How does this work? I thought ligatures were just different glyphs stored in the font that would replace some number of other individual characters. Does that mean there’s a ligature glyph for every combination of 7 characters?!
There's a whole, let's say, scripting engine that lets the font decide which glyph is going to be used that goes way further than just simple ligature substitution. People have even implemented "games" as fonts this way: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
I'm not sure if the serif-icity is the jarring part, I think it's the different point size (or whatever that word is for the horizontal height lines that fonts live within).
I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.
Many of the more complete font families feature stylistic alternatives for certain letters.
Usually typesetting software has you manually pick them or select sets, but it could be done as you say.
I wish you could specify the x-height of a font in CSS. If you mix serif and sans serif you want them to look like they have the same size. It would have been nice if the default browser fonts were selected to have the same x-height.
No, it doesn't. Compare the heights of the 'ri' pairs, for example. In the Github repo, the difference is ginormous, the top of the 'r' is almost past the dot. In the original Tumblr mockup, the top doesn't even reach the same height as the dot. It's still too big to be subtle, but it's better.
People really seem to hate "handwritten" fonts. Comic Sans is the mainstream example, but there are a lot of other ones.
As others said, stylistic alternatives definitely exist in most font packages, especially commercial ones used with Adobe products. So the fact that they are not widely used outside of graphic design probably goes back to people generally hate fonts that look handwritten for anything besides wedding invitations.
I see a lot of the "why do people hate Comic Sans" articles on the web think it's just because it's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations, but this seems like post-hoc rationalization. It's the Comic Sans look specifically that people intensely dislike, not "handwritten" fonts in general.
The original and better case against Comic Sans was that there were much better handwritten, comic-text-style fonts and that Comic Sans was a particularly bad instance of one.
>"It's just a shame they couldn't have used just the original font, because it's a real mess. I think it's a particularly ugly letter form," he says. "The other thing that really bugs me that they've used an upper case I with bars on it: it looks completely wrong to the comic eye. And when you see store fronts done in it, it's horrible."
> it's just because it's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations
It's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations /and the only available for anything 'fancy' on the Average Computer used by Average Joe/.
stylistically, my personal taste is that Comic Sans is exactly the right font to use for serious warning signs like in a kitchen, such as "DON'T TOUCH, handle gets HOT" or something. Anything official looking I have a tendency to ignore as boilerplate, but comic sans seems like a personal friendly message directed at me
if any of the objection is to the precise letter drawings, ok fine, give me a different one, but the overall concept, I'm Comic Sans all the way.
I completely disagree, though, you're not getting my point. There is a type of "standard" warning that I routinely ignore, the "don't cut yourself with the tablesaw" warnings. Or "knife is sharp". Like, yeah, that's why I'm using the knife.
A warning I won't ignore is one written by a friend about something unusual or unexpected. "The supposedly insulated handle on this pot will melt your fingers off"
I just think that comic sans draws my eye in, in a way that Copperplate instructions from HR do not. Don't tell HR, or they'll start using Comic Sans.
These are fonts that are not just eye-catching, but actively painful to look at for how striking they are, to the point that they're even maybe a bit hard to read (but you still end up reading them, because it's hard to look away.) These are fonts that scream at you — fonts HR would never dare to use, even knowing they "work", because it'd be unprofessional to be that attention-grabbing. It'd be the typographic equivalent of blowing an airhorn in a small room in order to interrupt someone.
(Though actually, oddly enough, something about that typography makes me feel threatened even without the image. I think that particular tight leading with all-caps lettering using a high-weight sans-serif font, puts me in mind of specific public civic-engineering uses of typography to warn people away from high-voltage power substations, large AM radio transmitters, hydro-dam spillways, etc. It's a subtle thing, but it's enough to make it really not look like your standard HR print-out. See also: the old shield of the US Department of Civil Defense — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_in_the_United_St.... Seeing that on something is just unsettling — for purely typographic reasons!)
I'm imagining huge Comic Sans lettering: "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here."
My favorite comic sans note taped to an office fridge ended with “sorry for the incontinence” and once I had a good chuckle I read the part above it that I had previously ignored.
As GP indicated, the important thing is that Comic Sans doesn't appear handwritten because it lacks variation. Just like good Calligraphy doesn't appear handwritten. In genuine (non-Calligraphic) handwriting there will be minor variations in each letter (say, the letter "s"), even though in general all instances of the letter will be more similar to each other than the same letter in someone else's handwriting.
> I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.
Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.
You might want it for emulating handwriting by choosing glyphs from a series of fonts so that tokens like "IEEE" or "error" aren't uncanny giveaways of the computer-rendering.
call me OCD but when I look at stuff written in script my eyes check to see if all the a's are the same, all the b's are the same, all the... and then what I see is manufactured uniformity, a communique from The Machine.
it wouldn't take much variation (say, three different a's) to make me feel a sense of relief that it's warmer and cuddlier
This is true, and I know there is sometimes such a convention. However, I can't find it in the guidelines, and I thought it better to preserve the original title as best as possible with 79 characters before someone ekse truncated the title.
The biggest problem with this is that it's too obvious, if you really want to fuck with people it should require more effort for them to tell what's wrong.
An insidious little niggle that grates upon the mind.
That wouldn't be bad, but I think you could do something more off-putting with something like deliberately slightly bad kerning.
I'm not sure of the extent to which you could use ligatures to tweak the serifs, rather than remove them completely (if possible - frustration will be maximised if the reader is unable to tell what's wrong, even after they come to believe that something is wrong).
Had the idea a while back to make posters and t-shirts with ‘I [heart] Helvetica’ on them, but set in Arial to wind up design nerds. But realised that 99.999% of anyone except possibly myself wouldn’t notice of care.
Note that the title of the page is not "Times New Bastard" but "weiweihuanghuang/Times-New-Bastard: It's Times New Roman but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif", which I had edited down to "Times-New-Bastard: Times New Roman but every 7th letter is jarringly sans serif".
It reminds me of lawyergrams, where the language is constructed to antagonize and threaten while still being logically and legally specific and correct - a kind of ransom note with airs. I'd wonder if some white shoe firm has gone to the trouble of commissioning an in-house font based on similar design principles to this Times New Bastard, just for that purpose.
The word you used, “lawyergrams” is so niche that it shows up only in a couple places on internet and no one knows what it means, including dictionaries and ChatGPT.
Neat. By a strange coincidence, I made something similar yesterday in a script to make each letter in HTML into a different font. I wanted to see if it would end up as an OCR-proof font:
One can get a similar, extremely ugly effect if one is reading Japanese text rendered on a Chinese language system.
Many kanjis in the Japanese text will default to the glyphs in the system Chinese font. However, the kanas as well as some kanjis are not included in the Chinese font will be rendered with a failback font, frequently in a very different style.
Something similar happens when you use Spanish accent letters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ) with fonts that don’t include them.
It’s amazing to me that many people seem to not notice or care that random letters don’t match the font style and they keep using those fonts for Spanish.
This is beautiful for grating discomfort. And for over the top insanity, there's always Z̴͔̊ͤͨ̀ͅä͚̦̯̤͟l̸̤̙̰̥̝ͭ͛ģ͍̫̙̬̪̺ͯo̧̞̖ͤͪͦ͒ ̵̗͍̩͔̀ͭͪţ̪̯̘̭̤̲̰͗͒ͩͬe̢̤̙͇̘ͩ̓ͤx̷̩̤͕̺̍ͅt̩͔̪̠̞̳̟̱͂ͦ͜
I've got an Instagram post titled with Zalgo and it is the only one that instaload can't backup because of the resultant filename. Which amuses me greatly.
Nice! GGG has some awesome posts on their dev process. In this case I really hope the resource manager remembered to remove the cached pointer when it unloaded the font, or (until another font is loaded at the same address) it's a use-after-free waiting to happen. :S
Reminds me of how Twitter uses an odd font for @usernames where the I and 1 and l have serifs so you can tell them apart, but is otherwise sans serif. Every time I see a username with an I in it it looks weird.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadhmm.
I guess that must be where stuff like
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/bewar...
comes from.
It seems quite risky, I’m used to not downloading and executing shady programs, but downloading and executing… characters… is hard to avoid.
I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.
Not sure what you're talking about; it did and there are many fonts that use it.
Agreed! The x-height [0] (among other things) differs jarringly between the serif and sans fonts used.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-height#:~:text=In%20typogr....
Yes.
As others said, stylistic alternatives definitely exist in most font packages, especially commercial ones used with Adobe products. So the fact that they are not widely used outside of graphic design probably goes back to people generally hate fonts that look handwritten for anything besides wedding invitations.
The original and better case against Comic Sans was that there were much better handwritten, comic-text-style fonts and that Comic Sans was a particularly bad instance of one.
Just ask Dave Gibbons:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/12/dave-gibb...
>"It's just a shame they couldn't have used just the original font, because it's a real mess. I think it's a particularly ugly letter form," he says. "The other thing that really bugs me that they've used an upper case I with bars on it: it looks completely wrong to the comic eye. And when you see store fronts done in it, it's horrible."
It's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations /and the only available for anything 'fancy' on the Average Computer used by Average Joe/.
if any of the objection is to the precise letter drawings, ok fine, give me a different one, but the overall concept, I'm Comic Sans all the way.
A warning I won't ignore is one written by a friend about something unusual or unexpected. "The supposedly insulated handle on this pot will melt your fingers off"
I just think that comic sans draws my eye in, in a way that Copperplate instructions from HR do not. Don't tell HR, or they'll start using Comic Sans.
These are fonts that are not just eye-catching, but actively painful to look at for how striking they are, to the point that they're even maybe a bit hard to read (but you still end up reading them, because it's hard to look away.) These are fonts that scream at you — fonts HR would never dare to use, even knowing they "work", because it'd be unprofessional to be that attention-grabbing. It'd be the typographic equivalent of blowing an airhorn in a small room in order to interrupt someone.
Or you can go the other way, and just put an actual picture of the grim reaper on your sign: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/58b3vj/stop_prevent_y... .
(Though actually, oddly enough, something about that typography makes me feel threatened even without the image. I think that particular tight leading with all-caps lettering using a high-weight sans-serif font, puts me in mind of specific public civic-engineering uses of typography to warn people away from high-voltage power substations, large AM radio transmitters, hydro-dam spillways, etc. It's a subtle thing, but it's enough to make it really not look like your standard HR print-out. See also: the old shield of the US Department of Civil Defense — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_in_the_United_St.... Seeing that on something is just unsettling — for purely typographic reasons!)
Yes, like a clown talking to you while honking his nose. Amusing and ignorable.
You don't use it for a business letter for the same reason you don't use Times New Roman, Garamond, Baskerville, &c, for a comic.
[1] https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/brush-script
Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.
https://www.fontshop.com/content/enable-contextual-alternate...
call me OCD but when I look at stuff written in script my eyes check to see if all the a's are the same, all the b's are the same, all the... and then what I see is manufactured uniformity, a communique from The Machine.
it wouldn't take much variation (say, three different a's) to make me feel a sense of relief that it's warmer and cuddlier
I still see it on newspapers' websites when they're using a custom font and the headline contains an accented character.
Shit, I need to change my password.
An insidious little niggle that grates upon the mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1D3ebc6h0
I'm not sure of the extent to which you could use ligatures to tweak the serifs, rather than remove them completely (if possible - frustration will be maximised if the reader is unable to tell what's wrong, even after they come to believe that something is wrong).
handle becomes handel
Or strip out past tense:
fined becomes fine
Also: You're always spelled as your; Oxford commas never; Two becomes too Public becomes pubic
https://gist.github.com/tonyb486/0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56c...
An example: https://tmp.tonybox.net/chbgr.htm
Rasterized and OCR'd: https://tmp.tonybox.net/ocr.pdf
Big fan of on-a-whim-experiments.
Many kanjis in the Japanese text will default to the glyphs in the system Chinese font. However, the kanas as well as some kanjis are not included in the Chinese font will be rendered with a failback font, frequently in a very different style.
There is a solution if you're using Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration/Examples...
It’s amazing to me that many people seem to not notice or care that random letters don’t match the font style and they keep using those fonts for Spanish.
> Times New Bastard is a modified version of Nimbus Roman No. 9 L and Nimbus Sans
https://web.archive.org/web/20201229053709/https://hellvetic...
https://twitter.com/glitchr_
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3277814
Would be much more annoying if every so often a letter was eve r so s|ightly wrong.