I tried a similar approach but via CSS for my "medieval content farm" (<a href="https://tidings.potato.horse" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://tidings.potato.horse</a>), but for perf. reasons ended up only randomising the opacity and tint of its individual characters and removed the transforms.<p>My next step is to add those little padded areas hiding the empty spaces on the right side of the text[1][2], so the column of the text feels neater (horror vacui was a big thing then it seems).<p>Weirdly enough, this gets much easier with container queries and stable diffusion:<p>1. feed SD with some examples of patterns, then scale them to 10 or so sizes<p>2. then use those images as backgrounds for elements fitting the empty space in each line<p>3. select the right image using a container query<p>This should give them a neat but organic look. And hey I can brag about not using any JS!<p>[1] <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2f/46/2d/2f462df256f4bd509b489ad1fe3f67bd.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2f/46/2d/2f462df256f4bd509b48...</a>
[2] <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ac/68/a8/ac68a86da5ec457960d0b865170ee6bc.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ac/68/a8/ac68a86da5ec457960d0...</a>
The quote marks on that page are a real mess. Best practice is to use double curly quotes or single curly quotes—not backtick and apostrophe.<p>See <a href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html</a>
("Summary: Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote').")<p>Also, Founder's Caslon <i>is</i> commercially available, at least, it is now.
<a href="https://www.myfonts.com/collections/founders-caslon-font-itc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.myfonts.com/collections/founders-caslon-font-itc</a>
For a version of the Fell fonts that is variable with cleaner shapes, see Elstob, <a href="https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://psb1558.github.io/Elstob-font/</a><p>You can play with the sliders and it is easy to get the same spacing effect as what the article talks about.
Reading this really helps illustrate why and how a font is considered a computer program and thus eligible for copyright protection. I don’t think most laypeople (and even many programmers) intuitively think of it that way because they seem like a collection of little pictures, but so much work goes into these fonts. We are fortunate to have so many good ones to choose from today, and that someone has footed the bill for their construction, since most people never directly license a font.
Ah, I've found my new terminal font: <a href="https://building-m.net/xbackbone/jOGE6/sUGEqePe74/raw.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://building-m.net/xbackbone/jOGE6/sUGEqePe74/raw.png</a>
What I wish for is rather than encoding the wavy imperfections in the font, they should be procedurally generated at rasterization time. This way, the graininess can stay at the same resolution regardless of the font-size. As it is now, if you have a 120pt font, the rough edges are magnified.<p>Is there a way to specify something like that in the font language? Or does the rasterization engine have to implement that?
This is fantastic work. It's very hard to find historic fonts that haven't been overly modernized. For fun, I like to restore and re-print old playing card/tarot decks and other ephemera for use by a modern audience. In order to make them more legible it makes sense to use translated or reconstructed text. Having fonts like these readily available makes this work so much easier.
This font is slightly too messy for me, but I agree that "modern typography" is often too soulless. I'm also hoping for a renaissance of serif fonts - I'm not really buying the narrative that they're not suitable for the web.<p>Not a big typography expert, but one font I like and try to use often, is Baskerville.<p>On the other hand, while I love LaTeX, I absolutely abhor Computer Modern. Maybe it's not the font's fault, but rather the fact that by using it every paper ends up looking the same - but it just bores me to death.
I actually found this really pleasant to read. My eye seemed to be able to move from each word to the next more smoothly. It is interesting to note how the slightly uneven weights on each character are similar to fonts designed to aid Dyslexic readers like OpenDyslexic. I wonder if that is why. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDyslexic" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDyslexic</a>
This is actually my favorite font execution and post I’ve seen on this site, and believe me, I click on <i>all</i> of them.<p>(I’m also writing a book, and typeface distraction obviously comes with the territory.)
I took slight offence at the passage "a live performance of a great symphony, in which musical instruments played by humans are never perfectly in tune and occasionally quite far out of tune" after mentioning the Wiener Philharmoniker. I don't think they ever play out of tune.<p>I did hear orchestras play out of tune occasionally, but it has never been an agreeable experience. It never made me think "how human". Instead, hearing a botched entry in the chorale in Mendelssohn 5 helped me understand the brass players' addiction to beta blockers.
<i>Sadly it is no longer commercially available after he died of a heart attack at the age of 41 in 2005</i><p>If it's an exacting replica of a preexisting typeface it shouldn't be covered under copyright and thus you should be able to freely share it.
This font's ragged looking nature — is it primarily because of the way the font was printed at the time? I would assume there is some loss of clarity and other artefacts introduced by how metal type printing prints. It seems like these fonts were created only by looking at printed works. Could the original metal blocks (sorts/matrixes/punches) still be around?
Sure enough, if you go from the end of the blog post straight to the thesis, you can totally hear the introduction of <i>Also Sprach Zarathustra</i> coming out of the title page.
I don't know why but I wanted to combine it with the Arwes[0] colors/assets and I kinda love it: <a href="https://blog.winricklabs.com/sci-fi-old-font.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.winricklabs.com/sci-fi-old-font.png</a><p>[0] <a href="https://arwes.dev/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://arwes.dev/</a>
Reading this page I actually wonder, why don't we do it all the time. It never occurred to me before, and I'm even used to the idea that bland sans-serif fonts are somehow <i>required</i> of the screen, but web-fonts look like shit compared to your typical older book typeface. This page is simply more pleasant to read.
> that one should never change the letterspacing of the lowercase letters<p>But with the microtype package it is acceptable to slightly expand or contract the letters to avoid hyphenation. Typically the limit is set to around 0.025em.<p>Anecdotally if you are applying letterspacing to uppercase letters, 0.025em is also a good default value to use.
- <i>"It is certainly not as far-fetched as Leonard Bernstein's controversially slow reading of</i> Nimrod <i>from Elgar's</i> Enigma Variations <i>with the BBC Symphony Orchestra."</i><p>That link got Google-holed, but I <i>think</i> it's the same content as this one (?)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkklz0Vird4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkklz0Vird4</a> (<i>"Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations | BBC Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein</i>") (1984? or 1982?)<p>(Or it might have referenced a specific passage of that recording, but I can't easily figure out which).
> The very first specimen book of the Fell types, printed at Oxford University Press in 1693, when J. S. Bach was only 8 years old. Only four copies are known to exist. Furthermore, many of the original punches and matrices, some of which were made of wood, have been lost (Oxford University Press 1900), so these specimens are the only record.<p>Ah so this is THE Dr Fell from an old remembered nursery rhyme<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_do_not_like_thee,_Doctor_Fell" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_do_not_like_thee,_Doctor_Fel...</a><p>:)
I'm usually a fan of Windows-style font rendering that snaps on-screen text to the pixel grid. But for this typeface it seems to heavily exaggerate the roughness as the different serifs snap all over. The pictures of the print pages look much nicer.<p>How does it look on a Mac monitor?
This is exactly what I miss about modern computer-typeset sheet music. There's a lovely organicness to the very slightly splotchy noteheads etc. in old sheet music, and modern scores feel very antiseptic to me by comparison.
Like the lack of typeface requirements, I think there was also a belief that the university regulations still allowed phd theses to be submitted in Latin, though I’m not aware of anyone trying it.
Are those statements about “eye strain” for serif, sans and sans serif fonts scientific? Every time I see them they are not supplied by evidence but by some mumbo jumbo.
Very interesting that one can reproduce these “un-sharp” effects using digital fonts.<p>But for the eligibility, I find old typesets like these Fell fonts harder to read.