

@TiroTypeworks @davidsudweeks @timahrens Just to clarify, I ran a check on a series of periods. I should do it again on period + ellipsis. And ellipsis + period.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Luke@typo.social Yeah, I mean who wants to see the first movie if the filmmakers don’t finish the series, amiright?

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 17mo ago

Replying to

@TiroTypeworks @timahrens Sure, that is a reasonable way to do it. (Makes note to self.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@AmeliasBrain@mstdn.ca One plausible explanation for why LinkedIn has that label, is that they want to know WHEN their AI slop is problematic/bad, in order to improve it until it is either undetectable, or at least users don’t find it objectionable. Whether that seems like a Good Thing probably depends on your POV.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@slye I think everything that is finalized is in the program. There is that welcome at the design school on Wednesday, but it ends at 6:30 pm. Check again in two weeks to be sure.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@w__h_ I mean, it does exist, but... the procedure for proposing emoji is very open. LONG AND PAINFUL, but open. Mind you, the emoji subcomittee of the Unicode Consortium has set the criteria for inclusion, which is critical. They are, in fact, Big Emoji. 😛 😂

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 11mo ago

Replying to

@mhoye Thanks for sharing this. You make some great responses! (Though pretty sure your first answer was meant to read ARE achieved by… rather than AREN’T achieved by.... Darn typos.)

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@johnbutler@typo.social Wow. Super broken, that. Means that superscript numerals and subscript numerals would be indistinguishable from each other, among other things.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@AmeliasBrain@mstdn.ca Ohhh. OK, this makes way more sense. Sure.

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Thomas Phinney @tphinney@typo.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@DunwichType@typo.social How many email addresses do you have? I figure I have three main ones, and one minor.

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