My buddy Tom Lord made an interesting comment on Facebook and I’m reposting here as I might want to refer back to it later:

Thomas Lord:

Morozov’s self-awareness; he tweets:

<< Me: The “Emperor” wears no clothes! “The Emperor”: But have you
done anything useful to say that? And doesn’t it serve us well to
pretend? >>

Of course, Morozov doesn’t mention that “the emperor” here is also
saying “Even so, what are you going to do about it? Hey everybody,
this Morozov is just a Mr. Negativity wanker!”

He’ll be permanently unable to reason with them and his present
experiments are an exercise in trying to reason past them.

Dave Crossland More Oreally debacle? [http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler]
Thomas Lord It’s a much larger project he’s got going.
Dave Crossland Summary?

Thomas Lord:

It’s problematic to make the following distinction but for sake of
summary his project can be split into two parts: an intellectual
project and a political action heavily rooted in realpolitik.

The intellectual project is pretty straightforward:

There are various related, mutually-sympathetic contemporary
discourses about “technology”, “the internet”, “open”, and so forth.
When I say “there are” these discourses — you have to understand
these in their specificity primarily: Where they are, in whose mouths,
and what functions they are performing in the order of things. Morozov
is contending to establish some generalizations we can make about this
discourse and he’s doing so by looking at specific cases and finding
commonalities, lines of transmission, interesting shifts in discourse
and so forth.

As a schematic example of what is at stake (my example, not his)
you can trace pretty direct lines between O’Reilly, Esther Dyson, many
others … and the Obama administration’s approach to health care
reform. Similarly, in that O’Reilly piece, Morozov notes O’Reilly’s
fairly direct influence over the Obama administration’s approach to
government “transparency”. My example, again: The Lt. Governor of
California has recently published a book and is on an informal
speaking tour basically parroting O’Reilly, promoting the vision of
“government as platform”, etc.

The intellectual part of Morozov’s project is to note these
inter-twined “conversations”, examine their structure, and critique
them.

Critiquing that discourse as if it were intended to be rational
discourse is a bit like shooting ducks in a barrel. Therefore, Morozov
tries to at least to do a very thorough job. For example, when he
boasts of having read pretty much every word O’Reilly has published or
video of himself on youtube, I believe that’s roughly true.

In any event, the intellectual project is carefully analyze that
discourse and critique it in ways that are relevant to the real-world
effects of that discourse.

The other part of Morozov’s project — the one I called a
“political action heavily rooted in realpolitik” — is much harder.

The kind of intellectual critique I described above is fairly easy
and it is also fairly easy for people like O’Reilly and Dyson to, as a
class, ignore and even bury. One of their “go to” strategies when they
can’t avoid confrontation with the critique is just what I mentioned:
the fiat declaration that their critic is must a mr. negativity, not
looking for the societal win-win but only to tear down others.

Morozov’s political action project is to try to use his standing
in the world (e.g., where he can get published) to overwhelm those
anti-intellectual lines of defense deployed by people like O’Reilly,
Wu, ESR, Doctrow, Shirkey, etc.

He’s trying to make it impossible for them to keep speaking the
way they do in these matters, to the people they usually speak that
way, without beginning to provoke laughter from the audience.

And he’s trying to popularize a mode of critique and analysis that
is really insistent on grounding things in specificities rather than
insisting first and foremost on ideological abstractions.

His success is by no means guaranteed but he’s gotten farther than
I would have expected.

These are live blog notes from the Libre Graphics Meeting 2013 held in Madrid Spain.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment. Thanks!

Gentleman: Thanks for being here … remember there is a crisis and contributors may fear being exploited. this space can be a home for you to contribute autonomously. …

Femke: The LGM has grown in 8 years from an informal meeting to the most important meeting for people interested in tools for digital design practice. Its focus is libre software; we can take it for granted. None of the meeting could have happened without being int he ecology of free cultulre. A codebase, a body of thought, a philispogry, a legal framework, that is what makes this meeting possible.

People have flown in from around the world, people who know each other for a while, who have met on IRC also a long time but never met in the flesh, and those who are new. Thanks to them, its important to be open those who are like us, seriously interested.

We are here to be inspired, to find new peers, to meet old friends, and be challenged by unexpected perspectives. Thats why new people are more than welcome.

This year we added a slogan, ‘future tool’. Do we need one? What does it mean? Future tools, we haven’t fix longstanding bugs. I want to take the meeting serioulsy as a way to do R&D free software style. We dont have big companies to think about what the future will bring, its here that we will do this together.

In the context of rapidly developing web tech, creative coding, lowering barriers to entry for new users, it seems a good time to ask these questions. I want to bring you all together as artists, designers, developers, and find a way to all speak to each other and learn from each other.

This is the best moment to sit around the table, share expeiences, and share ideas. Think about what needs to be done on the list from yesterday and what to put on the list for tomorrow.

Lady: We are focusing on collaboration in tools. We are in a new building we are inaugrating and we have a chance to present these processes to more people. The interactios workshop, tools for a editable world, starts on Monday next week. Before then we have presentations of the 9 projects that will be worked on. The model is to incorporate anyone who is interested in the project, we welcome all kinds of profiles, people and skills to be invovled, full time or part time. 2nd, the libre graphics workstations downstairs, in operation for some months now, and these are open for study and use by anyone, profesisonals or amateurs, to learn and research and develop their projects there. We’ve been in collaboration with 2 design schools in Madrid, their tutors and students have helped a great deal. I also want to invite you to participate in the workstations this week, open laboratories interconnected to bring together different worlds, and present the projects and initatives to the general public. we hope visitors to the medialab prado will see all the projects being developed in this space in the building. also, teh communication campaign we put together to increase the profile of this meeting; we’ve been working with the lafkon (?) study to incorporate the questions of users and the public, how they see the world of libre graphics.

- – - -

We have this huge screen on the side of this building. We made a space invader game, it was great. we held a workshop on how to make games for it. but its a very low resolution, a special computer to drive it. we wanted to open the screen to more participants. a huge expensive things, we wanted more use.

we have this web app for this. a programming env. we dont use the traditional langauges, processing or open frameowrk; we use the JS version of processing. you write processingjs code.

- – - -

Fonts of DOOM

http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2013/program/

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom

http://www.robofab.org/objects/model.html

http://www.zeromq.org/

https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/

http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html

- – -

In Producing OSS, Karl Fogel asks, why do volunteers contribute to libre software?

He says understanding their motivations allows us to attract more contributions. The mortality rates is also often unexamined. Then we can understand the rules to share recognition and status. These are important concepts, more important than we might think.

Elinor Ordstrom has a book, el gobierno de los bienes comunes. There are rules on status and rules on surveillance and protection. in Wikipedia there are patrols to eliminate errors and fix vandalism. Ordstrom studied those who took advantage of a commons.

Another factor is how to make a living.

When Felipe and I started to work, I thought of Franz Boaz, a German anthropoloist who went to Canda and the US. He went to Canada and met with trides and documented the potlatch. Its an economic practice that can hepl to understand the way these communities work. What happens in Wikipedia is like what Boaz write about. ‘The social organization and secret societies of the Kwakiuti Indians’

The potlatch is a yearly ritual, where those who wanted to be chiefs woudl give away all their belongings or burn them or break them or share them. there are 2 functions to share things and destroy them. what sense does it make from an economic perspective, for a 21st century person? it also didnt make sense for 19thC misionaries. They saw it as a mental problem. There were times when lots of material goods were burned. It was a ‘differential logic’ as anthropologists call it. If I wanted to be chief, I must transform my material goods into symbolic goods. The chief would not have symbolic power with material goods; the social capitial came from the phsyiscal capital. That’s the basic idea.

Felipe started the big databases of wikipedia, and i started interacting with wikipedians. my username was boaz, so people could trace my background

There was a long tradition in native american culture about how people gained their names. Wikipedia handles are similar.

Karl Polanyi studied pre capitalist production methods, a famous anthropoligist. If we look at captirlaim, labour had to find its price, currencies were self regulared. But in libre software, there is no price for labour, it is intangible. There is no logic of accumulating financial captial. So people see it as an anomaly. In my studies I have met many people who express this view. They can’t understand how it works the way it does.

There are different logics of accumulation of capital. Altruism can create interest; that disinterested behaviour can create interest. In the academy, there is fear that has little to do with the world, that knowledge is shared freely, makes important value for students in their careers. We see that logic in wikipedia also.

Another scholarly comment: People talk about libre software as a gift economy. But it is not. Marcel Mauss write about this. The gift economy he defined as a gift cirle, you give me somethign and i give you in return. but in a gift economy, its not automatic. if i give a present, you are not obligated to gift me back. its not disintereted behaviour. its not a question of something in return, its something else. that was our hypothesis.

This is for wikipedia: if i give my time, work, knoweldge, i expect acknowledgement and prestige. that is the only captiral in the community. how is this carried out? i dont know if you’re familiar with other parts, the back stage, its less well known. wikipedia is strictly regulated.

- – -

13:20
Tau Meta Tau Physica
Susan Spencer
www.taumeta.org

The Tau Meta Tau Physica open source patternmaking software is calling for collaborators to create an interactive prototype built to HTML5 specifications using Processing.js. Tau Meta Tau Physica replicates manual patternmaking processes in code. The project is focused on generating sewing patterns. The current menu-driven batch application is written in python and runs only on Linux. Implementing the software with Processing.js will allow the program to run on multiple operating systems and will add an interactive user interface. Collaborators will be re-designing the software engine, user interface, and project roadmap. Collaborators will learn how to use Tau Meta Tau Physica to create design patterns. The resulting code, design patterns, video and documentation will be posted on the www.taumeta.org website.

Susan: I tried prototypes as Inkscape Extension, Java, Python… Javascript won. Our web app will be at www.thepatternshare.com

The alpha is at www.thepatternshare.com/sharedemo

The idea is that non-libre and libre patterns can be published in the same format, and the non-libre items will have warrantees.

We’re better positioned for collaboration, we I’d love to chat to Kune about adding all their features to this.

Q: magnatune sells CC music; when you said the library will offer free and commercial patterns, will there be commercial libre patterns too?

A: RMS sent me an email out the blue, they wanted to make sure all patterns were libre. the code itself will be GPLv2+ which i find a good unviersal license for any libre sofwtare, it allows the right things, prevents the wrong things, its loose in its defintion of everything else. the output of the code will be CC licensed, patterns are artworks in US, so the drwaings are copyright, the pattern itself is copyright, and so if the users understand their patterns can be licensed the way they wish, under CC, I think the CC can cover all bases. Any garment you make with the patterns aren’t covered by these licenses.

Q: why processingjs instead of paper.js or raphael?

- – -

Friday April 12th

10:00: Free-ness as an aspect of type design.
——————————–

Vernon Adams

“`
Looking at how libre fonts have driven type technology on the web. Argues that on the web, ‘being free’ is a vital technological aspect of a font, just like ‘legibility’ or ‘foreign language support’. Looks at how libre fonts have been adopted in huge numbers by designers of the web, and how libre fonts can enable high levels of usage and adoption that proprietary fonts cannot allow. Looks at how libre font designers could learn a few lessons from the fashion industry to inform on “what fonts will be used the most?”
“`

I’m Vernon Adams, I’m a typeface designer and I mostly make libre fonts. I’m talking about freeness as a technical aspect of type design.

Here’s an Emil Ruder quote from 1969, a swiss modernist graphic designer and typographer. ‘Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. A printed work that cannot be read becomes a product without a purpose.’

I’m suggesting that if we take that logic to today, then libre fonts have the most utility for typesetting the information on the web today. So I see freeness as any other aspect o type; like legibility, cross platform functining, etc.

Why has REAL, active tet become so important to the web?

‘Real’ means its actual text in HTML, not images of text. Such real text is key to the web. Why?

Its very fast to load, compared to bitmaps or flash. searched, indexed, cached, mined, tagged. it can be easily share, copied, redsitributed.

Visually it can be scaled wihtout loss of resolution or clarity.

You can style it with CSS and ‘themed’ in that way.

Most importantly; people produce A LOT OF TEXT on the web.

So, the solution to this was in implemtning CSS3, the @font-face rule. I expect you’re familiar with this, you upload your font to your web server, call the URL from a style sheet, and any page can render text with that font file.

Amazing!

But there was a big problme; proprietary licensing was designed for single or multiple users, but not MASS amounts of users – readers. The licensing didn’t allow redistribution of fonts like this.

Proprietary fonts used with @font-face could be easily downlaoded, and this was seen as a huge problem by proprietary font publishers.

But today, everyone is a publisher. In print, most people were passive readers. today everyone has a website, we all need fonts. before, fonts were TOOLS FOR PROFESSIONALS. but now we all need fonts.

My response to this situation was to make libre fonts for the web.

Here’s an example, Oswald.

I designed this from the ground up to be a libre, easy to use and popular typeface. Here’s a quote from SOCAL professor Johanna Blakley – ‘I see fashion as an example of an industry that emonstrates that sometimes strict ownership regimes are not th be way way to monetize things, to sell goods, or to increase innovation. A lack of ownership can also be a kind of incentive.”

She says that fashion isn’t subject to a dynamic where people can say “I can do that too” – not counterfeiting. She says it leads to: Democratisation of fashion design; faster emergence of new trends; incentive to create new trends; and acceleration in creative innocation.

Oswald is a classic 20thC Gothic typefaces, I looked at a lot of mid 20th C faces and mashed them together. I made many design choices that make it suitable for the web.

In the first 12 months, its development was done in a ‘release early release often’ style, I got feedback from users and made updates every few weeks.

It got picked up by the Occupy movement of their ‘free toolkit’ for making posters.

Its seen 650M+ times per week, its the 2nd most popular web font in the world after Open Sans which Google uses on its own websites as its corporate identity type.

This is how I concieved it, I wanted it to be a free, easy to use and popular face and that’s what its become.

Thanks!

Nahtan Willis: You say freeness is a attribute of type now. The FSF has the 4 freedoms, and I guess the feedback you get about change requests is part of that. Have you seen people directly modify it?

Vernon: Its rare for libre fonts. It doesn’t happen a lot that people fork designs into new ones. I have had people send me Greek or Cyrillic or other fixes directly, though.

Nathan Willis: Freedom to study it, how do you see freeness, in terms of improving the ability of people to learn from fonts.

Vernon: As much source material as possible is good to share for that. Scanning sketches, even. As much as possible makes it easier. I try to do that as much as time permits on my blog. others just make the final font under a free license, but thats ok too.

Femke Snelting: I’m not worried about this myself, but type designers say that with the move to ePub and web, how will they make a living? can you tell us about how to survive giving your fonts for free?

Vernon: I start by a mixture of being paid to make libre fonts, by Google, doing custom work, customising libre fonts for people who want an extra weight who will pay for that just for them. i dont see a conflict, people aspire to sell their fonts and they don’t manage it. i think they could make more money with libre fonts. you see that now, even larger foundries respond to this, by making libre fonts because it keeps them int he spotlight, in the market. you survive by getting your brand out there.

Dave Crossland: Do you think reserved font names are important? if i modify oswald, can i call it ‘oswald next’?

Vern: I have a loose relationship to my work, I’m happy for people to do what ever they want. If it was a propreitary foudnry, taking it and trying to proprietorize it, that would be an issue for me. The font name, thats a licensing issue. I’m not sure how the OFL is with this.

Dave Crossland: the OFL has the RFN as OPTIONAL. do you take the option?

Vernon: No, I’m happy for someone to take Oswald and call it “Oswald Something”

- – -

How we wrote a FontForge manual in three days
——————————————————–

“`
How we wrote a FontForge user manual in three days
Nathan Willis, Vernon Adams (t.b.c.)
glyphography.com/fonts

In December five people representing FontForge joined two other free software projects at Google’s 2012 Documentation Camp; there the team participated in a FLOSSManuals-run book sprint and produced “Start Designing With FontForge: a guide to making type.” This talk is a report on our experience with the “unconference” portion of the camp, and on what we learned during the intensive writing-sprint portion of the week (not to mention the process of maintaining the book since). The book sprint format forces participants to think about their documentation in a new light, and it offers real benefits to any project whose users are not other developers. Focusing on the reader has even helped change the conversation about FontForge development in the intervening months.
Nathan Willis is a part-time type designer, full-time free software advocate.
“`

The ‘how’ of this isn’t so interesting. We used booki software. Whats interesting is what we learned about writing a manual quickly and fontforge itself. There’s thing about our process you might find useful.

We? It was Verno ADams, Ben Martin, Eben Sorkin a professional designer in Boston, Jason Pagura a hobbyist in type design for a long time in the bay area.

and Molly Sharp, who works at O’Reilly and is an editor.

Vern and Eben are trained professional type designers. Jason has been around a long time, knows FF really well, and

Ben is someone who looked into the abyss of the source code. I am an hobbyist type designer too and a tech journalist, writing 1,000s of words a week about libre softwarefor years. so thats useful for a documentaion project.

Vern and Eben are very different type designers. Vern is a active FF user, answers FF questions, Eben is not as active or experienced with FF but is a theorist and likes to talk about type in general. They both lecture a lot too.

So, Google host in Mountain View a Summer of Code ‘Doc Camp’ – in December, of course – and so you get a mix of people who can attend that. The GSoC office hosted it, but FLOSS Manuals ran the event on the ground.

FLOSS Manuals is great, been around a long time, and if you don’t know it check it out. The sprint events is a new idae, to gather a team in a place for 5 days to make something in that time.

FLOSS Manuals runs on free software but is not requried to to be used for that.

3 libre software projects were picked, EVergreen ILS, eToys (a kids programming system based on squeak) and FontForge. We all follow the same pattern:

1. 2 Unconference days together to brainstrom our projects and see what a manual is like

2. 3 writing days

You see everyone faces the same problems, keeping it up to date, having users and developers speak the same language.

At the end of the week, there’s a Print on Demand shop that produced the books OVERNIGHT. I have one in my hand here.

The Booki software produces eBook formats too.

So, first day you decide the title for the book. The title determines the scope of the book. Decide the Table of COntents. They you split up and have everyone write a chapter each – in parallel.

Then you review each other’s chapeter. And then it gets done!

Book Type is managed by Source Fabric who make journalism software. It was called Booki when FLOSS Manuals maintained it.

Its a WYSIWYG book editor. It can lock chapters, allows to comment on things… its better than a plain text entry field.

It output HTML, ePub, PDF… It uses Calibre.

So, the title was “Start designing with FontForge, a GUIDE to making type” – its a GUIDE, not a manual,

When you make a book in a week, you must relearn the application, thinnk of the POV of the reader.

You learn the user see their tasks, see their inefficiences and unused features.

There is a finality about making a book. Its not like a wiki where you make a ToC and never finish it.

—

10:40 Designing a Libre Font Specimen Book
————————————————-
Manuel Schmalstieg, greyscalepress.com
“`
This talk presents the outcome of an intense 5-day graphic design workshop, during which a team of twelve students (of HEAD University of arts and design, Geneva) created a book of type specimens entirely made with libre fonts. The book has been mass-produced with cheap print-on-demand technology. This book will be an unprecedented graphic item, since it differs from previously existing specimen books in various ways:
* It will focus on “body type” – type that is suitable for long reading. No futuristic display fonts, no cybernetic ninja glyphs, no blood-dripping zombie script. Body type – workhorse fonts for real content. The most unforgiving stress-test for a typeface.
* It won’t aim for quantity. We won’t try to impress the reader by the number of fonts included in the book. The fonts will have all the space they need to breathe and show their character.
* It will be an open book, the source (Scribus) files will be openly available and invite further modifications and improvements by other designers. The repository is here (you can already see some first alpha tests): https://github.com/greyscalepress/font-specimens
“`

When you read a long text, you don’t want to see beautiful letters you want to read the text. the font should become invisible. this depends on the langaue, as the texture of text changes between Spanish and German.

So type publishers make specimen sheets. Here’s a Caslon one. A specimen page on Google Fonts looks like this; short paragraphs, and titles are different sizes. In a small space the type publishers shows off the font; they want to show what it can do and they want to sell it.

This is the famous FontBook by FontShop. 100s of fonts. Each has a few lines showcasing it. It has short paragraphs of only 4 lines, so this was always very frustrating as its like a musician selecting a sound from a sound library

They stopped making the book now, just an iPad app, but paper is essential for me as type looks different on screen.

Also the Free Font Index (but its freeware not libre fonts) book.

So these books haev too many fonts, but too little space for each font, and always the same Quick Brown Fox text or Lorum Ipsum.

print on demand allows type produces to make their own specimen books. Jean Baptise Levee, for example, makes these books showing the beauty of the glyphs and curves, its nice and impressive, but for use cases like books and magazines its not useful.

You have too little paragraph text samples and too much title text.

With libre fonts, Print on Demand, we can just make our own for libre fonts!

If you make your own specimen book with propreitary fonts you’d need to be rich to buy licenses for everything you MIGHT use.

I like the booksprint idea, so I suggested it at the RMLL in Switzerland. I suggested it to design schools but had no interest, then by chance I got a gig at the design department in Geneva.

I got a dozen design students for a week to do it.

Rules of the project: Any libre font, useful for text, and make the book as open as possible; libre software, documented, source files available.

First, we designed a good specimen layout. Looked at many existing ones. Lots of discussions. Sudents wanted lots of white space, I wanted ots of text

Also we had a search for the sample text to use in the layout. Its a tricky choice too. Fred Smeijers ‘Type Now’ book was great for us, he has some pages of type specimens, and he uses a single stream of text thorughout all the pages. Its a text written by PLantin about the production of type in the 16th centiry. So you can READ the real text, as well as look at it.

It must be French text, public domain, and w found “l’eve future” that inspired Mechanical Bride and Blade Runner. Its 85,388 words, so would it have enough text for us? 15 specimen layouts per perosn, 12 people, X words per specifmne, yes.

So we did it! The book exists, you can buy it online via Amazon, and we have copies here.

The sources are on github, I got all the students commiting. We also had some interaction with the designers of the fonts like @omnibustype. A debate in the school if we could publish it?

I thought would like them do things freely at the start and then go to scribus. But that didn’t work, the time pressure means to decide the tools at the start.

Conclusions: get the book, make your own!

Q: How much is the book cost? Can we buy it here?

A: Its €15 or trade me something

- – -

10:50 It takes a team to make a font
————————————
Alexei Vanyashin, 110design.ru
“`
The world of libre web typography is developing at a fast pace. More and more websites and blogs benefit from using opensource typefaces. Bloggers become more experienced in tailoring properties of webfonts to suit their need. Still not everybody truly understands how these typefaces are created. This talk will throw light on the process of designing type. Producing high-quality fonts requires a team of collaborators. This includes a type designer, type director, kerner, and hinter. I will share my collaborative experience that resulted in releasing 30 opensource fonts for the Google Web Fonts library, and explain how the team interactions work. My other focus will be on the co-authorship aspect of developing opensource multiscript fonts. Recently I assisted many designers in their efforts to add Cyrillic extensions to their work. My job is to ensure that the Cyrillic forms are correct, while the designers are responsible for the graphic details of their typefaces. For this purpose I launched learncyrillic.tumblr.com — an educational blog with the aim of openly spreading knowledge on the subject, and helping designers create their first Cyrillic.
“`

I am a designer from Russia, my foundry is Cyreal. We make libre fonts in Russia, Ukraine and Armenia. We’ve made 27 families for use and download in Google FOnts, and here are some.

This is Podkova, and sometimes we have outside contributors who modify them and fork them. One is Fajne Fonty who made a localized polish verision.

TODO FIND THAT

This is Lora. Its very popular on the web. its good in text.

Volkhov, another 4 style family. Its the body font for the LGM field book, tahnks!

That our fonts are libre maens thy can be embedded in mobile apps. MarvinApp is ebook reader that uses Lora and Volkhov.

All fonts are SIL OFL.

Here is Lobster, we see it everywhere. I made a Cyrillic for it.

Here’s a design workshop in Moscow that used it. A state project used it. A student ‘Lobster Face’ project, student web proejcts using it. Burger Kind in Lviv used it. Flying here to Madrid, the in flight magazine uses it in its logo!

Lobster has ligatures and terminals and I made these

Jacques Francois, a revival with a shadow version, you can combine them too.

Wire One, a modular font. with dot terminals.

Junge is a calligraphy revival. This is a hitning test of it. It was published in TypoDarium.

This is Vidaloka, which has Cyrillic.

Marmelad.

Artifika. Vern has made Tienne, a mix of Artifika and Droid.

Another project is http://learncyrillc.tumblr.com with the aim to openly spread knowledge on how to design correct cyrillic. Here is the work I do; a collaboration with Eduardo Mazo, here is a colalboration with Georg Duffner on EB Garamond.

If you make a cyrillic type, email me! I will provide feedback.

I would like to invite you to a modular type workshop at 14.30.

Thanks!

Vernon Adams; What are the practicalities of collaboration?

Alexei: SOmetimes the hinter spot a mistake, 4 eyes better than 2 Contributors from outside, they ask permission to modify the type. THey can release it as a fork or they can submit the change to be included in the official update. We have a request for bold styles, but then that person is making it for themselves.

Manuel: Does working on libre fonts change the way you work in contrast to a traditional foundry?

Alexei: We are open to any collaborators. That more people are involved is different. In a prorpetairy prijects, its closed, you don’t share trade secrets. I’m thinking of pushing our projects to github so its easier to submit changes for inclusion.

Erik Schriver: What does github do to your workflow?

Alexei: Yeeah, pushing projects on Github, we need sources in various format, FontLab, FontForge, etc. So its easier to collaborate. Poeple use a variety of font editors.

11:00 Unified Typeface Design
————————————

Raphaël Bastide, http://github.com/raphaelbastide

“`
Unified Typeface Design is a proposal for the standardization of typeface design in an open source context. It also aims for the promotion of open source typography by introducing a transversal and flexible classification. Technically, UTD is a folder architecture to organize font sources, inspirations and references. It is also a JSON file containing useful meta informations about the typeface and its repository.
Raphaël Bastide, graphic designer, hacker, open source evangelist, was born in 1985 in Montpellier, France. He currently lives in Paris and works as a freelance graphic designer and artist.
“`

Hi! I’m Basti, I’m a french graphic designer and artist. and i like to use libre software and fonts in my work.

A question I pose, How to find a font? Today? I have some difficulty to find fonts, its important for graphic designers to find the one they want, precisely and quickly.

Find them by license, because I want to use libre fonts. I would like to find fonts that are similar to a font I can think of. And I would like to have tags from the designers and from myself to find things in anyway; a feeling, a time period – tags extend they way we can find things.

And existing classifications, but I thnk they are not so useful any more for the contemproary variety of designs.

So, first we must identify a font. Where to find one? One your hard disk? Its not my workflow though, most designers don’t want 10,000s of fonts on their font list. So the answer is to find them on the web.

That’s the best way to find fonts with a libre license.

So how can we identify libre fonts on the web?

My idea was to have a standardised repository layout for libre font projects. Sources, doucmentaiotn and a design guide so that if i fork it, i can know the idea of the design. binaries and web font formats, specimen images and also in use images and links to see how others use it.

We need a METADATA file too, for listing contributors, tags, related fonts, and the tools used to work with the source files and to recreate similar shapes if the shapes come from a tool’s shapes. and i like to know this trivia

Who can profit from this?

Type Designers can find it convenient to use.

Font users get more files.

All the libraryes (OFLB, GWF, LOMT, TypeKit, etc) can use it

Its on github! Please enter the discussion there, let’s make a standard we can all use!

(My slides are made with Whois Mono)

Ludi: Thank you, I think this is an important project. I like the categories and metadata on the history of the project, and I think its good to highlight the licensing of the fonts.

Basti: I agree, there is a long effort to have designers read and understand licenses.

- – -

11:10 The development of ttfautohint, a TrueType auto-hinter
—————————————————————

Werner Lemberg
“`
I will talk about ttfautohint, a tool to add automatically generated hints to TrueType fonts, based on the auto-hinter from the FreeType library: its development, combined with some technical detail, its history, the current state and its future.
On the computer side, I’m the maintainer of FreeType and GNU troff, also authoring the CJK package for LaTeX and working on German word lists and hyphenation patterns. On the musical side, I’m a conductor, composer, and singers’ coach working in Vienna.
“`

This is a amsll project, an autohinter for TrueType font that uses the fretype autohinting engine.

www.freetype.org/ttfautohint

You take a unhinted font (TTF or TTC) and you send it to the program and it returns a hinted font. The basic idea is that font editors will use this as basic hinting and improve it as needed. Automation can never be perfect!

This small project is a library, so it can be included in editors. Its still under development, though.

I have 2 simple programs to use the library, a CLI and a GUI with Qt.

This is the Qt framework on my GNU+Linux box. Qt is fully cross platform. I provide a windows binary, but i still need time to fully investigate making Mac OS X packages. You can compile it easily yourself. But I didn’t reach a point to make my own Mac OS X budnle.

Why do you need this program?

The number of people who are capable to do TT hinting is limited. This makes it expensive. Hinting a large family is very expensive.

If you don’t do high level hinting, using Microsoft Visual TrueType, if you dive into the real TT code, you will see its a black art. It looks like low level assembly code. The number of people who can work with it is very limited. A handful in the whole world!

ttfautohint is freely available, the same license as FreeType, GPL or FreeTYpe, and its fast: You press the button and its done in half a second.

Examples!

Whatever resolution I select on my laptop won’t be what you see on the projector, so you are welcome to look at these slides offlne.

Liberation Serif is a good exaple, we can show it unhinted, with ttfautohint, and with its top quality hand hinting that is expensive.

So this is unhinted, this is hand hinted.

Ttfuatohint has 2 modes, smooth and strong hinting.

Smooth means the stems can go more to the grid but not totally. If you go totally, you change the color of the texture of the font.

So I think the color of the overall font with smooth ttfuaothinting is better than hand hinting.

If you look at the small size, you can see strong hinting gives more blackness.

So it depends what you want to do; for older ClearType versions the strong hinting is better. ClearType uses a small grid vertically, and if you don’t have strong hinting, you can get very thick lines that are unpleasant.

So for this font, the results of ttfautohint are good!

Here is a magnification of the 4 hinting types.

TTFautohint doesn’t change the vertical lines, so look only at the horizontal lines. On today’s screens we have subpixel rendering so horizinal resoluation is high enough to not need hitning.

How does it work?

There is a 10 year old paper in TUGBoat by me and David Turner, and the ttfautohint documetantion also explains how it works.

Here is a view in fontforge showing the effect of the hitning. with smooth hitning you see some pixels are grye, with strong hinting they are white and the shape is totally aligned to the grid.

The autohinted looks at a global level then the per glyph local level. it finds a baseline, x height line, cap line. Then it tries to align important parts of a glyph to these and the pixel grid.

An important part is a stem: 3 consecutive points, control points or real points, that are aligned horizontally. if ttfautohint finds that line, its a SEGMENT. it will then try to align all segments on a line.

So in this $ you see the bottom of the S moving.

So then it looks for other important points, like corners.

Finally, it calls the ‘interpolate’ function; so after moving the important points, it then aligns all other points with them.

The past

Dave Crossland had the idea for this, he contacted me in 2010 to put freetype hinting back into fonts for non freetype renderers. In 2011 I got funding and in June 2011 I released 0.1. We did a pledgie and got a lot of money from Google, Android, FontLab and Extensis WebINK.

I went 0.1 0.2 0.3 fast, and got to 0.9 when I was far from 1.0. So now I’ve released 0.95 and expect 1.0 later this year.

The future

OpenType support thanks to Harfbuzz by behdad (and handling non CMAP glyphs)

Support for more scripts. Sometimes it would be good to have Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew handled with different ‘global’ values to Latin.

Ways to control the output, fine tune it…

A big long term goal is to make this library integrated in font editors, so that you can use it as a base for hand hinting.

Right now I’m busy with another freetype project, but then I will try to revive the pledgie campaign, so if you are interested in this topic, please don’t hesitate to give me money.

Alexei: Do you have a specific idea for autohinting cyrillic? how is it different for latin?

Werner: no, the algo is the same, but the bluezones will be different. I can imagine a cyrillic set of glyphs have a different cap height. these details can be adjusted; the global parameters can be adjsuted to cyrillic. freetype has a hinter for CJK, they are so different to latin. but LGC are the same for the algo. Arabic even works okay with this algo, but it and Hebrew have very different global zones than latin. When ttfautohing is published with cyrillic support I welcome your detailed feedback

11:30 Design and LibreOffice
———————————–

Miroslav Mazel
“`
A run-down of what the LibreOffice Design team is working on and how people can help
“`

I’m aprt of the LO design team, just 3 volunteers. We dont get much done as other teams; the most common qustion people ask, is will there be a new UI? people suggest, remake the UI totally in the next version. we dont have develoeprs or designers to do that.

instead we do gradual redesign. we focus on what our developers want to do.

We did an Impress Remote design; we did a template manager. we did a new button theme. We bundle some libre fonts, Source Sans Pro, PT Serif. We designed some templates too.

There a 2,000+ icons, we have 2 themes, ‘flat icons’ and updating the current tango theme.

We don’t have many developers interested in UX changes. we propose ‘easy hacks’ to help generate interest, as there are some things very easy to change.

…

We’d also like font library integration. If you send a presentation that uses a libre font, LibreOffice can download it for you from a library (GF, OFLB, etc) so the presentation works correctly.

If you would like to contribute, or if you have ideas how to involve more developers, please let me know

Q: The LibreOffice DOM and scripting interface is messy. Are you interested in designing a cleaner scripting interface?

A: I’ve not heard about that

- – -

12:00 Libre Cinema! Apertus Axiom: the open digital cinema camera

Jehan Pagès, apertus.org

“`
Apertus Axiom will be the first ever open digital cinema camera designed from scratch with openness in mind. The image sensor of choice is the CMV12000 from Cmosis. To ultimately build it, we are working to create a simplified prototype, the Axiom Alpha, whose technical details are still to be ironed out: http://axiom.apertus.org/
We will present shortly the Apertus Axiom cinema camera, the software ecosystem, and the Apertus project as a whole; and will follow-up by a question-answer session. Because Libre Graphics are not only about software, it is also about Libre hardware!
“`

Here is the Arriflex Camera 16ST from 1952, here is a Sony F62 in 2012. The features improved, 3d, high framerate, but as it improved our freedom decreased.

STickers taht say ‘do not remove, warranty voided if removed’!

In 2006 there was a dvinfo.net forum on cameras, and a DIY community started around the Elphel cameras. but it wasnt what we wanted for cinema, its used in google street view.

so 2011 the project begins, and in 2012 we won an award at ars electronica, and created an austraian non profit and a branch company ‘apertus’ in belgium.

In 2013 we plan to use crowd funding to make this happen.

one of the first prototypes was used in the artic!

we have a stereoscopic prototype.

…

- – -

12:20 Make The Movies Free
————————

Sirko Kemter, karl-tux-stadt.de/ktuxs/
“`
In 2001 a professor came up with a new license system for creative work, Creative Commons. In 2004 the first movie under this license system was published. The newspaper called it an “Open Source Movie” but is it a such one? What is an open source movie, is there a definition for them? What is the status of open source movies, do they have a chance? What are the problems of movie makers with open licenses? How to do business with open movies? Are there enough open source tools or the right one to produce open source movies?
The talk will give an overview on the open movie scene and try to give to all this questions an answer.
Sirko is since more then 15 years heavily involved into the floss community, he works and worked on different projects. Was long time chief of program at RadioTux, works for different floss events as graphic designer, propagates the use of free software in talks and workshops. Wrote a Inkscape book and a lot of things more.
“`

…

12:40 It’s 2013. Do You KNow Where My Free Vector Animation Software Is?
————————————————————————
Nina Paley, ninapaley.com

In 2008 I vowed that the only animation software I’d switch to, once I had to give up Macromedia Flash 8, would be Free software. Unfortunately in 2013 I’m still using my old copy of Flash on an old system, because the Free tools I need don’t exist yet. So I’d like to help make them exist, whether it’s a massive Synfig UI overhaul, or something new built from scratch. In this talk I will elaborate on the kind of tools I need, how I currently use Flash, and what I as a non-coder could contribute to such a project: publicity, fundraising, testing and some direction. I have a new feature film in the works which, if made on this not-yet-extant tool, could help popularize it.

I’ve been usign Flash since 2000. Not flash websites, video; i use the magnificnet Flash authoring tool. Adobe bought them and removed the high quality quicktime output options. I needed the pro video output it used to have. That’s the risk of proprietary software!

It happened to me.

I swore I would get new software that is libre software. In 2005.

There is still not good, mature libre vector animation software. I came here to see what the state of things are. I met constantine, Mr Synfig, Mr 2P (?) and chat with them.

Nothing in libre grpahics is mature. ANywhere near as easy and simple, 2p is easy and simple but lacks features; Synfig is powerful but insane, its very opaque. It would take me a long time to learn. They depend on SVGs. But weird distortions can happen to SVGs when they are animated.

…

So, what are the issues?

My new film is illegal. I’ve totally ignored copyright and licenses, use anything I want. What I do should be fair use, but it might not be. Whatever.

If there was a foundation or something, we’d have to be legal, if that was hitched to my project, its something to think about. Do you really want to work with a crazy perosn like me?

This is a preview of the new project, done in Flash.

[The end credit is,

COPYING IS AN ACT OF LOVE

Please copy and share

www.copyheart.org

Nice!]

So this is quite simple as far as pro animation goes. I could try Blender. Is anyone from Blender here?

The more I learn the less I know. I really want good libre vector animation software to exist.

People say, learn to code and make it yourself. When I say I’m committed to free culture, my passion is in the art. Your passion is the code. I want to see pictures move, it won’t work for me to stop doing that and learn to code. I’m too old. If software I want, I might have to upgrade to proprietary software. The movies will be as libre as I can make them, of course.

Q: Why not Blender?

Nina: I don’t know. Its 3d. I hear its comple. Synfig is also complex. Flash is light an elegant. Maya and AfterFx are like tanks. I just want a bicycle. I think it might be ‘too much’ – but maybe not. It has a huge developer community and it has MONEY. That’s the next thing for me.

Q: You can volunteer to direct their next movie. They have 2D graphics stuff now.

Nina: Yes, but my next movie will be illegal and I don’t want to involve others in my illegal activities.

Eric Screiver Q: Its interested to say, I don’t care about licensing, when reaching out to this community. we are divergent and diverse; these licenses are one of the ways we found to have something in common, a social contract that binds us to work together. if you say, blender foundation won’t want to deal with your position, it will make it harder to join the wider movement.

Nina: The movie overall is illegal but all the assets will be legal. Could be used in another project. Its mostly the SONGS that are a problem, and have historical value, so I think its fair use, but governments don’t see it that way.

Eric S Q: Okay, interesting to be civilly disobdenient in a articulated way, but the discourse around it, the movie has things that are illegal, but the whole discourse around it is interesting.

A: Life is short, making art is the most important thing.

Ricardo Lafuente: The idea you need a good free replacement for Flash. I thought that, moving from Photoshop to GIMP. When I get used to GIMP, you find thats the other way round to Photoshop for me now. I wonder, why you don’t try using the libre tools. No criticism, a suggestion: Try them, its 10x harder to make anything, it took me a year to move to GIMP, but then you can say you’re in Synfig, I’m miss A B and C. Everyone wants you to use their tools.

A: I hear you. I try. I have a dedicated GNU+Linux box. It crashes, it doesn’t work, its a mess. If someone is as committed as me, and has that bad an experience, that is not good. I was in NYC, I got a lot of help. Then I though “What is wrong with me” but then I realised its just not mature. 2P is, but it needs to grow. Animation is not like GIMP. Blender, maybe that is mature. Why not make them more mature? I’m not a coder. I can be invovled to a point. I’m also not an administaror. Me starting a foundation, doing filings etc, no. I want to be part but I don’t want to lead it. I am here today! I am trying.

Q: I think with your influence you can start a workshop to work on the UI to get the featurs you want specified. You can organize a hack week for 3 weeks. in 3 weeks you can have more than you expect.

A: Yes, a friend has a farm with a lake in central illinois.

Q: I disagree with your statement on synfig, that it is only for coders. My main work is what I do for a living, is teaching Synfig to kids. For 3 years. THe kids are not develoeprs. More than that, I have a group of kids, mostly girls not boys. They dont know progrmaming, they don’t know much about computers, they see GNU+linux for the first time. They make animation projects every year.

A: If YOU teach them, sure. You taught me.

Q: So what you are missing is the assistenace, knoweldge of how to use it. You get this with interaction with the developers. … You can communicate with develoeprs.

A: Everyone is on different continents. I was in NYC, does ANYONE near NYC know Synfig? nope. I need to be in the same place.

Q: Okay, but we can start to resolve that. Most animation projects, they don’t make it their full time activity.

- – -

12:50 Along school fences.
———————————

OSP (Open Source Publishing) , Pierre Huyghebaert , Alexandre Leray, Ludivine Loiseau, Pierre Marchand, Eric Schrijver, Stéphanie Vilayphiou, ospwork.constantvzw.org/work/
“`
There is a momentum in art schools of asking the question of the role of the digital in design education. There is no clear answer. All students bring a laptop to school. The hard- and the software represent a technological and cultural heritage that is not questioned, and a potential that is not exploited.
Free software culture challenges traditional education paradigms because knowledge is exchanged outside institutional borders, and participants move between roles easily (teacher, student, developer, user).
As a prototype revamp of workshops and print parties, OSP proposes a summer school experiment. A first try to to move across the conventional school model towards a space where the relationship to learning is mediated by graphical software.
This presentation corresponds to a public announcement to join or follow this prototype week.
“`

- – -

13:10 Willem de Kooning Academie strikes back: open source approach in art and design BA education
——————————————

Aymeric Mansoux, Aldje van Meer (tbc) Deanna Herst Kim de Groot (tbc) Jon Stam, wdka.nl

“`
Three years after the LGM presentation “How to Run an Art School on Free and Open Source Software” that described the central role of free software and free culture in the networked media branch of the Media Design and Communication Master at the Piet Zwart Institute, today the Willem de Kooning Academie is back to share its current progress on a new and exciting challenge in its approach to formal education: the design of three new open source related curriculum for art and design BA students. In this presentation we will give you all the what, when, how and why aspects of these new courses and we hope to open up the discussion on topics rising from such a project, namely on the question of openness of open source driven curriculum, technological forecasting within art and design free software communities, hybrid proprietary and open source software environments, licensing and the use of free software tools and infrastructures in digital literacy.
“`

- – -

19:10 Tupi: Open 2D Magic (to rule them all!)
—————————————————
Gustav Gonzalez maefloresta.com
“`
I would love to talk about the evolution of Tupi from a basic standalone animation tool to a free software client of a massive collaboration platform. I will start with a general description of the system architecture and the software features. Finally, I expect to show some examples of the potential of this kind of user experience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odo0FVYfepk).
Short bio: Degree in Computer Science (Universidad del Valle – Cali/Colombia, 2001), Free software user since 1994, Free software advocate / Speaker, Ten years experienced Unix sysadmin, Entrepreneur (free software business models), Qt Programmer, Development Leader of the Tupi Project (starting 3 years ago)
“`

First I want t os whoyou a simple Tupi animation, made by my first betatester in ARgentina. Thanks to him!!

‘Once upon a time at LatinoWare in 2011…’

Its Jon Maddog Hall doing the voice

Where is Tupi made? In a hackerspace @hackbo – www.HackBo.co – as its in that space I can build Tupi every night and I have the energy to work on it. Who is working on ti?

Me. My started, Mae Flower (?)

I am the only developer, but I have 2 friends who help. Andres Calderon love free open hardware, everything he does is libre. Antonio Vanegas is a mobile developer, he loves android. and me.

Tupi started as a 2D vector animation application. When you live in a hacker space, many things happen, you can’t control it – so they project gained sort of kids. First, a project 3 years ago, Tupi. A desktop application that you know. Qt.

ANother project, Tupi Mobile, is a port (earlya stage) that works, an Adnroid client in Java and Qt. Its just an editor, but its in progress and its interesting what you can do with it.

Tupi plugins for other libre graphic apps, inkscape gimp mypaint and blender. this work is barely started but its underway.

TupiPen is our first hardware component. Its a pen with a special features that is toally libre. the specification, if you can use it for all libre graphics applications. The design you see here is teh real circuit design, this is coming for real. I hope to bring the real thing to the next LGM if I can be funded

You have the overview of the projects.

What is the philosphy in common in these projects? We started on a 2D animation software. But with the experiments, we started to see a nice line of work: grpahics + collaboration/workgroups + real time.

Here’s a video.

Youtube: TupiTube: Collaboratieon platform + visual thinking

THis shows 2 people working on a single frame. just that. in an animaiton you do more than that; animation you have farmes, keyframes, layers, scenes. But in a collaboration, you have you in one frame doing something but many others can be working on other frames at the same time.

People say “hey, 2013! the year of collaboration!” but this framework was started in 2007. Why are we late to this?

The basic of animation are simple. you see a green line here, as a developer i see an equation. I feel like neo in the matrix, i see the equations

So everything can be serialised and sent over the network.

You people who are creatives, you and the canvas is a lonely life. WElcome to the orgy!

You can imagine, some of you, think of the possibilties. you will be afraid, you are doing a drawing and then you see something movingg and you don’t know who it is!!

- – -

Where is 0.49? last release was over 2 years ago.

0.49 was planned as a long release cycle, making major changes. Cairo based rendered, faster and more accurate. Caching of common objects for faster rendering. A move to lib2geom. Improved snapping. Many other changes.

Cairo is a 2D rendering library, lots of backends. used in firefox, gdk, webkit, and used in 0.48 for outline mode and PDF/PS export. Its been used for everything now, by 2 GSoC stuednt projects in the last 2 years. Its made it 2x faster, and more for gradiants and filters. 4x less memory use!

Improved gradient toolbar, say bye to the gradient dialog. The strok and fill dialog has enhancements.

Text tool has a lot of work; drop down for all variants of a family, not just B/I buttons. Text unit default is now pt not px. Font family drop down has fonts in the doc at the top, in blue. If fonts used aren’t on the system you get a warning with a red line through the font name. You can select all objects using a selected font family. And you can use CSS style font stacks for fallabck.

You can now ADD NODES AT EXTREMA. useful for designing fonts!

There’s a new measurement tool. Also useful for font design, measures across segments.

A new symbol dialog. SVG has a symbol element, and Inkscape will present them all in this palette.

…

Future?

Port to GTK3
On screen tesselation editing
SVG2 will offer lots of new things! New to figure out how to support that and integrate it into Inkscape.

How to handle mesh gradients? We used inksacpe as test bed for the SVG spec proposal.

…

- – -

12:40 Libre type design: breaking tradition and going new ways
—————————————————————

Manufactura Independente, Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente, manufacturaindependente.org
“`
This talk proposal follows on the issues surrounding libre type design that we began to explore at our last LGM talk, “The awesome things that libre web type enables you to do”.
There is a premise that one must spend considerable amounts of time perfecting a typeface, with timeframes going from months to years. Besides the “creative” part of the work, there’s a significant amount of boring workhorse tasks: checking spacings, comparing glyphs, testing use cases. Another unwritten rule in conventional type design is that typefaces ought to be released only in a finished form. Because most traditional type design is, in one way or another, a commercial endeavour, there is little openness towards unfinished or speculative typeface development.
No wonder, therefore, that thousands of unfinished typefaces sit inside dark corners of designers’ filesystems and notebooks, condemned to the most perverse kind of bitrot: “Someday I’ll finish it”.
Manufactura Independente will go over how applying F/LOSS development principles can provide new paths out of this tired way of working. This will be accompanied by a set of practical examples gathered from the designers’ own experience with collaborative development and typeface design, including a first look at Manufactura’s latest project — Oxshark Fontworks — a proposal they’ve been developing to tackle the aforementioned issues.
“`

…

R: This is a CC liecnsed font from Porto, and we want to not heave neutral type but very local time. This is Crixx, seen used in a sticker from LGM, that is typical of a brussels neighbourhood. This reivival by OSP makes sense there. we dont like this idea of netural.

4. Type is centralised around atypi, myfonts, MATD and T&M in reading and the hague. this leads to small social circles and restricted knowledge. the knowledge of how to ship a final font is limited to those small groups. There are libre foundries like VTF and OSP. This is Google Fonts today, its awesome, it exists, but it poses an issue with centralisation. everything is there, the ecosystem becomes dependent on one decision maker. eg, they introduced the search feature for proprietary fonts that we really disagree with and dont like. chris said this week, we want more agents and more ideas. This is VTF and OSP type foundries.

ANa: what we want is t scene, to bring all the players in teh space together. we want MORE foundries. the idea of a foundry is a space with lots of machines, lot of costs and work. nowadays the foudnry is a website with fonts to download. why not start your own foudnry? you need a font editor, tools for shipping, and the wbesite itself.

r: the idea of a scene is something we found when doing the typeface revival that is used throughout this building. besides the type itself that we were suprised to see in the LGM 2013 identity that we were not involved in at all, and we were talking to pablo over there. he told us that others in spain have used the prinipcesl in the type design workshop we did, and they are really into the idea of a madrid libre type scene! we are very happy about this we need a processing type scene in madrid too, and a london libre type scene. the traditional type scene is there of course, but its a exclusive culture and that is not what we want.

we thought about the train model conventions. the lgm is once a year but thats not enough for us.

ana: whats stopping us from habving a scene? its fun to draw letters, but finishing the font is the hard part. the spacing ,kerning, metadata, documetnation, packaging it. thats stopping many people to publish what they have. so we decided to make a starter kit.

r: so we wanted tiny type tools to go into such a kit. Our github account has this, its fontforge pyton scripts for hacking type. these tools do boring work. what do we have?

fontconvert –woff –eot font.sfd : convert any format to any format

fffilters – shadow, outlines incline, wireframe, and so on. fontforge has these features, so we have simple scripts that makes these.

outline versions of proprietary fonts you normally have to purchase a copy.

transpacing. we like drawing type, we dont liek spacing them. its a long job, takes ages. so we take your font with no spacing at all, you find a similar font with good spacing and you get out a font with ok spacing. this works with kerning too. it works well enough for us.

btw, these scripts can only be used for libre fonts.

we also have a new project, django-foundry, that will produce a foundry website for you.

we will launch our foundry, made with this software:

Oxshark Fontworks

we want to showcase what is happening in our local scene.

ana: going against the idea of ‘someday ill finish it’, we said that we will do the finishing work for anyone who has unfinished work, if you agree to use the OFL. its a way to help our friends get in touch with free culture and tools. these are the fonts we are launching

Fachada by Rui Silva.

Acidente by Luis Camanho, a classic ‘waiting for spacing’ type

Le Jerk, by Frank Adebiaye, a french designer we like a preview on his blog.

Serrier

And of course our colorfonts, we develoepd a JS library and we wanted a library of multi color fonts.

r: why not start a foudnry. go to your designer friends, ask about typefaces they started and left unfinished. EVERYONE HAS THEM! our challenge to you is to publish them. if you have a step in a type design process you dont know how to overcome, let us help you.

Q: the idea that type should be static, there is a reason for that. versions of the same font, means documents change. how to resolve that problem? versioning within the font files?

r: a good question. versioning fonts is a great idea, this shows that v numbering is important, keeping track of versions, in the same way you do with software, you release with notices that it may break things. its something an author should take care of. But i dont think is a total premise, as we dont want fonts to bitrot.

Nina Paley: what will you do if you get overloaded with fonts? i would love it if you did that.

r: well yes, we want to give you tools to build your own foundry. we dont want to be a dumpster of unfinished fonts. its a good challenge though and we are not yet overloaded so send us what you have!

Por Dave Crossland, traducido por Pablo Cosgaya. Publicado en LibreGraphics 1.2.

Copyleft tiene una reputación temible entre la gente de negocios, pues ellos a menudo no entienden de qué se trata. El copyright es fácil de entender: trata sobre cuáles son las restricciones y las libertades que tienes para utilizar y redistribuir una obra. Copyleft es una modalidad de «cadena de favores» para licencias de derechos de autor que propone que si tú redistribuyes el trabajo, debes hacerlo en los mismos términos.

Eres libre de tomar un trabajo libre y mejorarlo. Puedes tomarlo en parte y combinarlo con tus propias partes para hacer algo nuevo y mucho mejor. Lo que promueve Copyleft —y esto es lo que asusta— es que si decides hacerlo, todo tendrá que ser libre. Puedes estar de pie sobre los hombros de los demás, pero entonces los demás también podrán estar sobre los tuyos. O puedes empezar de cero y establecer tus propios términos.

Copyleft ha sido difamado como «viral», como «un cáncer», pues los creadores de software propietario prefieren que las licencias no tengan las posibilidades que ofrece. Los propietarios de licencias pueden tener su pastel y comérselo «en ejercicio de su libertad», mientras que niegan esa libertad a otros. Incluyen en su conjunto propietario partes libres, contradiciendo uno de los principios del trabajo libre. Copyleft es una defensa contra estos abusos. Copyleft es fundamental para las licencias libres más populares de programas y obras de creación, como la GPL de GNU y las Licencias Creative Commons Reconocimiento-Compartir-Igual, respectivamente. Copyleft promueve el crecimiento explosivo y exponencial de la cultura «compartir por partes iguales». Y, como siempre, las tipografías son un tema especial.

El PostScript alimentó los primeros días de la autoedición y requirió la redistribución de fuentes completas junto con esos documentos. Los archivos PostScript (ps) tenían fuentes tipográficas vinculadas. Esto resultaba molesto para los proveedores de fuentes propietarias, pues las fuentes podían copiarse fácilmente, sin tener que pagar licencia alguna. Los controles de Derechos de Fuentes Digitales (DRM) fueron cocinándose a lo largo del tiempo y demostraron ser más problemáticos que aquello que intentaban solucionar… No poder imprimir correctamente un documento es menos molesto que si un diseñador tiene que trabajar con una aplicación y esta no funciona correctamente.

El formato pdf resolvió estos inconvenientes mediante la inclusión de las fuentes en los documentos o, mejor aún, incluyendo sólo las partes mínimas de las fuentes necesarias para imprimir un documento concreto fielmente (la aplicación Scribus se fijó como prioridad tener una impecable exportación a formato pdf). Pero esto volvió complicada la historia de las fuentes copyleft. Una fuente copyleft puede usarse más allá que en los documentos que las contienen, a menos que se haga una excepción a sus condiciones de uso normales: creando un permiso especial para permitir al usuario combinar partes de una tipografía con un documento sin que esto afecte la licencia de textos, de fotografías, de ilustraciones y de diseño.

La mayoría de las fuentes LIBRES tienen hoy en día una licencia Copyleft, como la SIL-OFL o GNU-GPL con las excepciones descriptas en el archivo Preguntas Frecuentes GPL. Las Fuentes Web devuelven al mundo la vinculación entre documentos y tipografías. Esto resulta lamentable para el mundo de los negocios de propiedad, pues la gente puede ver una fuente, esa fuente puede gustarle y el usuario puede descargarla y guardarla sin pagar licencia alguna. Sin embargo, resulta muy favorable para quienes hacen negocios con obras copyleft, pues la distribución copyleft es un motor de generación de riqueza para aquellos que saben cómo manejarla. Más distribución significa más dinero.

El negocio de las fuentes LIBRES está abierto para los diseñadores que pueden tomar una fuente libre y combinarla con sus propias piezas para hacer un diseño de tipografía personalizada para sus clientes –clientes que no pueden darse el lujo de encargar tipos de letra totalmente nuevas, pero que aún así desean renovar su identidad tipográfica. Como todas las empresas querrán utilizar sus fuentes en sus sitios web, la participación en la cultura libre está garantizada por el copyleft. Si ves un tipo de letra que te gusta en una página web y tiene licencia libre, puedes descargarla, guardarla y mejorarla.

El Add-On Web Font Downloader para Firefox ofrece esta posibilidad, por lo que descargar de la web fuentes LIBRES es muy fácil. El próximo paso, mejorar el tipo de letra, subraya la importancia de las fuentes de cada tipografía. El formato OpenType consta de dos versiones: los archivos PostScript de contornos cúbicos y los TrueType de contornos cuadráticos.

PostScript es superior como formato de fuente y se ve muy bien en equipos con FreeType y en Mac OS X, pero no tiene el control de píxeles de TrueType que resulta necesario para verse bien en la mayoría de los equipos con Windows OS. Esto significa que casi todas las fuentes web son distribuidas en el formato aquél que mejor se adapta a tu sistema, después de hacer varias modificaciones en la fuente original. Es precisamente esa la definición del código fuente de GNU GPL, y funciona muy bien para esos programas. Espero que muy pronto sea también una tradición para las fuentes tipográficas.

Puedes obtener el Web Font Downloader ahora en www.webfontdownload.org. El Add-On Web Font Downloader para Firefox favorece estas posibilidades: ahora resulta muy fácil descargar fuentes web LIBRES.

Dave Crossland cree que cualquiera puede aprender a diseñar fuentes. Dave es un diseñador de tipografía fascinado por el potencial de la libertad del software para el diseño gráfico, y dirige talleres sobre diseño de tipo en todo el mundo. Más en: http://understandingfonts.com

These are live blog notes from the 2012 Media Places Conference in Umeå, Sweden, 5-6-7th December 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may, or may not, be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because I mistyped it or misunderstood. If anyone wants corrections, you should email me immediately so I can make a direct edit (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or just post a comment.

Natalie Phillips, Michigan State University “An Interdisciplinary fMRI of Attention and Jane Austen: New Spaces for Mapping Connections in Literature, Neuroscience, and Digital Humanities”

MSU has a new lab ‘Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition’; spanning literary neuroscience (literary experiments), cognitiive history (history of mind) and digital media (creative visualisations).

Literary cognition in the lab, DHLC has cross field engagement, not to apply previous cog studies to literature, but to INTEGRATE humanist questions in experiments themsevlves. THis is new ground for concrete questiosn in humanttiies. Digital text enables this, and neuro tools connect experience of reading to physicality and the mind.

fMRI eye tracking for ‘close reading’ and ‘pleasure reading’; the pilot text was Austen.

Pleasure reading is relaxed (fun paintings) and I wasnt sure peopel could do this in a loud scanner but it was ok. I explain to press, close reading is like looking at a movie with a directors eye.

Elaine Showalter, ‘Teaching Literature’, says ‘Close reading is slow, noticing character development … has more depth’. Goals: Close reading Literature makes better thinkers, we know, but how. We have experience of different perception in the 2 modes of concentration.

2 neuro tools were used.

fMRI is a dynamic picture of blood flow in the brain; where neurons which need blood to function are firing and when.

fMRI-compatible eye tracking, for seeing the saccades, pupilometry, and patters of reading and rereading.

ALso track heart rate, respiration, etc

Literary PhD candidate come in and reads Austen’s Mansfield part. We needed PhD students as they are great close readers, but professors were out because we forgot to read for pleasure

They read the 1st chapter outside the scanner, and time it, so we know how fast they read normally. They read the 2nd chapter all hooked up to the machiens.

9 paragraphs in they are asked to read in one of the 2 modes, and then we end the session asking them to write an essay on what they read.

We displayed the text on a screen with a red or green border to indicate which mode of reading.

We randomised the order, RGRG or GRGR, 8 paragraphs per mode, and reach read the entire chapter.

PRELIMINARY results?

first, what we EXPECTED I spoke to neuroscientists, Human Brain Mapping Conference, and I was told to expect sublte, local effects for this; as people were doing ‘the same thing’ in 2 ways. So we considered zooming in to a partuclarly part of the brain. But having never done this before, I said to get whole brain slides.

And we thought CLOSE reading would activate regions associated with WORK and pleasure reading with PLAY.

So what was the suprising result?

The WHOLE brain is transforming in moving from one mode to another.

Compare the move from pleasure reading to close reading to the move from reading to non reading. a much bigger change, apparently

Why this matters?

Core skills in liberal arts have immense cognitive load

Here’s an 3d image, a view with brain folds, showing close vs pleasure reading

So, neuro has been increasing in sophistication: eg, Picasso Vs Dali, a painter an be predicted from fMRI activity patterns, even when the artwork was new to the person

Functional connectivity, mapping not just regions but the way regions work together. that dynamism is where to go next; using eye tracking, a rich record of what readers notice, vs the essays that they write after. Some of them quote text afterwards, so you can then look at when they read the quoted passage…

Molly Steenson, Princeton University “”To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture:” Nicholas Negroponte & The Architecture Machine Group, 1967–85″

The Architecture Machine Group existed before Media Lab, to be the UI arm of the AI Lab at MIT. There was a close connection and the funding structures that ArcMac has that linked to DoD.

Started in 1975, it was a book, a minicomputer, a book, a bunch of papers. many mandates, what didnt it aim to do?

NN in 75 said, his view of the distant future of archi machines; they wont help us design, we will live in them.

NN always gesturing in his promo photos handwaving notion, demo-ability of thing you cant explain and hand wave past.

A cross discipline lab, half architect and half elec eng. NN is an architect, he thought it was a useful place to use computers in his 68 Masters thesis. this jived with MIT’s lab structure. ‘a neccessary interdisciplinaryy activities’.

J C R Licklider and Marvin Denicoff were in a rotating door between ARPA and Office for Naval Research, and MIT.

…

Microworlds.

URBAN5 , SEEK , INTERACT: failures, had damning reports about ‘GOFAI’ good old fashioned A I.

URBAN5 1967-70. was descended by SketchPad, Ivan Sutherland’s big breakthrough, and users had a light pen and a Q&A dialog to ‘meet the user midway’. would be advanced today, NN thought it was a failure. Computer says to user, ‘many conflicts are occuring.’

SEEK 1969-71. mirrored cubes in a gerbil pen, and software sought to order them while gerbils knocked them over. ‘Life in a computerized environment,’ title of a magazine spread about it. ‘about machines dealing with the unpredictable nature of people (gerbils.)’ and seek was a failure because it tended to CRUSH THE GERBILS DEAD.

INTERACT 1969: About slums. NN said people had no qualms about using a machine, they didnt say anything awkward, and didnt treat the machine as black or white and wrote things they might not tell a white urban planner. But it was a human on the other end of a teletype hmm. User has a TENTANT POWER button on his coat.

Informational Surround.

in this time, defence folks figured that the more automated the battlefield, the more efficient the war. Arch Mac followed thisp path.

Media Room 1977-80

…

Put That There 1980

…

Aspen Movie Map 1978-80

Google sTreet view sytle, view the streets of aspen. with a gestural interface, system says ‘ready’ and user says ‘big red circle’, ‘where?’ and user points and it appears. Ted Nelson’s dream machines like this.

Mapping By Yourself 1977-80

Nascent augmented reality, a westing house tablet computer, with a ‘star wars’ mode.

Tactical media, information surrounds could be as comfortabel as consumer electronics and with the control of a plane cockpit.

NN had ‘teething rings’; broadcasting (film, tv, radio), publishing (graphic design and text) and computer science brought together over a phone line.

OLPC, NN says the best way to deploy alptops is not to make arelatioship with a head of state but the DoDs. They are around longer than 4-8 years, and have real access to logicistics.

‘Logistics is the procedure of transferring a nation’s potential to its armed forces’ — someone

Arch Mac made media that is friendly and cosy like a TV set and strange, like a machine-like claw.

* * *

Q for Katherine Hayles: Agency. You swtich from algos, the SEC stuff, machinations put into play by humans and unintended consequences not fully anticipated. You later conclude regulations could determine where fees are assessed, things in human systems that can be regulated. in the middle you talk about CAPITAL itself as vampiristic. then agency shifts; capital has an agency to itself? so please talk about agency attributed to capital, attributed to algos, and to people.

Katherine Hayles: Right, we do have human agency and autonomous machines. trading algos are meant to cut out human agency as they trade at rates not accessible to humans. evo algos is a new trend there, and it opens a new can of worms, as very UNintended effects can emerge from emergent algos. in my talk, i tried to trace the auto algos drive the system to inherent risk and instability. … [ I think of https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/autonomous-technology ] … its a question of, how do we change a culture of greed? thats a big project. the power of narrative to intervene shouldn’t be underestimated. the narratives must be responsive to our actual situation. robert harris’ ‘fear index’ pits human vs machine agency, skynet style, machine agency disempowers human agency. a pulp techno thriller. too simplisitic parsing of the situation. its not machine vs human, its nuanced, a negotiated situation, small contests wages all the time in congress, in media, that shape how we undersatnd this. its not bad machine, good humans. its more coplex than that. the work has started and should be ongoing. Bernhard Steigler, Time and Technics 1 and 2, he defines ‘tertiary attention’ (?); a print centric assumption. that human machine interation is about memory storage. but moving from print to compute, its not about memory, its about agency. Mnemotechnics is appropraite to print, not automated trading. humanist discourse must take account of this new dynamic.

Natalie Phillips: What does it meant ot be reading with more legla attention? What are modes of awareness, how much is genre based? How much is disciplinary traning based? …. We wil also look at listening to texts in the 2 modes.

* * *

Pre and Post Digital ARchitecure.

Finn Arne Jørgensen, Umeå University

“I don’t know what Digital Humanties is, but I know it when I see it ” (cf Justice Stewart)

We dont see the infrastructure connecting hte cabins to industrial society, its seductive, therapy for digital workers. People write in, ‘Thank you, think is the only site on the net that I ever found therapeutic.’

ARchitecture. What does it do for us? What do we do in Digital Humanties, whatever that is. Architecture refers to both buildings and a metaphor for thinking and refelcting about our practices. Cabin Porn does that too. Its an immediate online phenomon. 100s of cabin blogs, a builder culture, the DIY cabin building with your own skills and made by own hands and body, and now a process of prefab units, pinterest and blogs and so on that art direct their creation.

In the process, things are filtered out, that people dont like. Digital is frictionless, you block out what you dont want to deal with. the lack of infrastrcure is key to that. as scholars we must dig up the infrastrcure. thats what footnotes are for. blogs and twitters, the back channel, people talk baout HOW they do their work.

Post Digital?

I think its no such thing, its digital we take for granted. infra strucure, hidden. we cease to care about digitla and are human instread. its our job to expose the rpocesses as they occur. hacking is making infrastrcure, making is taking out the dificult parts, we need to focus on them.

Thats why cabins are cool.

* * *

Erica Robles-Anderson, New York University

I’m a montessori kid, grad school was more like that than the earlier schooling models. … I went to stanford thinking you do an undergrad ending in ‘er’ – doctor, lawyer, designer – and ‘humanist’ is not one of them. i got into CS and graphics, got good at that, and i thought i’d graduate to do a startup, making screens about spaces. I then went into grad school with a social psychologist, a communications lab; testing how people felt tother or apart based on screens. I met a historian, studying counter culture, and so with that in mind, I found the church.

this is a mega church in Houston Texas, 2,000 people in a sunday service, was the Houston Rockets stadium. i didnt go for religion but the media; it was a naturael space to think about people working with tech.

more recently, the crystal cathedral. i need to justify why i switched from lab studies to reading and field work. church is good for this. big congregation, big glass space, huge screen.

Historian view, this isn’t an uncanny thing that churches shouldnt look like, but the trend of protestant reformation and constant reformation; theres no longer a bible, its hi technology only. we all look together at a single text, not all at the same page in our own copies.

Here is a post war drive in cinema. these spaces were churches on sundays, and you couldn’t get that much revenue from the cinema. screens at churches started here. the family auto like a family pew.

heres teh parking lot for the drive in. a skyscraper with a tall cross on top nearby.

* * *

Jo Guldi, Brown University “Infrastructure for a revolution”

landscape.blogspot.com

Infrastructure was a revolution of scales, preceeding indus revolution. anti turnpike movement of 1820/30s, thanks to that you can walk from home to your work and school without paying and so can everyone else in society. capitalism in 18thC was based on idea of rising tide to raise all boats, the designers of raod system first appearing in britiain that was destroyed by a liberterian revolution.

ancient world uesd roads for military to reach edges of empire, not for citizens. interkingdom highways, garden cities, suburbs, the parts of built environemtn that are a silent piece of our lives.

infrastrucure has a life. utopian projects live or die. in the 1830s, localists oposes government taxes and the same neoliberal fantasty, that captialism can exist without infrastrucure, today, in teh collapsing infarstrucre.

I’m in an odd place, an 18thC historian working on the net. transport paper and information revilutions.

3 men, john palmer, the 1785, the first civil service not about taxes and miliarty, post service. a bunch of clerks and carraiges connecting every village in england. the clocks were set by post not trains that were later.

????. gravel was same as rome as then …

john wesley. people on the road, walking 20 miles a day, a social network of preachers not an establishment.

the masses of receipts, forms and such to co ordinate civil servants acros the country. 1950, paper peaked. an i18d system of paper records of all farms in the world, preceding world bank.

anti turnpike movement, wesleys idea of a chuch owned by working class, the paper revolution, every town had paper for everyone. byt he 60s we saw paper was hiding facts in plain view. in development studies, rob chambers did 1st crowd sourced maps.

molly told us today about the information reovlutions origins, and i want to talk how it effects me. we have infrastrucure for sharing, we can share citations, journal entries and what we do with them.

Josh Ginburg invitned Zotero; we dream of reaching outside ivoery tower to public, work without barriers to entry. so i made paper machines as a zotero plugin, so you can take what is in your zotero library and do things like topic models, geoparsers to show you all place names about 19th C novels about gypies.

as a designer of software, sustiining the idea of exlucsity and sacle, retooling things, an idea from earlier generations. in 18th infra worked on gravel, mail and community. today we have a new infarstruacure for humanities, we ahev software and data, but the questions of community, how we use this, spending our grants, making one map or many silod amps, that question of community can be answered.

in CS dept at brown, they said this was astonoishing; that you can be a scientist in academia and talk to the public. there are publics and communities we serve outside the

so i had 10 CS undergrads asking what tools i want to look into texts. History Lens could be another plugin for zotero that can be shared in a community. free sofware can be built upon existing standards and retooled and remade. so we can offer it beyond the gates of the ivroy tower.

Infrastrucrue as a reovlution? yes, if we make it for teh communities.

Yesterday Tara McP spoke about reaching out to

Becky Hurwitz, Sandy SToryline, a website for sharing stories about sandy. humanists know a lot about this.

Liz Barry, Public Laboratory, what can environmental historians, so could we make a tool to link publiclaboratroy abd zotero?

Sans Clar, Occupy ARhive, using zotero to collect things.

What if you and your class ran zotero on wikileaks?

Infrastrcutre as revolution. My question to you is then, yes?

* * *

Jo GUldi: at harvard recently, discussin how our new tech infra is reduplicating angloamerican hegemony of 19th c? well, we have people who live off associations with subaltern archives. we can use grant funding to build altern infrastrcures that are massively inclusive. tara mcphereson mentioned a tool to collection inforation from indigenous archives – murkurtu.org – that sovlves a technical problem of archiving counter power. …

Day 2

Fred Turner, Stanford University “The Democratic Surround: How World War II Changed the Politics of Multimedia”

[10 mins late]

Black Mountain College, 1948. Their exhibition then has the Fuller Dome. It goes from there to NYC in 57, Cage moves there, teaches a class on artistic production. he brings with him the idea of the happening. By the early 60s he’s teaching this to Keegans (?), alan aprow, which shapes beings, the van der beeks, the basis of the 1960s, a new aesthetica and political mode in the 60s. its not revolutaitonary! its celebraitng against fascism in WW2.

Its still with us, This is the CES in 2010. The pepse pavillion in 1960, its nearly the same design.

Step back, there are 2 things we can do, telling the history of te Democratic Surround: identigy a meanigful thing in that era that didnt have a clear name then or now. media studied, then or now.

We think of attention is depoliticised. Like Natalie’s talk yesterday on Austen. Attenion is a politicised process. What we pay attnetion to is something powerful people struggle for. We must be alert to that as wella s the mechanics of attention.

the DS is something we can track about that.

Also, meida and buildings are merging. In CA, many cars have screens in car seats for the kids in teh back. a new ad for virgin airlines, a cut away of the tube of the airplane and a whole media party there.

we need a history of the media and space merging, and new tools to get at it. thats my work.

another piece important, is cold war historiography. i thought the 60s was a revbellion against the 40s and 50s, but the people who told that story wrote out the OPEN aspects of the 40s and 50s. Charles Morris, UoChicago 1948 book, the Open Self, a prescription for hippies. He said ‘lets have a sexually tolerant society.’

Someone Nazi race theory criticised and says this is happening in USA and we must stop.

in the 60s they FULFILLED their parants expections!

M Mead “were the world we dream of obtained, people then wouldnt value it as we would. we wouldnt be at home there, we couldnt live in in”. that is now us and my goal is to recover the dream.

Sylvia Lavin, Princeton and University of California, Los Angeles “Architecture and the superreal”

(A book, “Kissing Architecture”)

The word ‘place’ scares me. In architecure, it ESSENTIALISES transcendental subjects, lurking behind a spirit of the place phenomenology. A nasty word.

I want the word to go away.

Its strange to be at a conference about place to make it go away. Architecture is to distract people from the thing they’re looking at.

Fred was saying, he’s good at reading images but not spaces. I’m curious what that means; I don’t believe it, but the symtomology of needing to say it in a place on space? Why say that at a conference about media and space?

The history of media as being the thing that consitiues space itself?

There is a visual form of analysis happening with skill.

…

I was asked to talk about frames. Arch is a frame par execllence. If I can google my way to a framing set of images that collapses the world, you see what im ean.

archi is invoked in humantistic conferences, the discipline as frame, making braoder cultural epistimmes visible. the persisitance of this frame. the CCTV building is a triumphal arch, it says within its frame a reading of the cultural episteme, a instruction manual on how to read what is desired to be seen in the cultral episteam as a whole.

culture is assoiciated with interdisciplinarity, using the triumphal arch

….

Erica Robles-Anderson, New York University “Congregational Framing”

…

Smalltalk is a environment to edit at runtime. Always active running loops you can self modify. Animators who can add frames to a looping motion graphic. Monads is the notion for this.

Last week I was contacted by Alexei Vanyashin (an expert in Latin and Cyrillic type design. Originally from Moscow, Russia) about doing some type design workhops in the Ukraine with Octavio Pardo, one of my co-instructors at the very first Crafting Type event in August.

We’re now set to run 4 events there in the coming weeks:

• 27 November: Public Lecture, Kyiv
• 14 December: Student Workshop, Kyiv
• 15-16 December: Professional Workshop, Kyiv
• 17-18th December: Professional Workshop, Lviv

For full details check the www.craftingtype.com website!

These are live blog notes from the 2012 Unicode Conference in Santa Clara, California, 23rd October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

Vint Cerf: The Bit Rot Dilemma
================================

My purpose today is tangentially related to what you are about – encoding writing in digital form for the whole world. But encoding in digital form is what I work on. When you think about digitisation and representations, think about the issues of doing so over VERY LONG periods of time.

Unicode is key to the DNS; since 2003, efforts to express non latin characters in domain names. Now ICANN opened up TLD space, they had 2,000 requests for new TLDs, 1,900 unique, but few were outside ASCII. I don’t know why that is. A 40 year history?

In DNS, the expressiveness of labels is not what is at stake. Its not expressing every way of writing in a domain name label. We dont want a novel in domains, we want identifies that can be matched correctly: MATCHING is the point.

In unicode there is more than one way of writing the same thing; things can LOOK the same if they codes are different. So someone can type something in and not get what they expected.

We aren’t able to put unicode into DNS directly, we encode as acsii. punycode and its odd apperance – .xn--90ae – is unambiguous.

What you do is hard and important, so thank you!

Now, my primary topic:

Every day we create complex digital objects with applications. Spreadsheets, text documents, even more complex data structures; 3D interactive objects, interactive environments. The bag of bits can become rotten if the runtime for it isn’t available.

In 3,000AD can you open a 1997 Powerpoint file? Can you open a LibreOffice presentation file?

I had this last week, opening a 1997 powerpoint file on a Mac failed. We invest time in making digital objects and we would like them to be preserved.

Digital photographs suffer the same thing; some contemporary photo managers no longer support GIF files. Its not just the application code; its that app runs in a particular operating system. If you dont have the app and the os — and then a specific piece of hardware with IO interfaces – then you may loose the ability to access your data.

Each year the National Archive get hard disks they are meant to curate and catelog. The variety of software running there, its tricky to figure it out.

Why is retaining the ability to interpret digital objects is hard? Business failure, your OS vendor no longer supports some hardware, vice versa. Products advance, and get retired, and no backwards compatibility is made. If you asked for source code, 50% will be in the new version, so they won’t release it.

You can imagine a regime that requires code escrow for published software. When I contract for software development for hire, I insist on a ‘go bust and get escrowed source code’ clause. Loss of access to digital objects is common due to business failure.

Representing the same document in various ways, ROSETTA STONE style, allows extra potential for recovery. Reverse engineering software to interpret the data is more possible there. But many cases this isnt possible, like a video game.

So a standardised object for a particular application, a document or a spreadheet, which can be represented in various applications, would be a good idea.

Virtual Machines may help! You may be able to run an old OS in a VM in the cloud and allow you to run the old applications. Its hard. My first home computer was an Apple ][+ in 1979 and I did my accounting on that, then then ][e with a compatible 5 1/2 floppy drive. Then a Mac had the 6502 chip board to run old software and run that old drive. The MacOS could figure out how to make the old processor think it was accessing the old drive via the Mac's new IO.

I had a hissy fit when I got a Mac laptop without an optical drive. Another thing to carry!

When application software you NEED and are depending on, but patents prevent you from using it, there's something wrong with this situation. We should think about legal regimes about what we content creators have something to say about being to retain forever the ability to access those bits.

Unicode was always about rendering writing digitally. I'd like to introduce a meme here:

DIGITAL VELLUM

Some people misunderstood this, like a physical CD. I don't think that. 1,000 manuscripts can still be read in greek or arabic; vellum is highly preservable. Its physical, so if you can see, you can access it.

But I see vellum as having all the digital representations of the digital object; the data, the app, the OS. So if you can see it, you are SURE you can access it.

This maens changes to copyright, patent and other laws to give us the leverage to give us the ability to interpret the work we create.

Also:

Domain names and URLs.

Something odd happens when you monetize things. At the start it wasn't monetized; John Postell (?) was the original registrar, funded by the US government, and he passed in 1998 just before ICANN was fonded. When the NSF realised it was spending millions a year to operate DNS, and asked if we should spend research dollars on a private sector interest activity, they decided Network Solutions (under contract to NSF) to charge for domain registrations. I thought it was reasonable, it wasnt clear what to charge, $50 a year for 2 years, seemed minimal.

When you introduce this, and a need to renew to create a continuing revenue stream, you create instability. When you cease to pay, what happens? The domain name sinks, or returns with differnet content. You can be mis attributed to that content.

For me it was a revelation that the monetization had side effects that are serious for preservation for content. URLs are ways to point at things that are temprary, so we loose our ability to reference information in a stable long term way. Thats unsettling.

Bob Kuhn (?) and I started 'Digital Object Identifiers' project. These can never be reused, create 'permanent' curated archives that contain these obecjts; you need a business model to support the archive, and you want to have redundant archives. Its not just documents, could be source code, object code, images, movies. The system should be insensitive to the nature of the content, while being able to tell what that nature is.

This is like UNicode, trying to take a digital ID, a codepoint, and have it interpretable as a specific object in a specific class of symbols. We need to classify digital objects similarly, so we know all the required dependencies for accessing an object.

When you put something in you want to be sure its not modified when its removed. A double digital signature can do this. You sign it with two keys and then it cant be modified by a single party. Digital signatures can become weak over time so you may need to resign things over a long time. I have to recork my wine in my cellar in the same way.

I'm not sure how to advance this problem of long bit rot, I think by 2,100 AD we will have lost access to everything we access today, and our colleagues in the future will not know much about what happened this year because the bits will have rotten.

I think unicode should not be disengaged from this. I'd like you to keep this in mind, as I know you are interested in preserving digital culture.

Thank you!

Q: I'm from the W3C and I wonder that XML can be useful for marking up data and metadata. Is there a way to reencode data in a more resilient way?

A: ASN-1 is similar. Its not for operational purposes; running an application with a markup version, but it might be a way of documenting things, yes. PDF-A is a reasonable attempt at similar. While readers are free, creators are not, and if ADobe goes bust (which I hope it wont) then we may loose the ability to access that format. HTML5 might achieve similar things. This relates to my rosetta stone idea. I'm hesitant to leap on this because there are semantics to deal with. Sometimes thats only achievable with executable bits. You may need the applicatoin to know why a bit is where it is and what it means.

Q: Do we really need to keep all that stuff?

A: Martin! You remind me of this young PUNK - no pejorative, its a compliment - of a young guy talking to librarians. "The important stuff will be important and converted to new formats" - but the librarians were on the ceiling, and 'A Team of Rivals' book about American History is a key example of this: WE DONT KNOW WHAT IS AND ISNT IMPORTANT. The author wrote that book in the present tense. She went to 92 libraries to read letters exchanged by people contemporary, and reconstructed conversations based on their language. Those letters were personal, not important, just about daily events.

Q: A patch to a program can change the way a document appeared. How much accuracy is enough?

A: We'll have a spectrum of capability. Mapping all text to unicode, leaving that as the 'trace' of a document, then try for more and more formatting. For documents. But our objects are not just documents that COULD exist in print. Many things CAN NOT exist in print, sound, video, and INTERACTIVE things. A spreadsheet can't exist in print except as a momentary view of a state in time. Not the structures and formulas. There isn't perfect fidelity possible. How to grade the levels of fidelity?

Q: Adobe Reader is likelyt o be around a long time (I work for adobe) but this talk of preservation seems rather gloomy to me...

A: The ADboe founders are friends of mine and I respect what they've done. Flash is a differnt matter I'm afraid that it alone isnt enough, we need a conscious effort to preserve peripheral data formats. PDF is great but its not enough because there are so many KINDS of objects.

Q: I'd like to preserve my family tree, a tiny small group of users. There are things important to 100,000s and important to just 10.

A: Whats worth preserving is a key question, and if something is important to a fmaily, it should be preserved byt hat family. This is why I think a legal regime . Paul Allen's (not MS P.A.) ancestry.com who works are gallup now, his digital obejcts are complex. ... My email from 15 years ago isn't readable; I used a PC based email application, I moved hwardware, and I kept all the files, but the STRCTURE is lost; the attachments are gone. Its but a shadow of what I had. Its a hazard.

Q: Is analog part of this?

A: Yes, rendering is the end part, and analog is the final part of rendering. Did you know we can look at a music record with a laser to digitize the music even though its damaged so much it cant be played any more? Amazing.

Q: Richard brought up a fair point about XML and markup technologies. Semantics is a key issue, CLDR, our data is all in XML, but we have a 100 page spec on how to interpret it. the XML helps to be self descriptive but without the semantics, its opaque.

A: I was in UCLA yesterday, celebrating the Turing award. Alan Kay was speaking there. I challenged the CS community, "Where's the science in CS?" in an op ed page. He said CS isnt about software, programming, or even computation; its about PROCESSES and the way they behave. If we are going to preserve the meaning of complex objects, we must preserve the PROCESS of how to use them. So this is a fairly big challenge; I'm not sure what the right way is to go about it. If we don't think about the Intellectual Property regimes that are friendly or unfriendly to archivists, we may lose before we begin.

Q: We need something like acid free archival quality paper. That stamp that people can gravitate toward for long term storage. That will get traction from ordinary people.

A: Hmm. Literally or metaphorically?

Q: Both

A: That acid free paper idea, its a metaphor for people to understand why this is important. I agree.

Q: A lot of us in the last few years have abdicated this topic to a large corporation.

A: Yes, I'm sorry to hear you're using hotmail Its a reasonable concern. We allow MS, Google and Yahoo and that leaves us open to a problem. I have 75Gb of email at Google. I am worried about that too, for the long term. New digital storage may be our friends, we can store that much in a small space. I wonder about file transfer and serach; a terabyte in a sugar cube disk without enough IO to process it fast.

Q: We dont know what will be important. With easily available encryption we also loose the ability to get things back. Should personal certs expire, or an escrow so we can access files 50 years after someone dies?

A: Wow, yes. Protecting privacy in the near term, protecting history in teh long term. I expect today's crypto will be broken in the long future. CCs have a expiry date, so the numbers churn so they can't be used to do bad things. If you intend for things to be available, you want somewhere to put it for the long term. The protection needs to be undo-able. Wow, I would like to work on that problem.

Q: I'm working on PDFJS, and one goal is to make HTML possible to render antyhing in PDF. What do you think about such 'super formats' that can encapsulate other formats?

A: The union of everything rather than the itnersection of everythig. But eveything can be contradictory. I dont know if its possible; I suspect there is a Turing Halting Problem in there somewhere. There's no way to prove that it will. But I'm all for generality. As a former comptuer programmer, I'm all for trying to make the most general solution to the problem, but its hard so we'll have several cases. I like this javacsript idea though!

I met up with Tom Milo who showed me

http://www.decotype.com/ace/

Demonstration of ACE with SVG

New HarfBuzz Coming to a Device Near You - Behdad Esfahbod, Software Engineer, Google, Inc.
==========================================

behdad@google.com

www.harfbuzz.org

Slides at http://goo.gl/2wSRu

I spoke about Harfbuzz 2 years ago at UC34 and its not in a much better SHAPE haha

Old Harfbuzz vs New Harfbuzz

Who already knows about HB? 50% of room.

This project started 12 years ago when GNU+Linux started adopting Unicode. FreeType started interpreting OpenType layout tables and then removed that, Gnome's PANGO and Qt did their own. I maintained Pango but I hated it.

Christmas 2007 I started a new shaping engine, thats the old one. At 2009 I started on it full time, and I completed it at Google. Thats the new HB engine.

Its a library with one function:

hb_shape()

If you take arabic, thai, india, mongolian, vertical japanese... the text needs contextual rearranging.

There is a generic shaper, a fallback 'dumb' shaper that does nothing but stack glyphs, then backends for Uniscirbe, Graphite, CoreText, and ICU LayoutEngine. You should be able to use the harfbuzz API but if you want to use a platform shaper you can do.

It was designed from the start to be usable by humans; others are designed around font formats, exposing all font features, and are not user friendly.

Goals:

HUMANS, ROBUST, FLEXIBLE, EFFICIENT

Robustness is crucial for web fonts, Firefox has really helped drive this. On a desktop i could crash out of memory. error handlind, what to do if the font is broken, what can you do? rendering something close to what you want. you cant query for font errors, we just return the best possible output. for C programmers, we use techniques common in new free software libraries, you dont have to NULL check everything. Thread safe, we have a desktop to thumbnail icons, icons are SVG, SVG has text, pango wasnt thread safe, we crashed. Not good. If you design Indic fonts, the Devanagari, Tamil, Sinhala shapers are all different. The new indic shapers copy and modify the previous shapers but dont modify them. So I had to deal with bugs, like force RTL on a font it would crash. So I wanted a unified shaper code body.

For humans, if you have no experience with text rendering or opentype, I can tell you, put your face data, your font data, your text buffer, and shape! Thats it.

Flexible: Glib, ICU, UCDN. Unicode character database is used. You can use HB with FreeType, Uniscribe or your own call bakcs. There are NO dependencies.

Efficient. Instead of parsing OT tables 2 butes at a time, i could MMAP the table directly. no malloc(), just mmap() and sanatize.

Status
----------------

Been in Firefox since 4.0, GNOME since 2012-09

Chromium/WebKit patch landed 10 days ago

ICU LayoutEngine drop in replacement is ready

Q: This means OpenOffice, XeTeX and OpenJDK can use Harfbuzz.

A: Right, if we do that, then I can say, if you're not Apple MS or Adobe then you're using Harfbuzz

Android and KDE are using hb-old but we plan to switch them soom

A lot of embedded companies want to use this.

With Emscripten you can do cross compiling to Javascript!

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

Normalisation

Fallback Shaping: we can compose mark positioning from base glyphs automatically. Here is a correctly composed glyph, here is the GDEF table dropped, GPOS dropped, GSUB dropped, and all 3 dropped.

Testing

My focus last few month. I can write code and ask peo

opentype is NOT a standard, its just RECOMMENDATIONS. Uniscribe is the standard. So we decided to be as close to Uniscribe as possible. So I got text from 60 wikipedias, and tested each word against uniscribe, and aimed for a 1 in a million error rate (1e-6) and its currently less than 0.1% (one in a thousand). So for 100,000 works we disagree on about 50 of them between Uniscribe and Harfbuzz.

Missing?

There is new Myanmar shaping in Windows 8.

...

Q: Normalisation, its the same code point or its not. Shaping, its the same pixel in one resolution and another pixel at another res.

A: We test glyph ID and positions, not images.

Q: GID is a number easy to match. Positions?

A: We test in font design units, 2048 or 1000 em size, and i render at that many pixels. I'm not itnerested in hinting, I'm interested in GSUB, GPOS, and shaping engine. We think we are outmatching Uniscribe in some parts. Our indic shaper has a uniscribe bug compatibilty mode

Pravin: Excellent job on the test suite. Windows fonts working well on new harfbuzz. We have fonts made for Pango too, so can you test the restuls of pango and harfbuzz? If we can get test cases we can fix in the fonts.

A: Very valid point. If you look at GNU+Linux side, we designed libre fonts against the old shaper. but now we match uniscirbe. In sinhala, it shows up badly; there is no OT spec for it but Uniscribe implemented it. So people implemented what made sense to them in pango. Uniscribe many some very different decisions. So now I implemented those decisions and this breaks those fonts. I deprioritised this because it wasnt clear where bugs were in hb-old, the shaper or the font? But im happy to work with anyone on font issues.

Q: it seems useful to compare against pango for sure. ICU, we get bugs on indic scripts in the form, heres the parallel patch in pango, and perhaps a commit to harfbuzz. so the more we see convergence here the better.

A: Yes

Mark Davis: What challenges were there in plugging ICU and others?

A: It was easy, no major mismatches. 1, the callback to load a table didnt include the length of the table. no way other than crashing. also concept of a layout engine of ICU includes a font and font size. in HB, i have a 'shape plan' that takes a script lanauge direction and font size. so there is a mismatch in what we can cache.

Alolita: I'd love to see your unit tests, we are building something similar.

A: Good point. I considered publishing this with Wikipedia, its http://code.google.com/p/harfbuzz-testing-wikipedia and I will meet up with J Kew in Vancouver in a few weeks

Innovations in Internationalization at Google - Luke Swartz, Product Manager, Google Inc. and Mark Davis, Sr. Internationalization Architect, Google Inc.
==================================================================

We do core i18n, encoding work, cldr, icu heavily; we do our own segmentation, character encoding detection... and beyond that we look at entities, names, phone numbers...

We're trying to NOT overlap with out Google presentations; harfbuzz, ICU and javascript, plurals and genders talks today. Tomorrow, emoji, locale data, bidi and rtl, i18n testing, and ldml.

Other issues?

Entities. Knoweldge panel in Google search has these. If you search 'brad pitt' we connect that name to an entity, thats locale independent. to put together theis kolwedge graph, what entities are and the relations of entities, we use Wikipedia, freebase, and the web. web with a huge corpus is easier (english, spanish) than say slovienian. so we can translate the entities relationships, even tho eg brad pitt and jennifer aniston have different names in slovenia.

Names. 'Barack "barry" obama'? Google+ Pages "Lindt Chocolate World" and google.com/+toyota

Unicode security issues. well knwon mixed scripts used for spoofing, the 'paypal' problem with a cyrillic a. mixed numbering systems, a U+09EA is a bengali 4 that looks like latin U+0038 ("8"). We allow differnt script in your nick names.

You can enter 100s of combining marks and it looks like the software is damaged when they spill down the page.

...

Name Formatting

The reversal of given and family name is one of the biggest differences in the world.

Phone Number Formatting. This is in Android ICS

Addresses, equally compelx.

...

Smaller languages are getting bigger, and Google products now aim to support 60 langauges. Google prevoiusly only supported Hindi in India.

Google Translate is also expanding from 40 to 65, the last one way Lao.

They added Yiddish, and because they could do english to Hebrew and German, they could convert that to yiddish, and english can now conduit eg lao and yiddish.

So now you can talk to your room mate in NYC

Google Speech recognidition covers 42 languages with 46 accents/dialects

We're also working on Fonts in our group.

Encoding is Unicde, but we're working on a pan unicode font project, Noto.

http://code.google.com/p/noto

We see these boxes of unknown fonts, 'tofu' and we want to eliminate this, so "Noto" for 'No Tofu'.

It will be libre licensed so no user will ever need to endure tofu. They are harmonised too, they should flow nicely, not a ransom note.

we will also have UI versions with different virtual metrics.

also important with fonts is knowning what is in a font; there are specialised proprietary tools for analysing fonts, it was hard to do with libre software.

http://code.google.com/p/sfntly

we use this to read font data, it was black magic that only font developers knew, but now everyone can do it with this library

...

GTT

http://translate.google.com/toolkit is used for ALL google's own localisation. this hooks into machine translation. ARB is a format for web app l16n

http://code.google.com/p/arb/wiki/ApplicationResourceBundleSpecification

If you own a video on youtube, you can add captions and translate them in place with GTT.

...

Arabic Typography - Tom Milo
------------------------------

Here is a 'minimal pair' - 2 lines with 1 difference, 'as money for a king' and 'the money of the king' - lam-alef fusion and lam-alef ligature.

The connection jumps in logical space. The top one is a 'fusion' not a ligature, thats the bottom one. In arabic you must distinguish this; letters in the same block the fuse, and letters in different blocks that touch are liagtures.

So some results: here is the lam alef, anything with a lam on the top row and anything with alef on the bottom. The cells should show a fusion including all the elements described by the unicode. IranNastaleeq should do this for all 42 cells but it only does FOUR. That font has over 4,000 glyphs. These 4 are sufficient for arabic and persian.

Nafees Nastaleeq, a government project. 1,001 glyphs and only 3 successful fusions. This is enough for Urdu, not even arabic.

Alvi Nastaleeq, a Monotype Nastaleeq design, and it has only ONE fusion that works. 20,000 glyphs!

Jameel Noori Nastaleeq is the same typeface but reprogrammed by another team, with 4 fusions; perisan and arabic, not urdu.

Finally, DecoType Nastaleeq has 456 glyphs and covers all 42! There is another col with a new unicode point we are yet to support.

This table shows similar results for a word; only a handful of successful fusions for all these OpenType fonts.

Now, I want to take you through an arabic typesetting project. For printing to come to Europe from China or Korea, it must have come through the Arabic world.

The script is found everywhere islam played a role. arabic is an islam related script; ukrainian muslims of tata descent, serbocroats who were muslims used arabic. javanese is written with arabic.

the mechanisation of script associated with islam? arabic typography is a by product of latin typography. did europe invent typography or renovate it?

There is always the argument that typesetting arabcic is complex with many contextual variations; but latin type at the very start had just as many contextual variants; 22 alphabetical letters with 323 sorts in gutenberg bible. they used them to appear less mechanical. so there was no mechanical hurdle.

the idae of designing type came later; initially it was an accurate model of the hand written scritp. Here are 2 lines from an Ottoman Koran, and here are 2 lines based on digital type. The first is decotype naskh and the second is linotype lateef; typical of 'eurobic' fonts made by people who dont understand the script or who dont have technical implementation to work with.

...

Allographs: the unit of graphic rendering. like allophones in phonetics. arabic typography revovles around letter blocks; single letters or fused letters. ligatures are letter blocks touching. other ligatures are europrean approximations of letter fusions.

Archigrapheme - the unit of arabic script analysis. The only way to read this word is to already know what it is. if the dot is placed above it works, but if the alef is under, it can be pronouced two other ways. so no dots means 3 meanings.

...

Typography is deep down a reproduction of writing. arabic, you look at paleographic text, proto-typographic writing chosen by early typographers to reproduce.

When you deal with real arabic, you need to identify the style.

...

There are theographs: words for god.

...

De-grammaticized arabic was done by workers in the vatican who used syriac script grammar to shape arabic. 'yod eurobic' has this inverted Y and 'noon eurobic' has an N form. these forms dont exist in arabic.

...

Practically this means you can see arabic has a DISSIMILATION of repeated letters; if you aramaize arbic you see repeated shapes.

Each script style has a different solution, each is a system with grammar. Eurobic collected fusions in a haphazard way and added them to eurobic typography. OpenType is based on this typographic appraoch.

This table of green, red and blue cols helps you to identify the style.

...

traditional typography for print was driven by form, eg, LM-LA, two glyphs. but in digital type you want to color each letter individually, or have a cursor step through each letter. the only way to get each letter lined up is to design the tech not from form but from content. that is the approach of Decotype.

...

Here are 3 letters, keshide - you can add a keshide in either of the 2 interletter positions.

This image shows that there is a euro approach which has nothing to do with the arabic script tradition.

Finally, there are 2 [BIG] books typeset with decotype.

behdad: why

A: the majority of my examples are mechanical; there is mech euro and arabic.

behdad: the syriac conspiracy theory, the yod/noon variants. if you want to cut letters, you pick one and cut it.

A: you are now used to it, its all over the place, but its a historical development i am presenting. there was an effort to develop arabic script; indian the british tried. the persians went to lithography, the only way to get the script right because movbale type didnt work. i said at the start that typography is originally meant to represent the writing as it was in use. thats why it failed in arabic world when it started but took off in europe. its the mass production of newspapers with linotype that used eurobic that forced it down the arabic worlds throat. in the last 20 years, with macOS and others, the software vendors used eurobic, and the style became associated with modernity. so now there is a trend to use computer technoogy for arabic instead of fitting arabic into computer technology.

Q: nastaleeq?

A: europeans never got close to mechanising it and the people there have rejected anything that doesnt get close.

- – -

Polyglots in the mist
————————

What does it mean to say you speak 24 or 36 languges?

its a trade book but a serious book: ‘Babel no more’ – the search for the worlds most polylingual people

It was reviewed nicely in the Times, Economist, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Suppliment, Vocabulary.com said i was ‘the indiana jones of polyglots’ – but it was evaluating claims people make about themselves about this.

hyperpolyglots are a mystery in plain view; linguists just didnt look into this. like the loch ness monster has an office in the biology dept and no one had gone to see them This is a kraken, another cryptid.

Tradtiaionlly, a polyglot is a person who knows 6 or more languages. thats the UCL professor Dick Hudson who surveyed multilingualism, and there are communities where EVERYONE spoke 5 languages, so someone with SIX must really be extraordinary.

I revised this upwards a bit to 11 languages

These were mysteries for science; although there are many stories of latin high school teachers who can speak a dozen languages, no systematic or empirical evaluation. so i went looking for them.

This guy: Cardinal Guiseppe XXXX (1774-1849) who didnt travel outside northern italy but he lived in a time when many europeans were there too who he learned from. as a cardinal he worked as a librarian and in the propaganda fide (?) the evangelical wing of the vatican. that place at that time was a unique place to see the worlds language. it is said he spoke 114 languages and dialect, by his nephew. also 72, a religiously significant number as thats the number at the time of the fall of the tower of babel.

Some scholars said he grasped 60-61 but agreed he had MASTERED 30. he left an archive in bologna. he was a librarian there, one of the worlds oldest libraries; i went to the street he was born on.

this is a box i found in his archives, not described in any of the descriptions of who he was or what he could do.

he was the 19thC premiere language learner. what enabled him to do this? people claimed to know the secret but never told it. Maybe it was this box. it was labeled ‘MISC’ he had packets of cards, 1 1/2 x 3 inch slips of paper. something in italian, latin, on one side, on the other side, persian or something.

FLASH CARDS!

the mythology of polyglots is that they just absorb it. there isn’t hard, time intensive repetitive work involved. but this is a hint thats not true. i dont know the history of the flash card as educational technology, but i doubt he INVENTED the flash card.

i also wanted to go to a non european place where multilingualism was common and the idea of knowing langauges was different. i went to south india, bangalore and hydrabad, to glance at whats happening there lingustically. even there, where it is very common to speak 5+ languages from a young age, there are people who can speak 12+ langauges are revered and talked about.

I told people about my project and they said ‘wow yes you must meet someone i know of’. i have studied spanish and mandarin and it changed my brain. this is an indian diplomat who knew indian and chinese and russian languages.

before indian i went to mexico, the Hippo Family Club, a japanese language learning club, 35,000 members, groups in korean, mexico, and us. a fmaily orientated play/game space with a motto that EVERYONE can speak 7 languages. they do this through language kareoke. this is for middle middle class who realised their kids had english but they needed MORE than enlgish and spanish for better economic chances.

I also spent time with Alexander Argreyus (?) who moved to Singapore and works at U of Omalan (?) who has a daily linguistic workout. This is in my book trailer.

“I wake up and write 2 pages of arabic, and spend a couple of hours reading arabic and listening to arabic and reading bilingual texts and reading freely” – 9 hours a day with a wife and 2 sons, was 14 hours a day before. Then I spend 2 hours on other languaes in 20 minute chunks. He has a PhD from U of Chicago.

Emil Krebs as another great hyperpolyglot from history.

You see how textually focused he is. He studied many langauges simultaneously. He’s got a few things specific to them. they learned how the learn and build thier own pedagogical environemtns to study in the way they want to study. they learn in a NON INSTITUIONAL way which means they have freedom to develop their own programs for themselves.

Alexander woudlnt tell me how many languages he spaeks, or to be tested in any way. I have to take his word on his abilities.

What are the upper limits? (on ability to learn, speak, and use languages?)

The lifetime limit is 50-60. Oral proficiency in 22 languages, demonstrated by a belgian and a scotsman to me. they compete in polyglot contests in 1987 and 1990 to find the most multilingual belgian and then european. a contest, you had to speak a minimum number to enter, then they told how many lagnugaes to tested in for 10 minute conversations with 5 minute breaks with natiev speakers.

the winners were given points in 22 languages.

i did an online survey of people who said they knew 6 or more languages; 26 was the highest reprted on the survey of 400 people who responded.

when you meet someone who says more (someone on the survey said over 500…) you know its not for real.

people can keep 5-9 languages no matter their IQ, cognitive skills, etc. Somethhing about the HUMAN BRAIN that it can hold that many languages without any extra effort. up above that to 22, then there is a patchwork of proficiency.

this is a bar chart of one persons mix. this shows reading is less mentally taxing than speaking.

here is a line graph of total, easy, and bilingual. easy means they said it was easier than for other people. and bilingual is those who were born into language learnig. you see it peaks at 6 and quickly tails off.

172 who knew more than 6, and 289 people who said learning languages seemed easy for them. the profiles are quite similar. overwhelmingly MALE. 69 and 65%. might be maleness of online population, the maleness of social networks advertising the survye. historically its male dominanted which are perhaps historical patriarchy.

i asked people in both groups, why they thought they were unusual; 50% said it was innate talent. 20% said they were smart. 45% said they worked hard. I would have thought that one would be higher. [more stats]

11+ lgnauges, they were mostly european, roman script, national languages. non latin? farsi, japanese, mandarin, cantonese, korean, thai, hindi. averaged 9 languages over 5 scripts.

How Unicode has impacted this community? its HUGE! openlanguage, anki, omniglot, chinesepod.

can anyone be one of these people?

No.

They have an atypical neurology. they have repetitive activities needed to put languages in their head, like training on flash cards. if there were less of them historically, 1 its because learning a langauge takes you out of your community. a hyperpolyglot is less social by definition, ironic given languages is for socialising. but online people can be together, in a tribal way, about their learnign techniques and materials.

unicode is key to this.

they like these tools to be free

they represent mutlilinguals; post-monolingualism is only 20% a joke. their need for materials is as high as a native speaker even if they cant fully read it all yet.

unicode is key to building a tech and social environment to reinforce their neurological predilections. so i think we’ll see more emerging. maybe i see it since i went looking but i think its a real trend, not just confirmation bias.

Q: i have 7-10 languages conversationally and 14 i studied. but i forgot a lot of them. how do you count how many people know?

A: I left that to people themesvles. i wanted to deinstitutionalise it. ‘I speak kannada!’ ‘did you take a class? a test?’ ‘no, i just picked itup’ – so if you think you learned it and its useful in your life, you learned it, i think. so youre free to say as many as you want

Q: i have an idea about the gender gap. men have more free time than women! 9 hours a day with 2 kids???? [applause] and where are they on the autism spectrum? its like a highly competitive sport. did you speak to them about their motivation?

A: Yes, and i went into neuroscience. the gesein-alliberta (?) hypnothesis is an endo-cranology theory of handedness and maleness, dyslexia, asthyma, etc. there are sensitive period in fetal development that change people, tending towards left males who are good verbally and not spatially. alexander doesnt drive a car! its a tell tale. but its a hugely controversial theory that you cant amass enough data on it. but yes, the gender thing is interesting. i joke that the next book will be ‘the wifes of polyglots’

Jungshik Q: He alreayd has a PhD, what else does he do?

A: He was a professor in lebanon; he was unemployed, doing freelance translation and living from investments. then he moved to singapore for a job.

Jungshik Q: any brain scans?

A: No, people who have 4 languages in Switzerland did this though. A hyperpolyglot who spoke 68 languages was studied too. I’d like them to donate their brains but they’re using them

Q: I have lots of friends who dont drive, its normal I also see english as a primary languaes as a bais in the survey.

Q: Where can we see the survey and data?

A: I’d like to put them on the web, the results are described in the book. but its a survey, not a census.

Q: Would be graet! at wikipedia we have many bi or trilingual speakers.

A: it was up for a year

Q: you mentined languages in the same family; a language is a dialect with an army swedish and norwegian, there isnt a clear cut distinction. its like saying i speak us english and scottish. someone who speaks a few each disparate languages is more impressive than many similar lgnauges.

A: right, in 1990 cpmetition they were national languaes, no dead ones, no invented ones, and all oral tests. for me, if people CLAIMED it was a differntl alnage, i let htem have it. when alexander says he wont tell me how many languages he speaks, there is meaning there: what does a language weigh? how do you measure diveristy? do people who speak 6 langues for basic conversation without reading them have more complexity than a monolingual educated person with a very high vocab and range of dialects? the number are not great data points.

Q: is there a universal grammar?

A: There is someone, Christopher, who has a single grammar, enlgish, and he ‘calks’ all other langauges through that garmmer. in the 2 contests, judges were told to disrupt the contestant when they started, in the 2nd one, so they couldnt talk about a practiced topic like golf, they switch topics to archeology.

Q: calks?

A: most languages have a wide choice in grammars, but in a foreign languae you can learn just a few and rely on them. or greek people speaking enlgish will use their root words that are valid english more than french or german words that are synonymous.

- – -

Bringing Multilingual PDFs to The Open Web: Bringing PDFs to the web, a review of PDF.js – Adil Allawi
————————————————————

I started this work in 1982

This project is one of the coolest out there today. They had an idae to do something REAL with javascript, rendering PDF in JS

It took on a life of its own and is now the default PDF renderer for Firefox and used by Google in their performance testing suite.

This is the sumerian kind kneeling before a tablet with writing. writing is key. as vint cerf’s talk mentioned, PDF is key to preserving documents.

adobe’s postscript was an interpreted langauge for printing in the 80s. taking that and making a document that opens everywhere took off in the 90s. i lived and breathed postscript but its not commonly known these days; i coded on PS interpreters in college, it was great. you wrote a program that made a page, you could let the printer’s intenral computer do the complicated layout processing. that made adobe, it took over the printing world.

Dr Warnock was the founder and CEO of adobe, who made the “Camelot Paper” in 1991, about the future of this. they saw people sending faxes, faxes were digitisations for sending documents across the phone network. postscript being an interpreteed langues meant you cant redisplay a document without rerunning the document program, which may lead to a different result. PDF was the result, to replace fax by sending documents across computer networks, and it too then took over the printing world.

What is a PDF?

its a text format, you have ID number, object data, etc. it was FLATTENED postscript, supporting all font formats used in 1991, and it could FALL BACK for latin text using ‘multiple master’ fonts. Adobe reader had a MM font that would stretch to match the missing font.

ISO then standardised it and fatures crept in; JS engine, forms, video, flash, 3d, and STRUCTURED elements.

PDF.js is this whole PDF structure can be put into a browser 100%. you give the browser a PDF and the browser renders it. pdf.js is a user api, it depends on stream.js to deal with objects, evaluator.js, spec.js canvas.js, etc.

Why?

PDF documents are EVERYWHERE. there are billions of them. its important to see if web technology can match the rendering of PDF, and the implmentation effort for pdf.js has helped improve JS engines. since JS runs everywhere it helps prevent bitrot. also security, external PDF readers expands the trusted codebase. adobe reader is a large plugin, it can be hacked,

Q: so it translates a pdf to js and renders that?

A: PDF is just a dictionary of objects. …

Q: When i see a pdf i feel i can rely on that im seeing what the author intended. when i think of JS, i dont feel sure i see what the author intended.

A: right, its just a interperted language. but pdf can be rendered differently by different apps. ISO standardisation is meant to reduce this. Microsoft’s OOXML doesnt guarantee matching rendering across implmenations, PDF is meant to.

Demo!

You can see the text layout chunking in a background process.

There is a ‘viewer.html#pdfbug=all’ name you can add to the URL to see a self debugger.

We see this in <canvas> not HTML5.

Q: does this mean text is not selectable?

A: it is selectiable.

…

SVG cant handle glyph drawing or a stream of glyphs. SVG requires a DOM, if you add too many DOM objects it becomes too heavy. 10,000s of objects each with their own payload.

Unicode in pdf?

Pre unicode fonts, 8 bit simple fonts, composite fonts, opentype (CFF and TTF). fonts have glyphs names

…

Arabic and Bidi; detect arabic lines, reverse ligatures, and reapply bidi algo. this will do the right thing and allow copy and paste to work.

…

what isnt solved? its hard to recognise cols and paras.

some indic languages use 2+ glyphs for a single char.

What is needed?

PRINTING. We need an API for printing from CANVAS tag

…

These are live blog notes from the 2012 Unicode Conference in Santa Clara, California, 22nd October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

Developing an OpenType font for complex scripts using Fontforge
===============================================================

Pravin Dinkar Satpute, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Pravin Satpure: I am working for RHAT 7 eyars in i18n, working on Indic scripts. I developed 6 unicode chars for devanagari. Pashmiri language. I’m project lead for Lohit fonts, supporting the 9 major scripts and are the default fonts in Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and some are used in ChromeOS and Android. Wikipedia loads some

I am also leading the Liberation Fonts project, the default fonts in LibreOffice.

I want the world scripts in Unicode, so everyone on earth should have their language on their terminal.

I was to show production of OpenType fonts, why they are important, FontForge – a 5 minute demo for Latin – then whats involved in OpenType fonts for 20 mins – then demonstrate making a Devanagari font with FontForge.

Imagine a developer has made an excellent applicatoin, but the first screen in that app has broken fonts. What will you feel if you see the square with 4 numbers, or a dotted circle?

A friend was working in Embedded systems, and faced a problem, he was getting U+0916 instead of U+0915. It took 2 days to realise it was the font that was buggy! Understand fonts is important

Why this session?

1 If you see the Unicode from early version today, many scripts were added. 5.0 to 6.0 added Khadoshthi, Lepcha. If normal people want to use these langugaes, they can’t, because fonts either don’t exist or are VERY expensive. So we should have libre fonts for these languages available to all developers, so they can support these users in their applicatoins.

2 People in those communities WANT to do font development. I tell them Unicode is a good thing. We don’t have users from this session here today, but I hope they will learn the things we are covering today.

The number of script in unicode is increasing.

There are several knowledge domains involved OpenType font. Linguistics, knowing the language and writing system. Art, the visual drawing of letters. Technology, since the letters are shaped by an operating system, so you need technical knowledge to write the layout table.

In the RHAT office in Pune, there are people from all the language communities I can consult with.

Why FontForge?

Its the only libre font editor tool available today.

I started using FontForge in 2005, it was very complex to write OpenType then. Today its very easy!

Continue improvement: There are active users and developers around this tool, and you’ll typically get a reply to your query within 1 or 2 days. I found a problem with the grid fitting tables and posted about it on the mailing list and got a fix later that day!

It runs on GNU+Linux, Windows and MacOS X.

What is a complex script?

[audience ideas]

In Devanagari we have reordering of characters, what we type and what we see are different; what we type looks totally different to what we see when its ligated.

Can we call CJK complex? I don’t think so, at the rendering level no. There are huge character sets, 6k in Japanese, Chinese is more, but the complexity is on the input level. I feel personally that Indic scripts can go like that; every syllable in an Indic language will have a key code and the rest will be automatic. I hope one day

The complexity can be in the OS level or Font level and its complicated. Win, Mac and GNU+Linux have different shaping engines for OpenType standard.

Indic and Arabic have re-ordering all the time.

I will do a small demo of OpenType in FontForge.

[GNOME3 accessiblity panel has a zoom tool]

I open FontForge git latest. [Default theme]

I open a LiberationSerif-Regular.sfd and copy the 4 abcd glyphs. The em size isn’t matches so I scale them from Glyph origin 50%.

Then I go to MS Typography site,and find the OpenType specification, Features page, and see the documentation for the LIGA feature.

Then I go Element, Font Info, Lookups, Add Lookup, Ligature Substition, add a liga feature for Latin (default) script.

Add subtable, add the Ligature Glyph Name colom first, tahts the name of the final shape, and then in the Source Glyph Names col, I type

a b c

And a mouse hover shows a preview.

Q: Its glyphs or characters?

A: You can see the glyph with glyph name a is associated with the unicode value U+0061 which FontForge does automatically.

Now I generate a TTF and install the Test1 font, then in gEdit I can pick the Test1 font, and if I type abc then I see d!

Its the font doing the magic here

Q: How does Japanese ruby typesetting work? Where you have kana written above kanji?

Jungshik: Its done by browsers with CSS, its Harakana glyphs placed by the layout engine entirely.

Q: How is the order of subtition rules defined?

A: Its defined by the rules, you can see in the microsoft.com/typography/…/otfntdev/features.html its ccmp, liga, clig,

OpenType is a cross platform standard by ADobe and Microsoft, extends TrueType format by Apple. Its cross paltform, has i18n characer seupport, large glyph sets, and supports many advanced typographic features.

How do they work?

Unicode characters are input into a OPENTYPE LAYOUT SHAPER (OTLS) which also takes as input a OpenType font, and outputs GLYPH IDs in that font.

The OTLS reviews the sequewnce of unicode chars and asks what kind of char is it, and based on the OT spec it applies a number of faetures to the input chars. the shaper searches for these features in the fonts and processes the features and finally outputs the glyph ids.

In FontForge we can see these Glyph IDs in the Font View as the first number on the toolbar.

The whole magic behind OpenType is the OTLS. We can develop an OpenType font but we can’t b

Jungshik: Glyph ID alone isn’t sufficient, the OTLS also emits x y positions

Q: And with the GlyphIDs and positions any dumb renderer can render text?

A: Yes, this is a part of the overall rendering stack

Here i write in Gedit ‘pravin’ with 3 syllables in Devanagari.

The OTLS does this:

1. Analyse the text

2. Reorder chars as per script requirements

3. share glyph sequences with GSUB then GPOS

eg, Uniscribe on win, ICU in LibreOffice, Harfbuzz-NG on many free systems. A few years ago pango, qt and icu were all different OTLS and a few years back, harfbuzz was started to unify them. harfbuzz is meant to be fully compatible with uniscribe, so a single font will work the same everywhere. This makes font development easier.

Jungshik: What is Apple using on Mac OS?

A: They use AAT

Jungshik: But they support OpenType too, in addition to AAT they support OpenType to CoreText. I wonder what is behind that.

A: I wonder if they use harfbuzz?

Jungshik: Perhaps ICU, but I don’t know.

A: I have used AAT and I like that approach

Jungshik: I like it too

Q: Split vowels?

A: No, not in Devanagari, but in say Malayalam

Demonstration

[Brief talk about Unicode encodings]

…

designers draw shapes on paper and scan that. drawing on screen is different, they are very used to drawing on paper. they draw and scan and place on background. once its in the backgroud, they say Element, Autotrace.

FontForge has vectorised the points. Now remove the background image. The problem with this is that there are SO many points. We can remove these with ‘merge’ points, select them and CTRL-M. We can also draw around the background image instead of using autotrace. I am no artist and it took me a whole day to draw the indian rupee symbol.

Q: Do you have different Rupee shape for each script?

A: We do a little bit

So, lets copy some glyphs from Lohit Devanagari to a new font

You can see that font development is time consuming process and I think thats why there is not much community contribution to libre fonts.

The ligatures dont have Unicode points so the glyphs belong in the Private Use Area.

Q: are there rules to assign PUA points?

Roozbeh: We are meant to not point any CMAP table at those glyphs

We can set the glyph name to ‘khsa’ and assign the unicode point to -1, and pste the base glyphs into their correct slots.

Lets sets up the GDEF table. Go Element, Compact, we only see the glyphs that are IN the font. Now we go to the base glyphs in Font View and right click, Glyph Info, and set their OT Glyph Class as Base. THen the mark glyph we set as Mark.

www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/devanot/features.aspx

now we set up the GSUB table. Font INfo, lookups, gsub, new lookup, ligature substitaion, akhn, for deva {dflt} script, and we can see this is set up correctly in the tooltip preview

Now in the metrics window we can see this working live.

GPOS, FontInfo, Lookups, GPOS tab, Add lookup, we want a Mark to Base position feature, abvs, for deva {dflt} script.

For testing purposes, we can see if we add the wrong feature.

…

Now we add an Above Base Mark GPOS lookup, and a subtable, name the anchor ANCHOR. then go to the base glyph, Point, Add Anchor, place it.

We add this to the mark glyph and then Point, Add Anchor, place it, and we can see in Metrics View that it works.

You can see moving the anchor point in the glyph view updated in real time in the metrics view.

In GPOS, the anchor point is a key idea.

…

How to debug for problems? there can be many issues, especailly with ‘cyclic’ features, where a b c becomes d and b c d becomes e.

I’m lucky! Are you aware of Nastaleeq? Its one of the most complex scripts. I’ve never seen a more complex script. Needs 1,000s of lookups. Debugging it is very hard!

Be patient. THat’s the only option we have.

Q: Do we have automated tools for subsitution that can become infinite and lokc up?

A: Yes, its possible. In FontForge if we do a sequnece, we pass that to harfbuzz. If we can test directly frmo FontForge it would be easier. Same problem with MS.

Q: Who defines the tags?

A: MS and Adobe, its an ISO standard, OpenType and Open Font Format are the same.

Roozbeh: Another good libre tool is TTX. It dumps the font as XML and you can edit tables without any side effects. Its nice to make precision edits. Play with existing fonts, dump them, see how they are arranged.

Jungshik: There is no automated sanity checking.

A: I’d like to see harfbuzz integrated into fontforge

Q: Is opentype sufficient for everything?

jungshik: nastaleeq is hard. it pushes the limits of opentype. you can not fully implement it, as needed by urdu speakers, you must do some compromises.

roozbeh: you want geometric calculations, move dots based on actual text, so fonts will always been a compromise even with a more advanced engine than OT. www.flickr.com/photos/pimu/4671362490/ You can see 2 baselines, every word has its own base line and there is the line baseline. tools arent ready for this.

A: in OT fonts, the font developer is totally dependent on the OT spec. AAT gievs total control to the font developer, so i think it is the best. OT shaper has so many implementatinos that differ. we should have a single shaper to make life easier. long term, a single base can solve all problems and move forward.

Q: when creating gsub rules, how can you verify they are correct?

A: thats where a linguist role comes in. you test by installing the font and typing text using those rules and see it is correct with native reader knowledge.

Finally, here is a testing tool:

http://utrrs-testing.rhcloud.com/languages/hi/gsub

Its libre licensed, under MIT license, in 2010.

Originally published in Libre Graphics Magazine Issue 1.4.

Designers often express caution about Libre culture. Letting other people make modifications to their designs is unusual for them. This is especially true for type designers, since the harmony of a typeface design can easily unravel if changes are made carelessly. Copyright is the major legal restriction that stops others from making modifications. In some places, though, there is another restriction: moral rights.

Moral rights are explained on the English Wikipedia as “the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.” In many places such as France, authors are not allowed to transfer, sell or give up these rights to other people or parties.

Recently I was discussing the sil Open Font License with France’s highest profile type designer, Jean Francois Porchez. He asked me if these moral rights conflict with Libre licensing. The sil Open Font License is the most popular license for Libre fonts and—I believe—it does respect moral rights.

Let me walk you through the OFL’s compliance measures.

Section 2 of the OFL requires that “each copy contains the above copyright notice.” As a copyright holder, your copyright notice (which can include your url and contact email) will remain with all copies and derivatives. This ensures that your attribution is made available. Additionally, there are FONTLOG text files commonly distributed with OFL fonts. These have a detailed description of the fonts, a timeline of releases, and details about all copyright owners and authors including those of any “parent” fonts. This is not required, but it is recommended by the OFL as a best practice and it really helps with good attribution.

Another side to attribution is a case in which the author wishes to be misattributed, in a way: anonymously or with a pen name. In this case, designers can simply use their handle, or “Anonymous,” in their copyright notice and other fonts’ metadata.

A third side of attribution, what we might call bad attribution, involves the name of the designer of a parent font being used to promote derivatives. Section 4 of the OFL provides a guard against such misuse to “promote, endorse or advertise” a derivative.

Such attribution issues are quite straightforward. The concern is really the moral right to the integrity of a work. English Wikipedia explains that “preserving of the integrity of the work bars the work from alteration, distortion, or mutilation.” Allowing others to make alterations is fundamental to Libre culture.

Personally, I believe that saying an alteration of a typeface is a “distortion, or mutilation” is an entirely personal opinion. If I chop off the serifs from a typeface and re-space it, I think it would be strange for anyone to say that I mutilated it. Others can say I did it poorly, that making a related sans is really a new design project and many other details of the typeface must be changed to re-harmonize it. But for my personal identity to be so wrapped up in my work that I could have hurt feelings in this way seems bizarre to me. Yet many artists and designers do feel strongly that the work they have made should not be altered by other people at all, even in the countries where moral rights are not instituted in law, like the United States.

The identity of a designer is associated with his work. In type, there is a common association of the name of a typeface with the name of its primary designer. Making a change naturally invites altering the name to reflect differentiation. Using the original name in part could cause the association with the original designer to carry over too far. The OFL has a solution to this. It allows designers to set Reserved Font Names, which act in a similar way to trademarks.

If you declare a Reserved Font Name, the OFL ensures that when your font is modified then the name you chose for the font will not be used—unless you give additional permission.

This naming restriction encourages people who make ‘corrections,’ who adjust minor details in the font—tweaking a kerning pair here, adding some metadata there—to contribute their changes upstream, back to the original designer who maintains the font under its most well known name.

In all of these ways, among others, I believe the OFL respects moral rights, while maintaining the principles of Libre culture.

The author of this column is not a lawyer. This column is meant as a set of opinions, not as legal advice.

Dave Crossland believes anyone can learn to design great fonts. He is a type designer fascinated by the potential of software freedom for graphic design, and runs workshops on type design around the world.

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 14 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

A study of punctuation marks’ history in Hanguel – Jaehong Park
—————————————————————-

…

Here you can see the ancient comma and period marks, comma are small circles connected to the foot of a stem and periods are the circle under the glyph.

…

Jungshik Q: Western punctuation marks are well established in Korean print. Will your suggestion be adopted?

A: No, its not a suggestion for adoption. Its an experimental typeface design. In 1933 we borrowed English, and I couldn’t find so many in the history. Korean type designers made type designs without thought to this aspect. This talk is just to show and rethink the punctuation marks.

Q: Quotation marks; the good reference for a quote mark, the French/Italian/German style << >> looks better than the English ” ” and would perhaps fit the forms of the Korean script better.

Jungshik: Korean do use French style quotation marks, such as in book titles.

Q: Thanks for this interesting presentation. 2 questions, 1, your design is experimental but doesn’t reflect the characteristics of the script, the forms seem unusual to the current korean forms.

I’m a type designer. I work at MS. I wrote a brief, Can a true italic be designed for Korean? The next question is SHOULD an italic be designed?

I don’t believe western type concepts should be added to non laitn scripts, but this case, its a genuine fit. Roman italics is a faster handwriting style, then it became part of an emphasis.

We saw earier today the emphasis mark as traditionally done. Why we need an italic? Korean italics, you have mechanically slanted forms be used. Its a mark of coolness, differentiation. Users see slanted text in latin and want to harmonise the korean so it looks better. the emphatic use of slant is useful.

But auto slanted doesnt look good. The handwriting type in korea is from beautiful hadnwriting; these are sandoll’s foundry specimen book pages. Here is the upright form, and in an example of use in their book, its artificially slanted to the right. Maybe harmonised with latin, maybe it feels cool. Not sure.

But why not use the handwriting forms with the type forms? In a headline it can work (example) but it wont work in text.

At U o Reading I looked at signage. You have many sytles, fat rounded, uneven alignment lines, brush styles. But an Italian restaurant “Santa Rosa” had this signage. A right slant, a brush style forms, calligraphic. But it has a horizontal axis, not vertical.

Traditional korean claligraphy has very vertical lines. Its part of the key elements of beuatiful korean tyep. So this with its horizontal axis/stress was special.

The cursive form or veernacular is not the masters of calligraphy, its just fast writing. it jeeps the vertical stress and axis but it adds ligated forms for speed so you get cool interesting forms.

I wanted horizontal forms, high contrast – brush inspired – but it was too brushy. ‘This reminds me of Edwardian Script’ – too decorative, too far from upright and scribal hands.

We just saw a lot exmaples of this handwriting. The writer said slanting it was unnatral. Why? I tried to write Korean quickly and it has a right slant. I realised my elbow position was differnet. Close to my body, there is more slant, than away.

Here is a piece of lettering on a CD cover that has horiznal axis.

So I made Saja, a different feel to normal uprights. Its ligated forms, 5-6 strokes, the top has 1-2. This merges latin slant, brush forms. Here it is like emphasis in an upright body of text, like latin use of tialics. how can we do an italic that stadns out? I think this will do it, a slight slant and a cursive form.

This works well when mixed in to roman tialics. if you have design elements that work well together, you cna put them in use together and they work well. You can do separate-but-equal typesetting as well as interleaved.

This is a new concept fo rkorean. Noramlly thye just have slanted type, its not beautiful, so i think a new appeoach is imprtant, but its not unprecedented. its already done but poorly. A new dierction will help diversity while maintaining teh value of the text.

www.sajafont.com

Q: The tilaic you did, will that be a style?

A: Yes, just hit the itlaic button thats the magic

John Berry: The last 3 talks all focused on modulation of text, especially punctuation. They all seem to be able ‘how to read the text’ like brinhurst says all punctuation including spaces are like musical notation.

A: Yes, i am excited about korean type because there is a focus on function and form, people think about how to display content.

Q: How does yours compare? in every script there is their own italics. can korean italics

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 13 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

11:25 Typography between Chinese complex characters and Latin letters – Mariko Takagi
——————————————————————————

…

I wondered what I can do to help bridge the 2 cultures of east and west. My EN

CN type primer, has 6 princpiles of chinese chars and some key ideas.

To talk about typography, we must have the same vocabulary. I saw a slide in yesterday’s Thai talk, talking about ‘looped terminals’ and I’d been to a train station show in the slides and said, “I’ve been to the looped terminal”

I am a native German reader, so I had to learn the English typo terms. How can they be translated to CN? In many books there are the ’8 principles of yong’ which are often shown with made up characters, that show different strokes but aren’t real words. The have quite a square form.

WE started collecting and comparing sources from CN, JP, Taiwan, and other places like Germany. Last year Susanna Licko (?) wrote a book about CJK typography.

CN chars can have a single stroke, but the most complicated has 64 strokes. You can see the 2 CN and EN texts, there is a row of headings, DOT DOT DOT, and the CN headings are visibly different terms for various dots. In EN we dont have discrete terms.

…

Horizontal bar, vertical stroke, these are easy to identify. downstrokes can vary a lot in angle, but all are downstrokes to the left; downstrokes to the right also vary in angle. Upstrokes left and right. Angles or corners, ‘returning stroke’ or folds,

…

11:50 Hanzi of the West, letters of the East – Christoph Stahl
——————————————————————————

‘Translation Server Error’ as headline on a billboard

The CN text input will add a space after a comma, so in EN you see a comma place ,after the space, and a space added after an apostrophe.

Some peopel can see ‘made in china’ from lousy latin fonts. Slowly CN foundries learn they should have better quality latin.

Now lets see how europeans use hanzi. Frederic William of Brandenberg had 2nd biggest CN library after French king. You can see a book made totally second hand, looks nothing like the real chars.

Here is a 1641 book, ‘relations of china’ and it uses the christian crossl + symbol, lol

1688, ‘new relations of china’

1655 ‘history of china pt 1′ – there is this idea that they are pictographic, so a euro man saw fishes in the ‘river’ char when there is no such thing.

Here’s a typeface with a thick border around each hanzi glyph.

Soon the euro founders invented split sorts, which allowed euro typographers to make up bizarre combinations of radicals.

1815 first bilingual EN-CN dictionary by Robert Morrison. He had one size of a wooden hanzi font. his workers desrted, all kinds of drama, but the book came out. Like roman said, euros got tired of this, they saw too much effort for too little effort. So sinology books have CN terms with romanisation, but there are many different romanisation systems. This means the same person may appear as 2 differnet names.

proportionality and monospace is tricky. latin text in chinese body means the latin text offsets the grid. so you align the hanzi on the grid and place latin words in the gap?

You can also use half wide and full wide latin spacing. not great.

Hanzi usually today uses justified setting, which means the same latin word has very different tracking even in the same sentence.

You can put latin in CN with a baseline alignment, but that means a step down for each latin word; so i think its better to have a middle alignment. even capitals and lowercase cna have a differnt baseline which looks odd to euro eyes but makes smoother reading for CN native readers.

A high x height helps fill the tall space of CN.

Line spacing can be baseline aligned with 3 lines of latin next to 2 lines of CN.

You must have a feeling for a language, you can’t just go ahead and apply the conventions of your writing system’s typography to another one, as they did in the past. This awareness should be done in all typography education arund the world.

100 years ago euro typographers gave up on hanzi and now with digital type we have the change to try again, if we work together, we can make it work, and the effort to bring out cultures together can never outweigh the benefit.

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 12 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

16:25 Black and white in Indian typography – D. Udaya Kumar
————————————————————

Tamil Nadu is a southern Indian state, its also an fficial language of Singapore and Sri Lanka. Its literary history starts in 300BC.

It has 247 letters with 12 vowels (life), 18 consonants (body) there are manyn vowel consonant conjuncts, loan letter sfrom Grantha script, some ligatures, and our own numerals.

All indic scripts come from Brahmi script; the Cankam script was 300BC-500AD. There were 3 great kings in india, and a kind promoted tamil as the official script in the 9th century.

There were stone carvings, copper plate etching, and palm leave manuscripts.

Stone, metal, palm.

A palm leaf survives for 300-400 years. There may be text from say 300BC but that has been destroyed by time. But every 300 years they copied the text to a new palm. The copying meant the script evolved. We can see the original forms because of the stone forms.

I tried to research these changes over time. Palm is used for many things in India, building houses even, and the palm leaves are boiled and dried. You can’t just take a leaf off at tree The processing various across india, north and south, and in S E Asia too, each have their own process. This is a processed and prepared leaf; its smoothed with pebbles.

Tamil has a unique way for using the medium. Here is a northern manuscript, and their tools of writing and script forms are totally different; a reed pen with an angular cut, that writes. THis makes the forms very calligraphic. Tamil is written with a pointed metal stylus that scratches the palm leaf, and then we apply the ink to the etching.

The manuscript is not written on a desk, its held in two hands. You must sit, you can’t write when standing. There is no ink in the writing stage. I believe there is thus no concern by the scribe about the black and white of the forms. Malayalam, you can see lots of curved forms, as a horizontal stroke is easy and a vertical stroke is hard to go across the palm lines. If you go horizonal, it will easily cut the lead. So the south indian scripts are rounded so that a scribe can QUICKLY write that overcomes the physical limitations of the medium.

Malayama is used in the neighbouring Kerala state.

…

So Indian typgoraphers like to use multiple bright colors, and lts of text effects. All the magazines have these effects. There isn’t a grid strucutre. We love to play around, use as much space as possible.

These are popular magazines in the south. At least 5 typefaces on the cover. This is INSIDE the magazine – each sentence has a different fore and background color!

This is a wedding invitation, I did it before all nice with a grid and helvetica and they said WHATS WRONG WITH YOU and did it the normal way.

A metaphor?

If I show this to my Mum, she says the traditional lady on the left looks good and the western lady on the right should stand properly, put more clothes on and eat better.

We want more ornamentation, more decoration, more colors, and we like it.

Conclusion

Modernism ideas are rejected. We should embrace what is there and understand the culture and do typography with that point of view. In Modernist type we look at the grey value, balance things and seek harmony. For the Tamil typographers these qualities may not be desirable.

I would like to thank my team members, Prof U A Athavankar, G V …

Thank you!

www.typoday.in

16:50 Simplified Arabic – Titus Nemeth
————————————————–

[nice quote]

Arabic type was slow to arrive. It was a slow and tedious process to compose arabic with movable type. 500 sorts, heavy kerning prone to breakage due to the pressure of the press. Until the mid 20th C the region wasn’t as supportive of typography beacuse colonial empires were in control. Ottoman empire.

This changed in the 1910s, a migrant arabic newspaper in brooklyn used a Linotype to compose its text. It was faster, a simpler workflow, but it imposed its own characteristics; it could not kern, it had a physical limit to character sets. 2 magaziens meant 180 chars. Reducing 500 sorts to 200 is a drastic reduction in type form variation.

Printed type remained marginal until around 1950. The biggest arabic newspaper at 1900 had 10,000 copies. Daily Mail in UK at that time was 1,000,000 copies a day. The region was fragmented with new and somewhat artificial national boundaries, and they sought identity. This is where arabic print really develops. This is what arabic typography as we know it today really developed.

The Al-Hayat newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon exemplifies this. Kamel Mrowa was a Shia muslim in Beirut, and it was a commercial success. In 1954, he approached LInotype for new machiens; he wanted faster production, to increase print volume.

He said he knew the arabic typewrite, around 50 years already, and they wrote arbaic with a simple tool. Unlike chinese or japanese typewriter, it had 45 keys and a shift for 90 total. From 500 to 90, it was a crude represenation.

Here’s how it worked.

Most arabic letters are connected, and can be reduced to 4 forms: initial, medial, final and singular. …

Walter Tracey was the type director at the time, he thought it was a good idea. Middle east was a new market for type manufactorers to enter.

Remember the wealth of letter shapes in arabic. Here are the 24 shapes a letter can take at the start of a word, changing based on how what is followed.

A typewriter reduced this to just 3 forms, singular and connected. (?)

LInotype was slow. They took an existing type and threw out some chars and modified existing ones. Kamel Mrowa was frustrated it was so slow going, and went to England to help. The University of Reading has in its collection some samples of this work.

It took years, but in 1959, simplified arabic was annoucned. It was big news for newspaper publishers, a 30-50% increase in output in a market where time is money is good. The author of the press release stressed that Kamel Mrowa was the author; perhaps Linotype wasn’t too sure about the invention of simplified arabic and put him with top billing. But in the following years, it was heralded as a great breakthrough by LInotype.

the type was expanded, an isntant sucess for the company. it found appreciation in the copmetitoin with imitation. Intertype had copied LInotype since the patents expired. Intertype was a total clone of linotype, to the degree it could exchange spare parts.

Intertype annoucned their simplified arabic a year later as ‘Abridged Arabic’

While Linotype had a patent on the system they didn’t go to court. The idae of shape reduction was copied by Intertype, and they improved the system; they added some characters to give a slightly more authentic, less simplified look.

Linotype took another route. They hired a calligrapher, to design a typeface specifically for this technique, and the Mrowa-Linotype Number 8 with 9 combiend the improvements of Intertype with a new design.

Intertype customers soon switched to Linotype since it was so much better, and by 1967 almost all typesetters were Linotype users.

In 1967 another type was released for the simplified arabic system, Yakout. A calligrapher was assasinated in his office and disappeared from Linotype marketing materials. It was the most successful and most copied.

In 1980 they had 80% of the general market and 90% of the newspaper market. You were guaranteed to read these types. This remains true today, with clones very popular.

But in moving to digital, the clones continued. Letters that are not the same have the same base forms, when there are no limits on digital character sets.

MS Arial and Times New ROman’s arabic used the simplified arabic system too. A typeface made for a narrow, specific cirumstance of newspaprs int he 1950s became a de facto stardard of typography.

A handheld device, it may be ambiguous and curious that this shares ANYTHING with the design for a linotype machine in the 1950s.

The quote from the start, we can subtitute script for type and writer for designer. There is no need to repeat the compromises of the past in the present.

Please learn the history, learn why things were done in the past, and consider how to do things newly today.

Jungshik Shin: You said the final and isolate forms were 1 form and the initial and medial forms were 1 form.

Titus: They CAN be treated separately.

Arabic glyphs in arial still use simplified arabic, just 2 forms?

Titus; Yes. The new font for a mobile has the 2 forms. There is no constraint any more for using more than 4 forms. Returning to my quote, its more work for the designer of course. If something contributes to the convenience of a reader, the designer or writer should do that.

Jungshik: OpenType has a restriciton on Nastaleeq?

Titus: yes, there are issues with opentype, it can’t handle everything – that is WAY further than simplified arabic.

Jungshik: Simplified Arabic ever used for urdu or pashtu region?

Titus: Urdu is a specific case. They use the arabic script in a different way, and until VERY recently, their newspapers were handwritten, and their websites are all single images linked, there is no real text. There is little or no use of ARial and TNR arabic by Urdu writers.

Jungshik: How do they do printing?

Tirus: Lithography. They handwrite on a lithographic stone and print from that.

Gerry; You can see a lithograph nastaleeq newspaper in the exhibtiion tonight.

17:15 Notes of Helvetica Thai: loop-less terminal in Thai typefaces – Anuthin Wongsunkakon
——————————————————————————–

I look kinda chinese but I’m not and I got help from a friend with the Chinese text in my slides.

I’m from Thailand, and we speak Thai there. Its a 513,000km^2 sized country, about the same size as france or california, 65M people, 95% buddhist. Bangkok has 6.5M people, a single state; capital, port, political center.

Think of Thailand? An elephant ride? People ask me if I ride an elephant to work but you do see them on the street for tourist purposes. There are the buddhist ruins, the floating market (that is totally far from Bangkok). Its like any big city, lets see the street typography; Air Asia ads, KFC ads, a loopless terminal type in both. CP, a big food company, blackberry, epson, citibank – all loopless in their ad headlines, and citi use it in text too.

Averege income, $490/month for someone with a BA degree. True? Yes. MA, $685/month. The foundry business, you think how much a person like that spends on fonts. 26 minutes a day reading, 40% prefer TV to books. So what kind of type we read in thailand in books? it doesnt match the street signage and billboard ads.

This is a knockoff of Interstate. This is street pedestrian signage in Helvetica stretched narrower, next to a looped terminal thai type. This bank poster and this Ikea signage is nicely harmonized.

This is a magazine spread, the way we teach in design school, you MUST use looped terminal type for text. Smallest use is 14pt, you do 1 full page col or 2 cols 50%. But they use loopless terminals for captions.

So if loopless terminals are so bad, why would we use them for captions? When you reduce point size you can say more, the area can contain more text. The loop terminal at 9 or 8pt, you see the little dots everywhere.

Thai Letter vs Thai Typeface

Old Thai stone carving lettering. This kind of text set the tone for what our type looks like. 700 years ago it was upright, then it became slanted like in this stone. But with movable type EVERYTHING became upright again.

It effected our hand writing. We all started writing upright, lost our little slant.

More bizarre, this is the face everyone in Thailand thinks is THE default type, if you want to type soemthing in an office, you use it. We call it French Face, designed by French missionaries, it is latinised a bit, euro style stroke contrast.

If it was introduced now it would be awkward but after 150 years its highly readable.

WE have looped terminal, this is Tonbori, the default Mac OS X thai type, and this is more ‘latinised’, Sukhumvit, with a non-looped terminal.

Wallpaper, Maxim, they use no loop. This ia school textboook with looped terminal.

This is a VTS station, its helvetica with somtehing that looks odd to me, not the looped terminal, but the way the classifications dont match.

This is more matching to me.

Legibility for the old generation? A latin type has a family of styles, weights. In thai, before digital type, phototype had little variety in weight. This estabilshed workarounds, so its acceptable to use a different type that is bolder to get emphasis.

This one, you see the outsider typeface; an old Ford newspaper ad. They wanted to look advanced, imported, reliable, modern. They used a type that looks like Futura Bold to me.

This concept crept in, people felt good to use loopless terminal in 2nd and 3rd level headlines.

Today, you can see morea nd more loopless terminal designs in text.

Many people mix it up, loopless is display+headline and text at 14pt with a looped terminal only type.

When you work in thailand, you may be as a co worker, or as a family business. If you dont have a true bold you use another type that is bolder, another example.

Helvetica in the 1970s, dry transfer was very popular here, an alternate way to get fancy type in your layout. That’s where this begins. Anuparp was designed to be Helvetica’s best friend, that I made. its looped terminal, monoline, with the same proportion as helvetica. Similar color.

But when helvetica wants to speak thai, what would he do?

Its born out of being a display font, so it went over the classification line into a text font. Differnet weights help with this. This is nutrition facts on a orange juice box. Its loopless narrow type. This is a loopless terminal in an Ikea catalog.

Capturing Helvetica physically, its not possible 70 years ago. But today its more and more used for serious text usage. You can copy and paste the forms from latin that are similar to thai forms. But it doesnt work very well. You can see thai text appears much too narrow in this way.

When I designed Helvetica Thai, i wanted to move on and design new forms. If you want to design something, you must make it new, not just copy. We have to keep the essentials, but the x height is different so I redrew everything. the text color and pitch is harmonised.

I did light, regular, bold, and the 44 thai letters. I also did helvetica neue version too.

Thank you!

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 12 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

10:45 Hanzi: the past, present and future – George Gu
—————————————————————–

Intro: Masters in Tokyo, he works with Chinese MM type design.

I studied in 1988 in Tokyo, and I finished in 1993, and moved to Canada. I designed a set of fonts, 0x-08, a MM font, and finished it in 1998. I showed my work to John Collins, D Knuth, in ATypI in Boston. After that I stopped my work but not my thinking.

Last year I started my work again. I agreed with my business partners to show my work to you today.

First, the type history of asia. Second, the thoughts about producing a typeface. Third, the practical results. In the USA, a company invents a lot of technology, like MM. You need a US computer company to make a big CJK font, but I can show you my work is fair, trustable and honest because it lets you export CJK but can work well for Latin too. I will show you my own software for designing. If a firm has this already, thats great. I am just an amateur type designer, so this may not be new. We have 4 guys, 3 with a PhD degree and me. 2 guys are Computer Science PhDs. We did lots of work together.

…

In 1836 Marcellin Legrand started compositing CJK with composite radicals. 20 years later this was adopted in Berlin and in 1912, a Japanese type designer biought a Lynn Boyd Benton machine which allowed them to move to large scale automated production. It was sold in China in 1950. Later Morisawa Noboo were inspired by Monotype to do phototypesetting of CJK but the scale was hard. This is lead type in 1861, 1875. A western type designer went to China and Japan and help with this work. A number of flaws can be found in the skeletons; loss of aesthetics in scaling a single origin skeleton to multiople weights (counters get closed); uneven alignment (dense characters are too tall, uneven baselines; vertical alignment from widths uneven too), disruption of normal spacing (monospace not done well), uneven strokes ().

Digital tyepface are extended by handwriting; a person doesnt change their brunch when writing but digital type often has variable stroke wdith in an unnatural way. Here is a serif and sans serif design

Here is an example of my teacher, a master of chinese art, Chu Lai Chen, 1982, its 2cm^2 and done very well by hand.

Current font tech:

1. Stroke based types by Dyna Font, in Taiwan, and they make Hanzi in Changhai. 1.4Mb fonts, can change weight.

2. Radical based type, like Paris Type and Berlin Type, is the most common technique in China, like WenQuanYi in Boston. Chienese military use this.

3. Fontographer EM function is excellent. We started this in 1995 and I asked the programmer to stop this.

Finally I chose to use Multiple Master for my font production. Range of weight by interpolation, allows range of wdith axis too, and I have a program to calculate the grey balance. We use this data to design with.

Gu CJK MMT

1. Smaller storage memory for JIS X 0208 WOFF (around 1.1mb)

2. Use of condensed fonts can increate number of chars displayed on a mobile screen by 130%

3. EM512 is 9 bit, 1024 is 10 bit, 2056 is 11 bit. Quality can be the same. My partner said, if a USA company chose a CJK font, we can’t match their quality.

Here is Basilisk II, hmm, doesnt work. Win XP, SoftMac. Here is my font in 3 weights. Here is a my font condensed. This is in Ikarus, and this is the grey balance output, returning a value like 0.123 for each Glyph ID. You can see this glyph has a low value, its a single stroke. We had another software on the ‘gravity point’ of a glyph. The 3 PhDs said they can see a central point but they can’t see the gravity point I can see. So we developed this tool. But I don’t have it here.

This is my iPhone mockup showing 1,155 characters on a screen. This is mine, 1,589 – a 137% increase. This images compares legibility, you can see mine is an improvement.

www.georgegu.com/portfolios.html

11:10 Designing CJK typefaces under a unified concept – Shinya Yagami
—————————————————————————

Japanese comics are popular and loved around the world. The quality and workmanship is famous, as is animation.

…

Why do we need many typefaces? CJK can express something with a single character. The phrase ‘Made in Japan’ reminds of things produced so far.

Issues in typography
======================

11:35 Digging into the ATypI archive – Gerry Leonidas
—————————————————————–

This talk is dedicated to Cynthia Batty.

ATypI was started in 1957, 55 years old, and in 1984 things changed rapidly with Mac and 2 years later Fontographer. Unicode, internet in 1994 with browsers 2.0, but documents didnt change until later. No memory of online until 1997.

We see a reversal of permanence, what was on paper vanishes as its not searchable, its hidden in an office in a box. digital things can be more permanent. but what happens to reference works, the last years brittancia shifting totally to digital. its a trend.

From 1957 to 1984 there were also big changes. hotel metal to phototype. There were big players; In 1968 when i was born, there was half a pge of new type being published. You could INDEX ALL TYPE THAT EXISTED IN LATIN.

The association handled everything byt he secretariat, employed by Monotype Linotype Etc, they kept copies of all the association’s stuff, evthing was on paper. Business transitions, conference records, meeting minutes (!). It was North Western centric; evrything was in English German and French and translater, copied to 3 colored papers. Like a world wihtout mobile phones; people type something, 2 weeks it arrives, 4 weeks they get a confirmation. its all filed in BOXES AND BOXES of stuff.

AtyPI had some transitions and the archive followed through each one. People felt they should maintain it somehow, it grew and grew. I have a presinte 2001 AtypI bag. Most things are similar to today, like Sam Berlow, and there are lots of pristine empherma. SoTA partnerships. LEgal history. And the founding principles, arbitration between members.

We got the archive in 2006, it was a store house in New Jersey and sent to Reading. We can maintain things that tell us stories. We kept it in storage for 5 years until I got funding and hired a student to sort thorugh it.

If you forget your credit card numbers from 15 years ago, we have them. It was all on paper so remains. We scrapped all personal financial informaiton and tried to keep all the best things.

‘Mostly gentlemanly disussions between mostly north western men, represtingn different strages of oligolpolies in transition.’ it was a series of dinners among friends. The gala dinners is a tradition.

The interesting thing was the committess. The type deisgners, manufactorers, and educators. Education was key from the start. Typefaces were no longer tied to heavy machinery. Portability. And portability of designers. So the challange was, who maintains this, who owns it.

Copyright for typefaces?

ATypI was active in trying to design copyright for typefaces. They put together a document in 1973, to clarify what type is and how to protect it. Lots of other discussions about how own them.

Who owns what?

THere is a tension between manufactorers and type designers. ANd they wanted to educate users.

How do you educate users?

get them young, its easy to copy a floppy, and bad habits set in fast.

The minutes are often very boring. There are a lot of whitepapers explaining to outsiders what typefaces are. They tealk to the general grpahic communication community. The main companies are behind this, they wantto get their act together – they are people who talked to each other instrution to sintiution and all faced the same problem.

Most of them will not exist in their current form in a few years, there is no awareness. 5 years into DTP, they talk about funding a bank service to fund buying metal type. There is a lot of stuff like this. Initiatives to get people together. THe industry is not like what we know today. 5-6 figure funds for ‘piracy protection’ activities. £10-20k per year across a dozen companies adds up.

The ease of ephemeral publication digitally, we dont keep things that are worht keeping. Producing things on paper takes time and attneion. so people had experence and its useful to circulate. No one I know has made any copies of thise online. Its lost to the modern world. This is in 73, and in 94, its people at the top of their game, education and industry.

Walter Jungkind, largely resposnibile for seriosu type in Candada.

David Kindersley in Rrading; Gerrit Noorszji and Simon Daniels in Reading, in a room thats still used today.

Legibility is fashionable today, and theres old research in this archive thats quite different to what is done today.

What is a typeface?

That was explained to non type people a lot.

What is a PROTECTABLE typeface?

‘This is a little bit too much like mine’ without a legal environment; explaining to users was done thorughfully. 2 definitions, one was german first and translated:

NOVELTY

and

ORIGINALITY

Novelty was ‘the stlistic elemnts or overall appearance’ – this is not yet known to eh general public,
and,
reasonably expected t be known by professionals.

WE cant talk about type separate from the users of type. all justments of type are in the conditions of use. familiarity by a general audience is a relevant factor.

ORIGINALITY

if the distinction features of a typeface exhibit [...] individual creativity exceeding [...]

the technical skills and craftsmanship of a lettering draftsman.

Today, if a junior extends a character set, the art director has set the design parametrers and the junior doesn’t have much influence.

But there are hazy boundaries. What is ‘just productoin’? We have production professionals.

There is an unashamed recognition of expertise. There are people who are qualified to make judgements that are worth of attnetion. Today we avoid recognition of expertise.

WEb Fonts FORCED type desiners to open up. Browsers said they’d do it on their own and there are records of that all teh way back.

We used Omeka, a libre archival tool. Its online,

www.typefacedesign.org/library

We started uploading text and images. When its more complete we’ll link it to the ATypI site. Its taggable and we want to make it available as a reference to the world, and then as content.

Jungshik: People take many photos of presentations. Why don’t we distribute slides of every presentation to attendees?

Gerry Leonidas: A list of participatnts is easy to do. We used to do that on paper. We can do that online. My view is that slides are not that useful. Theres little text in mind. You dont know what I said with the slides. I can put things on speakerdeck but you don’t know what the gist of what I said is. A paper presentation is different to a slide based presentaiton. I’m happy to put mine up. the images on my slide are not semantically tagged either, so you won’t find them if you search for phototypesetting. Taking a photo of a photo on a project is silly. Lets not forget that, as a teacher, I put my slides online, is that a substitute for teaching? The words that go with things is important.

Brian Stell: Its very valuable for us in teh audience to refer back to, though

Gerry: Yes. I will put my slides online.

Q: Why did you appear in Adams slides yesterday?

Gerry Leonidas: Oh, that reminds me! [Glimpses of Adam in various poses]

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 11 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

14:00 Making CJK web fonts faster – Brian Stell
———————————————————–

You can subset based on common character usage stats

You can subset for a given page, 1,400 chars for 99% of the pages.

A typical CCJK page only uses 5% of the characters in the Big5 set.

the GLYF table is 80-90%+ of a font’s data.

Google Web Fonts subsetting, for Latin this per-page subsetting is a big win. The text= parameter doesn’t have range support so its limited to 60 chars (?)

Page subsetting COULD be done all on the server but its not yet done anywhere.

HTML5 file system is local disk speed, its a web standard although its only implemented on Chrome. I’d like Mozilla to join in on this, I don’t know about MSIE. Can be used normally or used as a background process and then appears on 2nd time. a flash of loading at 0.5s is super annoying.

Load and use next time is great, if you know users will visit multiple times.

Lazy loading is a programmer term, you load the parts as you need them. This loads just what a page needs now, but each chunk is re-usable by all other pages, so over time the whole font will be loaded.

We do this by creating a ‘empty’ version of the font, with 000s in the glyph table space, and a gzip compression will turn that from a 18mb of glyph data to just 5 bytes. I’ve started this as a libre software project:

http://code.google.com/p/gwym

I hope to ship working code for this in the coming summer, and it only works on Chrome now but I know Mozilla plans to implement the required parts.

I’m now working on HTML5 ‘Load and use later’ for Google services.

Questions?

Thomas Phinney: Having the client merge in the fonts?

Brian Stell: Yes

Thomas Phinney: Where does the merging happen?

Brian Stell: The client is a small library, but the server needs some magic sauce.

Font production
========================

14:25 Managing font families just got a lot easier – Adam Twardoch / Yuri Yarmola
—————————————————————-

FontLab just makes type design software.

What have we done recently? We released Fontographer for Mac OS X. It simple, robust, It Just Works.

A free update for Mac and Windows is available today on FontLab.com

We released FontLab Studio 5.3 for Mac, as a preview, 2.5x faster, 500+ bugs fixed, new ADobe FDK 2.5, many other things.

FontLab Studio 5.2 for Windows has a preview today. You can finally preview OpenType features in the metrics window.

We have a new codebase, Victoria.

Design process isn’t a big problem for designers. They want technical stuff to just work. Like font families. There’s FLS, Fontographer, DTL, Glyphs, RoboFont, FontForge. All these tools have trouble making families that just work.

There are 2 naming systems. Styling groups must be in sets of 4, then theres the extra stuff. There is complex technical information to memorise. Designers get frustrated with this, unless you are a technical expert.

Our new technology makes this easier. We looked at our Font Editors and realised a typical editor isn’t designed for families; like Photoshop isn’t made for managing photos, like Lightroom.

TransType takes a different view to fonts, it was a Mac/PC conversion tool but that use is over. So we took our Victoria tech to TransType for organizing font families in a ‘just works’ way.

Demo!

Select all styles, ‘Optimal Family’ and all the width/weight information is analysed and used. Regular and Bold have 4 members, and oethers just 2, regular and italic. Thats the recommended method.

You can change this, make the black a bold of the medium. You just drag and drop them into these 2×2 squares. No more check boxes, no more tables. When you’re done you pick the target font format – we still didn’t pin them all down – and select an output folder and how to structure that output and click the ‘play’ icon to convert, and you get the fonts re-organized.

Linotype used to release 2 sets of fonts, one with style linking and one with all fonts in their own name.

There is a side panel with al the metadata inside the families.

It opens VFBs and UFOs. These UFOs have 10,000 glyphs, 50Mb of data, opens very fast.

If you open 2 fonts like an Extra Light and a Black, there is a ‘filter’ menu, and this allows us to very simply interpolate these fonts.

There is a rounding filter, so I can quickly make rounded editions.

There is a distortion effect.

I have a fake Bold and Italic tool.

It supports Overlay fonts, Chromatic Fonts, to create using the ‘overlay’ operation, and export a PDF from Chromatic ‘multi layer’ fonts.

It is not yet available, it will come out December 1st.

Yuri will now show something else.

This is a DTP page showing the font nicely. If you zoom in, you can select a glyph and make in place editing right in the page window. If you look at this, its our Dynamic Shapes tech. The serif is converted to a Dynamic Shape. The junction will stick to a stem. They are intelligent symbols.

We have better annotations.

We have a nice sticky guidelines with section counting. Our measure tool is very smart.

We really wanted to move away from many windows for different views of type. We want a single view where you can have a paragraph of text, and you can zoom in to a single glyph. Edit everything in context, in place, all the time.

14:50 GlyphWiki: a wiki-based glyph design and font production system – Taichi Kawabata / Kamichi Koichi
——————————————————————————–

How to encode and display unencoded glyphs?

www.GlyphWiki.org

Anyone can create a glyph and name it, embed it, as font or image data.

270,000 glyphs made here.

You can use existing components from prior glyphs, and place them.

…

15:15 Glyphs and non-Latin typefaces – Georg Seifert
—————————————————————-

I’m a type designer in Berlin, here is some of my work, I did a new type for the Berlin airport, and I made my own type design tool, Glyphs App.

I had some basic ideas from the start, as Adam said, I implemented the idea that you draw in place. I heard it was 2 days of work to do VOLT arabic mark placement. I take some arabic text from a test doucment, switch to RTL mode, you can see the FEA code is generated automatically. I add anchors from the menu with default positions.

…

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 11 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

11:50 Web fonts for non-Latin scripts – Toshi Omagari, Monotype
——————————————————

Non latin web fonts. Nassim for BBC was a breakthrough.

Web fonts are good [for the usual reasons]

Fonts.com has the most non latin web fonts

GWF Early Access is an experimental page with the widest range of scripts available.

In fonts.com web fonts or MArch 2012, 6 of top 100 were non latin

July had 10 – 4 chinese, 3 arabic – so we can see the steady growth of non latin web fonts

Here’s a list of example sites using non latin web fonts, including Wikipedia which uses Bengali and Burmese

There are simple and complex scripts. Complex scripts shape text by substiting glyphs depending on the context of other glyphs.

OpenType, wide support. AAt for Mac Safari, Mac Opera, iOS Safari.

Graphite, in Firefox as an option to enable and LibreOffice.

Last 2 are more powerful than OpenType but less widely supported.

DIN Next Devanagari, is OT and AAT. AAT works better than OT in this font.

There are unsupported scripts – Burmese only works on Mac. Syriac, Mongolian don’t work on Mac, Ethiopic on iOS, and Nastaleeq and Javanese don’t work anywhere.

Huge character sets can be an issue. CJK fonts are usually only a fe Mb, but can be up to 50mb.

Alan Tam explained yesterday that dynamic subsetting can help. Web Fonts services can help a lot with this.

I set up testing pages that are freely available to me, Fonts.com and GWF Early Access. Here you can see the results. Black text is a web font, blue text is a system font.

Some Loads and Works fine (LW), some fallback to system fonts (FB) and some load but don’t work (LD)

Some scripts can be really enhanced by web fonts because the system default may be a lot of boxes. But loading and not working may be worse than the system font.

GWF EA looks like this, its an experimental stage but here are lots of scripts available. North Korea loves Google Web Fonts! The government websites use it a lot.

Here are 2 tables showing these LW/FB/LD results and web fonts have less red cells, but Burmese may be LD. The table looks much better than I expected.

When I proposed the talk, I expected the talk to look more like this (all red with a smiley made of yellow cells)

I found that mobile browsers support is worst, and all the fonts are improving quickly. Google web fonts are very reliable, and more reliable than those from fonts.com

Raph Levien, said at Google IO 2011, that they are working to improve the reliablity of fonts.

I really thank Google for pushing this forward and setting the bar. Its up to us to make awesome web fonts and make the web richer, not just for Latin for the whole world!

Q: Do these work in mainland china when google doesn’t work in china?

A: If a website is blocked, not sure what we can do.

12:15 Solving the challenges of Asian web fonts – Bill Davis, Monotype
—————————————————————

Technology Adoption Curve, the top 1,000 websites measured by traffic, around 10-15% are using web fonts. For latin. Non latin and Asian web fonts have some way to go.

Web fonts are easy to use. Web fonts services really easy. Web fonts services

Technology Adoption Curve, for non latin, we are really right at the very start of this. There are 5 asian web font services, typesquare (morisawa), Fontplus.jp, Dekomoji.jp
amanaimages.com
mojidepa.com

These are in Japanese, there are some in Korea, and China has justfont.com

Why not seeing asian web font take off? Sites are very text heavy, lots of text at small sizes, where system fonts are tuned; in latin web fonts are used to replace flash with html5 or images of text for real text.

System fonts have 1,000s of hours of hinting. Web fonts tend to be autohinted or

Filesize is a challenge. But its solvable. There are now more smartphones than PCs, so it will remain an issue for a while. A 2mb file takes 61 seconds on a 256k GPRS, versus a 4G mobile with 4Mbs takes 5s.

Subsetting is crucial, and dynamic subsetting is effective and available from fonts.com

So I think THIS is the year that non latin web fonts will take off!

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 10 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

CID Keyed fonts – Ken Lunde
—————————–

Everything used in the workshop will be published on the Adobe CJK forum.

CID Keyed fonts are notoriously hard to work with.

They enable things like different hinting zones for difference scripts in the same font, with more than one FDArray element. Its easy to control FDarray elemenets.

The end game is making an OpenType CFF font. Almost all AFDKO tools support CID keyed fonts

Everything I show here scales to 10,000+ glyph fonts. This demo uses a Japanese font but applies to Chinese fonts too.

tx is a very useful tool. `tx -pdf fontfile` produces a glyph synopsis. Its 73 pages for this large font. Often you want to look at a subset. `tx -pdf -g /1200-/1299 fontfile` – this runs faster as its a subset

`extract-cids.pl -r -s fontfile.otf` will extract CIDs from the font in the text format needed as input to tx. `extract-gids.pl` will also work; GIDs must be contigious and it will extract eg `0-17499`.

`fsarray-check.pl` Checks the structure of the FDArray element. The output can be repurposed by copy and paste; we can put this into `tx -pdf` so you can see all the glyphs associated with that FDArray element.

[I bailed to see lectures]

Shades of grey: a look at how the brain processes typographic information – Myra Thiessen
———————————————————————-

[10 mins late]

All were right handed. So we showed letters one at a time wired up with EEG gear, awhen wht y saw 2 of the same letter in a row (regardless of typeface) they hit a button. The letters and numbers were randomised.

Fluent type were Times New Roman and ARial, and Disfluent were Edwardian SCript and Lucida Blackletter. These are in the Windows bundle. We had 2 groups of 4 letters, e c a o are rounded and at x height, and i l t f which are thin and tall. The x heights matched at 90px and reading distance was 30cm. The stimuli was on screen obvoiusly.

Results! The x on the line graph is time in miliseconds, its PRE ATTENTIONAL. Before the individual is aware they’re looking at something. The consciousness hasn’t processed it. it takes 300ms for that to happen. There is a time that the brain is aware that there is a sensation before cognition. This is shown in pink area. We can see in the left hemisphere there is a big difference between fluent and disfluent type.

There is a significant differnet in the left hemisphere between fluent and disfluent typefaces. The peak/trough in the graph means the brain is engaging more and its doing more for the disfluent type. The difference being right handed means language processing happens more in the left hemisphere.

So these results match what Diemand-Yauman’s study said, the brain is working harder to read disfluent type. But does that mean less cognitive capacity is available for higher order functions, like the gorilla in the room.

Conclusions

* EEG can tell us things with data about legibility and how the brain processes typographic information that behavioral tasks cant

* another point

* some other point

Typography on medicine labels: user studies on typeface, type size and spatial cueing for senior citizens in Hong Kong – Brian Kwok / Keith Tam
——————————————

Brian: … 96% felt type size should increase from 12.5pt to 16pt or more, and KaiTi font was a favourite. Is 16pt really appropriate? Is KaiTi really the best? And does point size really improve legibility?

Is it possible to use 16pt on labels? Not really because the label size is fixed, the invest a lot of money in the whole labeling system. The content is legislated and must contain all that is there.

SungTi has high stroke contrast, HeiTi has no contrast, and KaiTi has a brush stroke modulation. This means the height for the same point size is quite different.

So we scaled the type to be uniform height. So we had 6 labels to test, each font at the same point size and each at the same height.

We looked at the text that the public hospitals use; there are 315 possible instructions. We looked at the longest and counted the number of strokes. We found 4 classes, 108 chars with 1-6 strokes, 200 with 7-12 strokes, 122 with 13-18, and 23 with 19-24, for 443 total characters.

We interviweed 79 educated seniors and ran 5 tests. …

Conclusions

HeiTi is the more preferable font, with better contrast. But it causes many errors in the reading test. The Regulation should be about font height too not just point size.

16pt can’t work with the public hospital.

www.infodesignlab.org

Re-trans-formation of Chinese typography – Jackson Choi / Monica Chiu / Sylvia To
—————————————————————

Jackson: In our school we learn latin typography. for learning chinese typography, our output is often not as good. we struggle to apply what we learn about latin typgoraphy. We asked students to manipulate a chinese typeface to make custom forms, since they typically fall back on system fonts.

We see chinese characters as living coenpts, not ancient relics. Type is all around us and is evolving. We want to have an experimental learning environment and personal engagement from students. How to get students engaged is tough, so we asked them to look at their chinese names and make a logotype for their name. We don’t read stroke by stroke, we read the overall character form. This make students curious about chinese type because the forms are familiar yet alien.

Monica: We came up with a modular framework for these workshops. We had 2 parts, a literature review for rational knowledge and a practical part. We asked students to break down the structure of chinese characters and draw these structures on a grid. Another workshop used art material and artifacts to explore the type forms with texture and emotion.

Students start by knowing and imitating forms and move to appreciate and express them in their own way. This leads to transforming and interpreting the forms.

We saw that our graduates win more awards after we introduced this course, which seems to show it helps. To have fun is a key aspect of learning and we achieved this.

Sylvia: A transformation workshop looked at poster design. …

Jackson: Our focus is not on creating full typefaces but to enable better chinese display typography. We asked,

What did they learn from the modules? How did this interest them in chinese typography? New areas of interest? How did this effect their design abilities and professional work? 75% said this raised their interested in chinese culture and heritage. 80% said it helped them in their jobs and 60% used the skills directly. 63% of clients or bosses said craetive display type is unique and eye catching. But 23% thought it was a useless waste of time

In 2006 30% of students made lettering and in 2012 80%.

…

16:00 And we forgot about the time: flow, type and graphic design – Chris Ro
————————————————————————

[5 mins late]

I was into architecture and then went into graphic design. In architecture I couldnt be invovled in the whole process. In graphic design I could be. I love the instant form making. I love thinking about having type move, playing with the forms. I think of Angus Young from AC/DC and how he is when playing, and how graphic designers are when they are working. Glum, hunched over a computer.

Flow state is a subjective thing. I interviewed a lot of designers, about flow states in design. It was more about graphic design.

Many designers said computers themselves reduced flow. They felt mastery of a computer is impossible. The immateriality of a screen, its not tactile. Designers love working with their hands. The screen is flat, its a blocking point of flow. CTRL-Z makes designers careless. I read Matthew Carter say in the old days that before CTRL-Z he would choose what is doing more carefully.

Keybaord and mouse was made for word processing, not design. Interfaces, the CS UI is a model that is 22 years old. Tool bar on the left, palettes, mouse buttons.

A funny graphic for career evolution of Motion Graphics designers. and as you progress you do less design work and more email.

I found that positive associations with flow were about typography; Keywords with type were felt to have lots of flow. Designers set up their grid, their sizes and proptions, and then laying out the content with a typeface on their design system was great and had lots of flow.

…

So future study, we can look at physical interactions with typgraphy and …

16:25 Creation of two original type families intended for reading contents on electronic media – Andre Baldinger / Philippe Millot / Thomas L’Excellent / Virginie Poilièvre / Christina Poth / Haruko Sumi
—————————————————————————

We were 126 students, and we made ELT Foundry. Our studio is like a science lab, we have research topics chosen by directors, 4 students involved and 6 people working 2 years on it.

…

ELT Gaston

We used interpolation and discussed in the group which option was best.

ELT Incision

This was designed as a pixel font first. We looked at Corbel, Verdana and Droid Sans. We did some nice pixel traps here. We chose cursive a and g for open counters. We looked at a interpolated set of weights all together and in context with regular weight, and we chose the type we all thought worked best. Similarly for the italic angle, looking at it all together, in context with regular, and also as rasterised type. Here are our tests on various devices.

We are considering releasing them at the end of the year, with a reference book, a bibliography, and a concice chronology.

17:00 From the ashes of war and oppression: Korean font development at the turn of the 20th century – Fritz Park
————————————————————————

We are a research magazine, very new, started in April 2012, research is our main focus, we are looking at Korean typography. The history is vague. 1900-1950. Opression> Japanese occupation was 1910 to 1945, and infleunce started in 1880s. The Korean war was 1950-53, the start of the cold war.

Korean langauge was banned, hangul repressed, a ‘bantu’ education, and japanes names were enforced. The N/S war isnt over just a ceasefire.

Metal type was often melted to be reused as metal.

There was a 40+ year cultural black out. It wasn’t until 63 that rebuilding started.

A little about Hangul: there are three main elements, a dot for sky, a line for earth, and a bar for man. . _ | This is a zen appraoch to writing. Its a system for vowels. There was an inner reasoning; similar pronunciations have similar forms. Consonants have shapes similar to the shape of a mouth or in nature. Confucious philosphy was prevalent and influenced this.

Complex pronunciations have an extra stoke or are otherwise derivative from the base form. Non aspirated sounds, there is doubling of symbols.

The baseline can be hidden in Hangul. Its read left to right to bottom. It was originally meant to be read top to bottom on a page.

All the vowel and consonant structures are meant to fit into a 5×5 grid.

Korean type designers juggle the vowel and consonant shapes in each character. They are all unique. Shape and size vary. As more syllables are added, the color becomes hard to keep even.

What happened in typography in the cultural black out time?

1880-1954 is the ‘new letter era’ or ‘new printing era’ – Electrotype, we found no punchcutters from this time, so electrotype was very prevalent. Counterpunches don’t work well with the hangul shapes. All the technology was brought to Asia by missionaries and remade in Japan and reimported into Korea.

This image is from Ji Hoon Parl, Mushashino Univeristy, who helped provide may images for our research. We see that in 1880 the euro left to right reading order was introduced. Here is an 1881 with the traditional vertical reading order.

Hangul was bought and sold as type in 1896 as we can see from this type specimen. Its hard to research WHO type designers from this time were.

1954-1990 was the ‘original drawing era’ which ahs 2 parts, matrix cutting machine era in 1954 (official trade documents show their import here) but didn’t really start to be used until 1956. And photo type setting era 1970-1990.

Here are copper plate matrices used with a pantograph to etch punches. The original drawings! These are by Jung ho Choi, a famous designer from that time.

Phototype. In korea we tend to just dispose old technology, not preserve it, but we do have a phototype machine that is preserved. We can see the craft and detail that was put into them.

Conclusions

A lot more work needs to be done. The history of Hangul needs to be reassed, arhcived and documented.

I want to thank many professors who helped, including Ji hoon Park, Eun You Noh of Ahn Graphics, also the Text Book Museum, and many others.

Why are we doing this? Many people do restoration of old fonts. Neu Haas Grotesque is typical. In Korean, we dont have the well established history, so we dont have these revivals. This is an effort to lay down a foudation for that kind of work.

Q: What about contemporary type design?

A: We are looking at the first generation and the 2nd generation of designers. The period from 1990 is a 3rd.

- – -

Keith Tam: We covered a lot of topics today! I hope you enjoyed them all! Tomorrow we look more at the technology. Thanks to our sponsors!

These are live blog notes from the 2012 ATypI in Hong Kong, 10 October 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

09:30 In with the new: today’s font licensing landscape – Christopher Slye / Bryan Mason
—————————————————————————–

[Missed]

09:55 Future challenges of font licensing – Ivo Gabrowitsch
——————————————————————

[10 mins late]

Customers now offered mobile app font licenses, and they ask,

“Are mobile fonts printable?”

It may be technically possible but not allowed.

“In addition to iOS, Android, and WinPhone phones, can I use these fonts on Set Top Boxes”?

No. An additional license is needed for that use.

Desktop fonts are licensed a long time. Are there any open questions? Its 1-5 usrs, pay once and use in any print project. But then people ask, ‘Can I get a single user license, I don’t need 5′

Ebooks, people ask ‘can I embed fonts’. ePub 3.0 has font obfuscations, so its okay. For other things, users require an ‘editing/embedding’ license.

“We would liekt o know the costs to embed your OT fonts in our Kindle Fire app using HTML5″

We want to say ‘tahts what web font licenses are for’ – but while its HTML its not web, its an app. Web Fonts licenses are not for HTML its for websites, and we want to avoid web fonts being used in non-website environemnts without another license.

As we just learned, web fonts cna be made specifically for websites.

We want to move away from keeping track of each license. Customers don’t either. Its not a question of expense, its a question of too much admin work. So a big publishing house wanted many licenses, a perpetual license; they are willing to pay but not voer and over. THey want unlimited users. Most companies dont, they know how many users they have, and they just dont want to discuss licensing again. They want unlimited non-affiliate users, like print houses and consultants and so on. They want full cross media use, web, mobile apps, embedded apps. They want editable embedding. THey want all kinds of optimised formats, and permission to convert to any new format themselves.

There are people who will give them such a license for a cheap price. I don’t know what this customer ended up doing [but it wasn't with FontShop.]

Things are getting more **complicated.** Users dont want to talk to you on a regular basis, even if you’re really friendly.

So licensing needs to become more simple. Its not price related but complexity related. If its too complex, they will walk. Eg,

‘AFter some internal discussion, we decided NOT to extend our use of FF MEta, but use Segoe UI which is a similar font and available as standard on Windows 7′

We want to give a good service and ensure our FontFont designers are rewarded with royalities. I believe this happens best with SIMPLE licenses.

So please, make your licenses more simple. I think this is win-win-win, win for users, type designers and publishers.

I look forward to talking to you all about this.

ADam Twardoch: The top floor of licensing is customer comissioning a custom font. They go away froma library to a custom font as then they can do anything they like. The pricing is to me simple. If someone wants to do all the things, they pricing and licensing terms should be competitive to commissioning a custom font. Your license can not be close to that price and simpler.

Ivo: I agree.

…

10:20 Crowsourced font funding: Kickstarter’s impact on type design – Thomas Phinney
—————————————————————————–

Intro d

Predictor of success:

Size of your social network – nice Seth Godin quote

Low price goal

Short fund raising period with preparation work

Googel funding – Googel has funded open source kickstarters, often by 50%

Ethan Mollick on AppsBlogger, great research! Failed project really fail, only 10% reach 30%, only 3% reach 50%, and if they get over 50% its likely they will go all the way.

Delivery problems plague Kickstarter. 25% of projects are late and of those, 25% deliver after 9 months of their target. There is no guarantee the money will lead to the goal.

Success by Location graph of the USA. If you’re in NYC or Chicago, Portland, Chicago, its more likley (because of social network)

When I asked desigenrs, they said its hard to do large families because its hard to raise large amounts of cash. Natanael Gama said the STORY matters very much. The south american desigenrs all said the same phrase, ‘creating empathy for the project’.

‘Kickstarter is not a magic money machine’ – thes video took a long time to prepare.

KS gives you an admin panel with some analytics, here’s some graphs of the funding total over time.

Chatype, you can see it trickly up.

Folk, you see Google’s big 75% contribution near the start.

Montserrat hit 200% – it had a great story

Cristoforo – a victorian art neauvou. Why succeeeded on the 2nd time? My pledge levels were adjusted and the new $24 was very popular.

Stretch Goals are important to have, because it can help people contribute after you reach your goal. I put mine perhaps too close so that it created a lot more work than was justified, but having 1 or 2 helps a lot.

Lessons Learned

Scalability must be watched, if you have to package and send 200 items its a lot of work.

If you’re thinking of doing a Kickstarter for fonts, PLEASE contact me, I’d be very happy to review your project and help you optimize it.

Effects of KS? I think this will effect what kinds of typefaces get designed, because it allows for funding things that wouldn’t fly on the typical retail market.

Type and brands
=================

11:00 Multi-script brand identity, harmonisation versus standardisation: the case for Air Inuit – Jean-Baptiste Levée
——————————————————————

Air Inuit had old planes, an old visual ID, and the website, reservations, didn’t inspire reliability; they had newsletters and christmas sales and stuff with home DTP style design.

I started with a new logotype. I made the Inuit script harmoised with the Latin; its a plain sans serif and this was the base starting point.

Christian Schwartz told me to ask, do they really need a new typeface; it will cost a lot and take a long time. What other options did they have? There were some already available Inuit type, Nutaaq – Nunavik, the latin doens’t match the brand’s tone. Huronia, by Ross Mills at Tiro Typeworks, they do great work for Canadian Syllabics, and this is a great design. But its not for branding, its for literate and scholarship works.

Euphemia is another Tiro type, a sans with a similar tone; good character support but lacking in weights.

So it was easier to start from teh logotype and design from that. I was worried in the start that it would be Yet Another Helvetica. I wanted to steer the design away to something else. I started backwards with the bold weight first.

My method for non latin is to design both at the same time, make a few variants. The Inuit script isn’t bicameral, it has only one case, so there are weight adjustments you can see during development.

This was my first proejct with this script, so I could only trust my eye as a designer and read the documentation I could find, and thanks to Tiro for publishing a lot of that.

There is an old fashioned, romatntic thinking that you have to respect tradition in the way you engage the design; Arbaic type designers say you should mirror calligraphy. But I think Inuit is an invented script by priests 150 years ago during colonisation. It was to translate the bible and for everyday things. So for me this is a wide open field and I can do experimental things.

The shapes of the Latin and Non Latin script should influence. I avoid copy and pasting shapes. Each has its own form. You can see the latin C and a shape similar to a C in the Intuit script, there are slight variations.

I wanted the feeling to be serious overall but with little informal touches. I shopped prototypes quickly so the designers working on the graphic design could start to work with this type.

There are some shapes that produce odd shades of grey. A Latin wordspace in this script is too small. I could kern them against the latin wordspace to add space.

Before the Bold was finished I started the Light. Deadline, they needed to paint a new plane with the new branding, shown to the press and public, so numerals needed to be ready for the license plate of the plane! I learned a lot about airline companies, and if you Google these registration code you can find a lot of fun trivia.

So I can never underline the importance of a good graphic designer as a partner so type gets used very well. The designers feedback was essential; they said the light was not light enough. I had to draw a new extra light weight by hand, I couldn’t bring myself to quickly interpolate it.

Matching line lenghts is a key goal for designing multiscript type. I wouldn’t have bet that Latin was the longer script but it was!

These were my initial design glyphs – CEHIOV – and this was tricky for the Inuit script. There is a ___) and (””’ shape and one looks longer than the other when its flipped. So needs hand adjustment.

In all my type designs, I always add the little symbols like hearts, its not in the spec but its fun for me.

You know when the design works or not when the design is used. I’m a kid at heart and I love the idea of my type at 2,000pt on the side of an airplane. When this mock up arrived of the plane decal, I was very happy with the 16 hour workdays that I put into the project.

This project shipped 12 months ago. There are few options if you are a designer typesetting documents with the Inuit script. At the end of the exclusivity period, there are 80,000 readers of this script, and Google Web Fonts and Kickstarter would be good options for them.

11:25 Nokia Pure, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the scripts
Bruno Maag / Amelie Bonet
——————————————————————

Ted Harrison: This is a presentation about 16 scripts! A worldwide typeface before long!

Bruno: 15-16 scripts delivered so far, including Chinese, and in 20 mins we cant talk about all of them. Cheinese, Latin and Bengali.

China. Many if you know this script. Its a huge market. For Nokia as a mobile phone company, its 100M+ users, $3Bn market. THey want to be in there. The sheer size of the market, everyone wants to be there.

But China has restricitons [Great image of Mao saying "GB18030-2005"] – there is a state mandated character set that the government says your font MUST have if it ships in a computer or mobile. It must be CERTIFIED at a cost of $20,000 per font. And the process of certification takes 3 months, but the fonts must ship in 8 months.

So unusual problems there

We delivered the Nokia Pure fonts, 3 weights, 82,500 characters. Tencentype took 7 months to do these 3 styles, that is a record time for such a high quality product.

How did we do it?

Before we contracted Tencent through URW, we drew 50 glyphs in house at Dalton Maag to define the design to harmonize with our Latin. Everyone seems to respond to a design style.

Chinese friends, please dont be offended, but we felt the drawing quality was often not that great. We understand the character set scale demands compromises, but our ambition was to draw a high quality UI and print typeface. On the right, you see 3 variants with different terminals, strokes. We went from traditional to avante garde.

We then sketched 3 weights and tested it on print and screen. There can be dense symbols that become blotchy in a text block. We tested a lot of stroke weights in Regular and Bold to get a design that well harmonizes with Latin.

We also worked with various CJK type consultants to advise us. The font is for mobile devices with data limitations. We needed 27,500 character set that had a filesize no more than 3Mb.

Its a big achievement. We designed the font file with elements that should be repeated. We used TTF components to do this. This creates design compromises, that we will address over the next few months.

Latin.

How did we design the Latin? 2 years ago, we worked with Nokia who needed a new brand. Their fortunes were down, they remembered what design was, and they wanted a BLAND type design, they felt Nokia Sans was designed 14 years ago by Erik Speikerman with so much personality that brand designers couldnt do anythig with it. Even the in house type designers. They wanted something that would form the foundation for brand work based on other graphic elements.

We did a lot of variation in ef the crossbar of the B or the Q tail, to add a little bit of personality back in.

We did 8 styles, 3 for UI and 5 for display, ExtraLight to ExtraBold, and the UI had increased letter spacing and some design tweaks to be better in a UI context.

Type makes you money!

Clients too, not just type designers. In March 2011, Nokia threw a big party for the typeface lauch, and an indepdenedet marketing study said the hype created about the nokia type craeted €1,000,000 of value.

That means we type designers should charge more than $1,000 – don’t sell your font to Google for $1,000!

Amelie; Bengali is a phonetic script, this has Bengali Devanagari and Latin on a street sign.

To create a sound, you have a few component glyphs for the component founds, and they conjoin into the final glyph.

Bruno: Look at it! They are on drugs!

Amelie: Fiona Ross and others helped consult for us to work out the linguistic requirements. There are 500 glyphs in the font. Its not as much as CJK, and a lot is built on the fly, but everything is decomposed outline; the position is mark positioning.

Here is Nokia Pure compared to Benda (?) a system font. Benga is a good systtem font, but we wanted to have a slightly more calligrpahic stroke. We built a lot of vowel arms of various lengths. We avoided collissions of strokes above the body of the type which we can see in Benda.

It was hinted with VTT.

We are Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Sinhalese, Kannada, and now we are working on Gujarati, Telegu and Oriya. A lot of work is coming up!

Bruno: its not just Amile and I doing this. Its a huge team, here is the team. Supporting such a team means you can’t sell them for $1000 to GOogle and make them free fonts. Type desigenrs have to charge reasonable prices. Tom Phineey said $5,700 could be raised. That won’t pay rent for 2 motnhs! I am very upset with this stuff, because it undermines the value of the work we do. A doctor won’t treat you, doing a social favor. Type designers study for years, we invest in design adn technology, we train people. That has to be paid for. This huge team needs a fair wage, and clients needs to pay me a fair price for the quality we delivery. Thank you very much!

11:50 How web-based fonts and dynamic subsetting improve brand performance in East Asian writing systems – Alan Tam
——————————————————————

Web fonts!

CJK is much more complex than Latin especially for web fonts. Andy Payne, Interbrand Chief Global Creative Officer “Brand starts with the name, and the name is written.”

The digital medium can be a barrier for brands. Education, understanding how things work. It shouldn’t be feared, brands should extend and meet there customers. You can engage and enhance your customer relations, reaching many more people online than in the print world.

Fonts are at the core of a brand. So having the same type in print and on the web is important.

When you extend a brand globally, you recognise the brand by the type alone. Cocoa Cola, GOodyear Tyre, Cathay Pacific. Their message, their logo, brings trust.

Web fonts help reduce steps needed to bring your brand online. This makes globalisation local. Cosmopolitan cities like HK, Tokyo, Seoul, people wish to consume content in their language. Web fonts allow brands to do that.

East Asian writing systems have large fielsize. 6-50Mb! 10-30k characters. The average Big5 font is 13,000 fonts with 8Mb, and Unicode 6 has 109,449 characters can be be up to 50Mb.

MYuenHKSemiBold has 11Mb WOFF, 33Mb SVG, 11Mb TTF, 11Mb EOT. That adds up!

Mobile devices really can’t deal with that for bandwdith, memory or disk space.

Subsetting can help. That delivers only the characters used for the displayed content.

Raph Levien has blogged for Google WEb Fonts their text= parameter, and the example ‘MyText’. This is ‘Pre Subsetting’

Dynamic Subsetting looks at the content and extracts the glyphs needed. This is available on fonts.com and uses a JS file that is part of the HTML/CSS/JS page.

What are the tradeoffs? Both give a smaller font file size.

Web fonts helps a lot with reinfocing brand indentity and this can even have security implications for helping with phishing.

Before web fonts, all this was done with static images. Its a huge load on designers time, bandwith, and its also a poor visual experience for users.

On the web, speed is everything!

Fonts can be so much faster than images anyway, but subsetting takes it to a new level.

Different screens and devices means having a consistent customer experience is important and web fonts makes it happen effortlessly but images are a lot of work. Its future proof about new devices and screens. Images will have to be redone in the future.

Content is searchable. Theres a lot of workarounds you can do for static images or even Flash workarounds that don’t work with this. They use a lot of static images of text and this ruined their search ranking. SEO would have cost a lot with that technology. But switching to web fonts, they got all 3,000 pages properly indexed and searchable very fast.

Accessibility is important, and in the EU and USA there are accessible compliance laws, and there have been lawsuits against JetBlue and Disney, over these laws. Web fonts is great for accessiblity.

**You get up to 90% savings on developer time. IU-HQ CEO Frank Lampen said “we estimate that ethere ia time saving (and therefore a cost saving) in excess of 90% by using web fonts over static images.”**

I’d like you all to try out seubsetting. Monotype made a demo site:

www.fontsubsetter.com

This is a great way to experiment and find out how subsetting works. I can select a number of fonts and a text and see the file size reduction possible with subsetting. The full font on a 3G network took 3 minutes to load, but the subset was under 1 second.

Who is using Font Subsetting today? Many top brands are:

http://www.Nike.com

http://www.Line6.com

http://m.tiffany.co.jp

http://www.Dashan.com

http://www.Adidas.com.hk

Typography and reading
============================

12:15 Reading expertise: what does it have to do with typefaces – Mary Dyson / Keith Tam / Brian Kwok
———————————————————————————

Mary Dyson: I’ve been interested for a while in how we read and how we process different typefaces. I’m interested in perceptual abilities of type designers and typographers differ from normal users. I’ve also added some CJK type.

Before I start, I should say this is about reading. Its not about the expertise at the University of Reading.

Clare Leake is the 4th person on this paper.

What is font utning. How we can look at so many different forms to understand the abstract Platonic Form. This has been researched by Sanocki. Psychologists think of typeface differences as noise, being things to get rid off to identify letters. But they might be the opposite?

Regularity is the similarity of letters within a word. Same font for each letter in a word, you are more accurate in teling the difference between 2 strings of letters. Tested with Verdana and Bodoni, Garamond and Bodoni.

Congruency is also a relevant concept. If a type style is consistent with the meaning of a word, we are faster to recognise the word.

Reading expertise, just means being able to read the language.

My research qyestiosn: Can type designers demonstrate font tuning in a script they can not read? We found people who couldn’t read Chinese and people who could (bilingual), and readers of chinese who were/not typographers.

…

Font Tuning may occur with meaningless shapes, when people have typograhic expertise. Typographers can separate the stylistic aspects from teh character’s essential shape. If we dont have that expertise, those 2 thigns are bound together.

THomas Phinney Q: How could this influence how we design typefaces?

Mary: Not really, I think designing scripts where we cant read, I threw this to an ex student, and they said its helpful if you can’t read the language. I’m not a type designer, you can answer that It seems helpful to me to know how you percieve things, that you DO perceive things differently to those who do have that expertise.

These are live blog notes from the 2012 TypeCon in Milwaukee, USA, in August 2012.

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect it is because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately (dave@understandingfonts.com) – or post a comment.

Saturday
————-

Press Checks in the Age of Web Type
————————————

“Every society rewrites its past, every reder rewrites its texts, and , the they have any continuing life at all, at some point every printer redesigns them.” – D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and Sociology of Texts

So we need to think about what happens when we move from print to screen, and especially the web as thats more uniquitous than kindle and friendly ipad.

In print we only had what we had direct access to. We’re still effectiveyl limiited by what we have in front of us, but we can get a lot more and fast.

http://the.webfount.es

Our machine maintanence is less cumberson but more baffling. OUr tools are less imposing and less dangerous; here’s a warning sign of someone with their arm through the press. Here’s a “DANGER: ACID” sign. We may get criticism on blogs but thats better than acid!

And we don’t have piles and piles of paper to waste, we can correct mistakes and move quickly. This lack of danger, tremendous access, we should be here – image of an actual Easy St

But we’re not. We have new problems that couldn’t be dreamed of in the print world. …

Georgia. Its steady and reliable. Want to use IbisRE, Minion Prop Caption, Lapture, Sabon Next? Here they are on Mac OSX, Windows ClearType, and Classical Greyscale Windows rendering.

So we replaced danger with hope that our text and color choices work across devices, screens, resolutions… there are many many possible combinations.

You can create an opacity suprise, background:transparent and opacity:100% or background:white and opacity:100%

You have to watch out for automatic font-weight:bold that will trigger fake bolding if a real bold isn’t loaded.

TypeCast and Tim Brown’s web type specimen page help to see what a web font may look like. Gridset can help see what reading is like on different browser/device situations.

www.ffffallback.com helps you make a good fallback font stack.

So say you have a specimen, you can see it on GDI, DW and OSX. You can also adjust a specimen to see how it will look for people with various color vision impairments.

Earlier this year I made www.facebook-successstories.com just before I worked at Facebook. This uses Vista Sans Web, but what if it doesn’t load? We used the JS Web Font Loader from Google Web Fonts and TypeKit’s collaboration, to load the CSS for the font; this gave us a styling hook to let us know if things looked approximately right. So we made the fallback Lucida Grande, and the default layout made to work with the line height, padding, and other layout resulting from that, and then use JS to adjust these after the web font has loaded.

So we’re not at the point that working with web fonts is really difficult that we can’t or shouldn’t do it. BUt there are so many problems that are overwhelming on their own, that its fun to solve. I think its fun!

- – - –

Kickstarter Panel
———————

Thomas Phinney: Kickstarter is the biggest crowd funding site, Pledgie, Indie Gogo, one that is big in germany, south america. KS is for creative projects, and not ‘help me pay my rent this month’ projects but something that produces a product. Who doesn’t know of this yet? Only a few people in the room.

Its not donations/charity or investment, its funding – supports pledge and get a reward, Average pledge is $71, most common is $25.

Its all or nothing funding.

A couple of suble things are time delay (you dont get the cash instantly, it takes about 3 weeks) and skim (it goes through amazon who take 3-5% and kickstarter take 5%)

So even for fonts, people offer physical rewards.it costs money to fulfil those.

About 44% of KS projects get funded.

Academic research shows that if they get 50% of the goal, they are 90% likely to get 100% of the money.

A 30 day project is 30% more liekly to get funded than a 60 day project.

12 font projects so far. I studied all of them and 11 responded to my survey. About 50% are libre and 50% are proprietary.

Success rate? 8 were successful, 2 failed and 2 failed the first time, relaunched and became successful.

That sounds really good! Sounds like a much higher success rate than Kickstarter overall. But its a small sample, and Google’s funding role is important – Google’s backing was like 50% or more of the target.

Its an open question what the results would be without any Google backing.

Goal range, $500-$15,000 (15k one succeeded)

Median was $5,700, and 2 failures were in the 4 highest

The 3 highest raised totals are panelists

Median success rate was 110% of their goal

Success predictors?

Seth Godin said “Kickstarter campgians fail when the tribute of people who believe in the idea is too small”. Lower goals, shorter fund raising duration, Google money, trying again — and the biggest thing, telling a good story and creating empathy. A number of people are from Latin America and not native english speakers, and they used this word ‘empathy’ a lot

www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/ says that failure happens by large margins; and there are big delivery problems – 25% are on time and 75% are within 8 months of the target date.

Fonts are probably likely to be late too, because it takes a long time to make typefaces.

They have a nice map of success by location.

Survey said hard to raise large amounts or do large traditional families; and that the ‘hook’ or story is very important. Adding kickstarter to type design changes the skeill set and activities involved; its different to working quietly and putting something on myfonts, it involves a lot more public communication.

Varying costs and time commitments – “Kickstarter is not a magic money machine” – Matt Griffin, and Dan Ibarra said the video took him 60 hours, 50% of the whole effort.

ChaType funding graph: You can see it got a quick start, levelled off, got a huge jump2 weeks in (maybe around a local evnt)

Folk graph: the big jump is google (“or my mother” – hahaha)

Wood Type graph: You can see it flatten out at weekends; peple look at kickstarter while at their jobs.

Cristofo graph: You see a boost at the start and end, and I started and finished mine on both weekends, oops. This is my failed out, I set the goal as $8,000. My spiike is getting on Boing Boing, and I exceeded both my 2nd goal, and my original goal!

Fast Bursh: You can see Google’s jumps

Monserrat: This got double its target; it had a really great video and story.

So thats an overview, lets dive in to the original projects.

ChaType
———

Jeremy Dooley: This is an exclusive typeface for our city. The first exclusive typeface for a city in the whole USA. We were inspired by Twin, a academic execrise that tapped into different influences to make a typeface for the city. This is me and Robbie, a partner in the project who moved into the town around the same time as me.

…

This font was exclusive to Chatanoona, so we could tap into the local design team. We wouldn’t make it libre with Google because its meant to be exclusive for the local. We were on NPR, Canadian Public Radio, TIME website, and the biggest was on Good Design.

Marcelo Magalhães Pereira: Folk/Londrina
———————————————–

I’m from Sao Paulo, Brasil. In 2009 I made ‘Folk’ which was inspired by hand made signs used by small shops in Sao Paulo. It was with 4 styles, Solid, Shadow, Outline and Sketch. The idea is that they can be combined to create a different effect.

I met Dave Crosslad in 2011 in Sao Paulo, and he asked me to expand the character set. I thought this would be nice to do, make new contacts, share the work. We set the time as 1 month to raise the money and 2 months to do the work. I found many sites already sharing Folk and asked them to spread the word about Kickstarter, and used twitter and facebook. I made the rewards, the posters and cards. Here they are.

This is the final result in 4 styles.

Matt Griffin: Letterpress Wood Type Fonts
—————————————————–

We do web design and love wood type and letterpress. This is a 100 year old hand carved wood type from Scotland. We would print them, scan and digitize them, and create a ‘wood type revival’ site to retail them as proprietary fonts.

You can see have a steady graph, and there are level periods, and that’s where as soon as we stopped activitating it, it levelled off. You have to offer things people actually want. That’s not so hard. Then you need to get it in front of people who want it, and that takes a lot of time. We used social networking strategies – just using Twitter and Facebook, not linked in. Facebook seems to have more longevity, things can stay around a while and on twitter you see it or it passes by. But on Twitter you can reach people you don’t know, you have friend of friend reach. But on facebook its harder to get that. Blogs are also very helpful but harder to spread over.

Within a week we reached the limit of people we knew and could reach directly. Then we started being shameless. So it helped we really care about it a lot, that means you will work hard and overcome nervous things like cold approaching people to support my project. I really wanted the problem to happen; I sent tweets to people I admire but dont know; and asking sites for promotion.

The nicest thing was the good responses from other designers who liked the idea.

We created a beta prototype to share with people off the bat for free. KS works on trust, they give you money and you will do something back. So we took the first step and offered something to them first. THat worked well.

WE also offered rewards for people spreading the word – twitter, facebook, pinterest, etc, if the email me a copy of 3 references of you doing that I’ll email you back a font. College students will do a LOT of things for a T shirt.

So we made T shirts using the type. I was amazed about people ‘out of my orbit’ in the design world who would post about this on their blog and so on.

Ajay Surie: Google Web Fonts
——————————

I work on GWF and Google presentations. The GWF library is now in Google presentations and these slides are made and presented on the web.

I’m an engineer not a type designer…

Why did we do this?

We contracted many designers individually to create new web fonts. With KS, we let the public have input into the fonts that were included. We wanted to test the whole model out. Its clear from the graphs Thomas showed when Google made a contribution, but we varied when we made a contribution.

Thomas mentioned Julieta’s Montserrat which was by far the most successful and doubled her goal. She really connected with the audience. We saw that projects that got near the goal, people would be much more likely to contribute; and we also saw that those projects that were more complete at the start did well.

We also contributed to a non-type project, OERT.org. The University of Buenos Aires in Argentina has a programme to educate typographers and type designers. We want to encourage more type design, worldwide, and the University was interested in making their course materials available on the web like Wikipedia, so they could be translated. We’d like to make knowledge about type design available worldwide because we want to see more non latin type on the web.

We’re thinking about using Kickstarter’s model do this with the GWF directory itself, so that if people have a family that is missing glyphs, the users can show what they are interested in improving, perhaps pledging funding to make it happen, and becoming involved in the process of extending the fonts more actively.

Thomas Phinney: Cristoforo
—————————–

THis is a revival of a few designs, Columbus and another. This is the first KS page, and this is the 2nd. You can see I made the language more emotive in the 2nd one.

This tyepface is a quite niche style, but it has a small but dedicated fanbase in people who like eg H P Lovecraft games.

I failed the first time, 59% – this is really weird. If you get that you have a 97% chance of succeeding. I didn’t know that but I thought I put a lot of effort in and had spent time on it, and if I just tweaked a few things, maybe I would do better.

2nd time I got 168% of my target, and I changed a few things. Basic appeal, the audience base, the rewards items and levels, and Boing Boing. I made my appeal more emotive. MyFonts had seem sales rise by offering cheap non-commercial ‘personal’ licenses, so I added those. I saw I had some well known bloggers and journalists pledge and I emailed them when I ran the funding drive again.

And note that it is pronounced differently to how I said it in the video

Q&A
—————

Q: When Google selects fonts, what threshold, criteria or quality do you look for? Number of weights, design qualities. Who makes decisions about that kind for thing?

Ajay: Most families have only one style. Its not a problem for inclusion. We’d like the number of styles to expand. Dave Crossland decides, quality wise you’d have to ask him.

Dave Crossland: Initially the project selected fonts that were already libre licensed. This meant many fonts from hobbyists, so the quality was not what you might find in a regular foundry, but as the project has grown the focus has been more on commissioning new web fonts. Its been well known in the type community that Google has been commissioning web fonts and that I was involved in that so people tended to contact me directly, although there is a web form anyone can fill in to make a proposal. The level of quality has risen over time.

Q: With KS, the rewards offered posters, and so on. How did you decide the reward gradations?

Matt Griffin Wood Type: Most pledges were smaller amounts, fonts were $10 a piece, and we’ll charge $15 later, so there was a 30% discount for pre-ordering. We offered extras if you got all the fonts for over $100 and about 60 people did that. The big lump is $20-50

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: $20-$50 was average, but the total of the money about 1/3rd was from the highest pledges. I avoided physical thigns at the lowest levels, but I did not want to mail out 200 postcards to 200 different people.

Jeremy Dooley ChaType: We offered the font for any pledge level because we wanted to inspire people about municipal type. The Honda dealer down the road gave us $100, there was a local community aspect. The end result was not the aim really, it was the feeling of building something cool with us.

Q: You say people pledge money and you dont get the money unless its definite?

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: The money is pledged, the credit cards are not charged unless the total is reached, and the charge is done at the end. Amazon does it. There is no escrow.

Matt Griffin Wood Type: there is also a number of people whose cards are declined but that is minor.

Q: What does the IRS make of this? Asking for $15,000 and getting $250,000 is not unheard of.

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: You are wise to account this carefully. Your expenses making the rewards are deductable.

Q: Was it worth it?

Marcelo Magalhães Pereira Folk: Definitely

Jeremy Dooley ChaType: We lost money but loved it and it couldn’t happen with out Kickstarter so yes

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: Ditto

Matt Griffin Wood Type: Yes. We spend all the money we raised on stuff.

Q: I backed a project that took 6 months extra to finish [and wasnt too happy about it]

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: No penalties, but you may damage your own reputation if you dont deliver well or at all.

Matt Griffin WoodType; We didnt’ specify deadlines… oops

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: Thats now required I think

Q: People have said it was ‘shameless’ – have you more thoughts on shame?

Jeremy Dooley ChaType: No, I loved it

Matt Griffin Wood Type: I mentioned that word in relation to cold approaches. I found writing a well crafted tweet to approach people was hard, but after I did one it was okay and I reused my tweet. People were genuinely interested and happy to hear from me, even though I was anxious about approaching them. And we got business connections that benefitted me afterwards.

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: I was happy to use social media, and less comfortable taking money from my friends.

Q: What was done with the money?

Marcelo Folk: Great question. I did the Cooper Union Summer program with the money.

Matt Griffin WoodType: We spent it all on wood type and a press. I said with extra money I would pay ourselves for the labour and a few people got really mad, so we spend it all on wood type.

Jeremy Dooley ChaType: We had some great rewards that cost a lot, and the logistics to run the campaign cost money too, that was about it.

Thomas Phinney Cristofo: Mine ended 2 months and the $11k or so I raised, 40% will be ‘profit’ to pay my time, and the rest is supplies, reference books (a few more specimen books) and to give something, not great but some, to pay an intern. Its now illegal to have an unpaid intern unless the person does no functional useful work or you are a charity. The Dept or Labour will now hassle you if you don’t pay your intern.

- – - –

Perception of typefaces: A quantatite visual methodology
——————————————————–

Beth Koch, PhD, Minnesota Duluth

Wilden says there is no empircal evidence to go with the intuitive ideas in practice. Typgraphy design students learn type communicates through its design. How to communicate without words. That’s the crux of my study.

Emotion effects all humnan experience. Emotion and graphic design hasnt been empirically linked. Medical imaging, Rudolf Arnheim theorised all visual feelings have a phsyical counterpart in the nervous system.

Researchers work in interdisciplairny groups; XXX connects vision in art to emotion. The brain notices change in the visual field. 4 atttributes; motion, color, form and positioning in space.

The artists ability to abstract a scene, discard some information, is what the visual areas themselves are doing. In Boston College, ANdrea Barry made ‘perceptual aesthetics’ — “understanding vis comm lies in the neurological workings of the brain” – more than vision psych, to how vision works in the brain and connects it to behavior.

Not much is know about how people comprehend visual systems like graphic design and tyography.

“People seem intuitively decipher the meaning of typefaces.” – Can Leeuwen, 2005

In 1999, product and industrial designers at Delft Uni of Tech, Pieter Desmet there studied ‘Designing Emotions’ using interactive survey technique. I used that methodology.

All design is about human beings. smashLAB said “put aside talk of brand, strategy, execution, and consider effecting emotion”

People respond PRECOGNITIVIELY. We respond within 50ms if we like it or not. Book, “buyology” about how that effects buying behavours.

I asked 3 questions:

Does viewing specific typs produce emotional resposnes?

When looking at a tyep, do all people feel the same emotions?

What aspects of the type are the emotions associated with?

Earlier studies about the meaning of type? 1923 was the first and only about 13 since that appraoch from many fields. Mostly linguistics and journalism.

Of those, there are a set of common problems. What is being studied? Congeniality, personality, emotiaoal connocation, etc etc

What emotions are we trying to study? Psychologists can list them. There have 6 core +ve and 6 core -ve emotions. Desire, Satisfaction, Pride, Hoe, Joy, FAscinatino. / Disgust, Dissatiscation, shame, fear, sadness, boredom.

There was no common presentaion format: 1923 and 1933 used real tet, Weaver in 1940 they used a mock text, Wendt 1968 used something closer to English, Tannenbaum 1964 and Benton 1979 used alphabets. Morrison 1986 used lorum ipsum, Koch 2011 used ‘typeface sampler’ ???

Previous studies of type lacked a aliffication schema. I made one to separate out the typographic attributes. serif/sans, light/bold, condensed/extended, square/round terminals.

I chose Helvetica as it seemed non-descript and emotionless – although its not.

The emotional question used little cartoon animations to show an emotion which they can click to express their emotional response to a type.

Then I looked to compare designs. This compares ultralight and bold, narrow and expanded, rounded vs square terminals, serif vs sans. Then I looked to connect emotions to design features.

I got 100 people signed up to the survey but only 42 completed. Maybe the online format of the survey.

Findings?

1. People responded with emotion, not indifference

2. People agreed about the emotions

3. Certain emotions WERE associated with the design features

The method I used was visual, interactive, online, measung emotions and the strength of responses. Avoids problems of self reporting, allows repoting multiple and co-occuring features. No reading, so no problems with cognition of language and reading, just responding visually; and making empirical connection to emotional psych.

Implications?

Its imprtant for all people to understand design so they can interpret visual culture and respond appropriately.

Design researchers can improve their studies in this area.

Type designers can use it to decide how bold their bold should be.

Q: Why do the research with designers? I see you had a small gropu with non designers, but designers are more trendy and that might influence your data.

A: There were indeed more designers than non designers. Thats a good next step in this field. I thought designers might respond differently. I will publish my data on this, what the differences were between non/designers and fe/males.

- – -

Mayan Writing Reform
———————

This is the fast version of my dissertation.

‘Common Maya Knowledge’ from GraphJam.com by linkdude64, its all calendars, pyramids and END OF THE WORLD.

Myth 1: Maya = Mayan. Archeologists criticised me, Maya is the people, Mayan is the language. Don’t say “a mayan”

Myth 2: Maya = Aztec. Both were great civilizations, separated by centuries and locations.

Myth 3: Maya are extinct. No, they are in south mexico, guatemala, honduras, belize. 7.5mil alive today and 2mil speak mayan languages as their first language. There are 20+ languages in the family. Some of these are as different as French and English.

Myth 4: Maya Script is for recording dates. No, its a complete writing system. They can write any phrase or concept that was in their spoken language. Its the only native script that could do this. Its 1 of the 5 original writing systems. (WHAT ARE THEY?)

Myth 5: Spanish wiped them out. Around 830AD, something hapepned that was bad and 2/3rd of the population died out in 70 years. So in 1517 when the Spanish turned up the society was already far from its peak.

What is writing?

This threw me. My best seen definition is ‘a system of recording langauge through visible or tactile marks’ – so I thought about cave paintings. Is that writing or picutres? both?

Mayan script shows there are 3 kind: Semasiographic, Logogrpahic and Syllabic.

Semasiographic, the men ,hunt, monkeys – 3 images places together.

Semasiographic + Logogrpahic, the man, hunt, ’2′, monkeys – images plus a symbol

Syllabic, …

Mayan is logosyllabic. 1 word can have 2 ways to write it. ‘balam’ is jaguar, and it can be an image that represents the concept, a logogram, or a syllabogram, 3 component graphics that form the single graphic word.

A mayan ‘glyph’ is a block of 4 parts, a main sign with prefix and postfive on left and right and sub and superfix above and below.

Cool, where was this written? Stone, vases, and books? The ‘codex’ is a long accordian folded fig tree paper, 3.5M wide, bound with wood covers and jaguar skin.

Only 3 remain today in the whole world, and all are in europe. the dresden codex is in europe. they were found in damp caves or buried in soil. Mexico City has one in a vault. It solidified into like a brick, a book glued shut. The ones they find, they hope imagine technology will allow us to look through the object to read it.

The scribe had a high position in Maya society. They used pens of bone and reed, quills, brushes, and conch shell ink pots. How do you find out about the mark making process when they are dead.

I found Patricia Martin Morales, in Yucatan, she has a studio in a thatched hut, and she is the #1 source in the world for musueum quality replicas of vases, codex, etc. She tried to keep everything authentic, she can’t read the text, but she can write it. This codex shown was sold for $10k, she does well from the hut

Here is the ink she grinds and makes herself. ‘The maya vase book’ is a good source for this.

Writing reform + Script Death. Writing reform is when a society’s writing system is repalced totally by another one – Vietnamese, Turkish did this with Latin, Mongolian with Cyrillic. SCript Death is when the writing system toally disappears and dies awya.

A society in dcline, the spanish turn up, disease, and a religious motivation. The peak population of Maya was 14,000,000 and in 830 something hapepned (drought, war, we dont know) and 9.3 died, so 4.7M by 900AD, and 90% of the population was illiterate, so 470,000 people were literate in 900AD. 90% were killed within 100 years of the Spanish (smallpox and influenza). So by 1617 there were 47,000 – the NYC marathon in 2011 had that many people.

Religious motivation? The franciscans told the maya to end their heathen ways, from gods they workshipped to the writing they used. If you used latin you go to heavan, if you use glyphs you go to hell. Who said this? Diego De Landa. Epic jerk. In 1562, he burned 5,000 idols and 27 codices. If its weird, it must be satanic. Another bishop said he had an ‘excessive desire for power and authority’ and De Landa was sent back to spain and was trialled, and for his defence, he wrote an account of his time in Yucatan. They bought it and promoted him and sent him back to the Americas. Then he wrote down some of the syllabry.

The Spanish had finished conquring Aztecs and had a well oiled colonial machine. “Reduccion” was the colonial re-education programme. How do you reform an entire society? Like lego, take it all apart and rebuild it from the parts.

They remade the language. They taught Maya people to speak with Castillian grammer, “I’d like a glass of wine red”, and documented this as “maya reduccio” in books called Artes.

…

Latinization of the script.

In the 1980s the Yucatan gov created a standard orthography for this, and thought it had to work on typewriters. Apostrophes? Not good, it looked terrible. This makes teh text block very spotty. I thought this could be much better.

At UoReading I looked at Times New Roman, the a’ glyph is just like a’. In my Yukatek, they were VERY excited and said it was very legible to have the a’ as an integrated glyph. “Apostroglyph^tm”? They look strange on their own but in a text block they make a big difference. Here’s my specimen.

What does the future hold in store? They localized Firebox into Yucatek Mayan. People use MSN Chat daily to chat.

Could they return to Maya script? I spoke to archeologists who were excited about this, they have 3 options for recording glyphs in the field: 1. draw 2. transliterate and 3. use a thompson refrence number. A catalog with all glyph combinations with a unique ID. that is time consuming.

Could an opetype font work for mayan script? we think it COULD work. Minimum 600 common glyphs, 2 versions of each as there are multiple wa; you need a logogram and syllabogram. So about 4,000 glyphs is reasonable but most are positional variants. It would take MAJOR opentype feature markup, you’d type syllablic chars and it might convert that to display glyphs.

Possible, but not a big money maker. A great PhD research project at some point….. IF THE WORLD DOESNT END.

Q: The apostrophe is used in many native american languages. Its not an apostrophe in unicode, a glottal stop has its own unicode. …

A: I’d have to look at such details closely, its a good point.

http://www.typefacedesign.org/resources/RoP/2010/SteveRoss_Yukatek_RoP.pdf

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Font Licensing
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There’s a lot of confusion around font licensing. Users think they ‘bought the font’ and have no restrictions.

EURAs are written for 3 folks: Font seller, font buyers, and lawyers and judges.

When font designers write their own license, they can’t know the license is legally binding. This can compound with copy’n'paste license modifications.

Construction of a EULA: Claim ownership, and rights defined. The exhaustion doctrine is defined. First sale, the idea is when you purchsae it, do you own it and resell or give it away? Usually no, no resale or transfer or gifting. The limitation of liability is defined; you can’t sue for more than the value of the font, say. Governing law is defined. Granted uses are defined.

‘Who allows what’ diagram by Tiffany Wardle. Its a broad stroke of type foundries with what they offer, the uses they allow, their restrictoins. It shows visually how this is a complicated space – users are confused because the licenses are written also for lawyers, so the buyer doesn’t understand the EULA and restrictions/uses aren’t clear.

More confusion sources: Users have rose tinted glasses that if their use isn’t denied explicitly they are good to go, but might not be sure about it. Or, what happens when they want to upgrade the license, do they contact the reseller or the foundry? And what if either or both of those are no longer in business? Is the license still valid?

And anything can happen in the future! Mobile devices is a big thing just coming over the future horizon. Hosted fonts, cloud hosting and just who is the end user?

There is software immortality. What happens to the EULAs sold or updated? What happens when people want new licenses for fonts no longer for sale? Where are royalites paid on sales from deceased font creators? How is their work protected?

Attribution WILL be lost over time.

Will font usage become harder to track and validate based on emerging media?

Who are the current and future font buyers?

Product: Media, content creators – physical goods and software as products, apps and ebooks. The font is baked into a application being sold.

Content: Media/content creators – virtual hosted content including blogs, WWW)

Where will fonts files be lcoated? And how will the font licenses be managed?

Regardless of future technologies, EULAs will remain and must be considered with the same care as the development of the fonts themselves.

Is your EULA any good? Have you borrowed EULAs from a few distributors and modified them? Call Frank Martinez, font lawyer and trademark registerer. I wasn’t paid for that endorsement

Does EVERY distributor of your fonts use the same EULA? Does your Web Font EULA void aspects of your desktop font EULA? And how do you handle OEM licensing? How do your distributors handle OEM licensing – the uses your retail license restricts. Are you being fairly compensated by your distributors – We are Font Bros take that seriously.

If you are not sure what you are doing, you can create a big problem for yourself because you’re not sure if what you offer is what they need. OEM customers can be unsure of their own needs.

How do you police your EULAs? As a foundry? As a buyer of a large collection? How are you solving infringing uses. Google Search helps us find people who are sharing without permission.

www.typesnitch.com is a way we are proposing to monitor this. It is crowd funded.

Q: Are you seeing more standard EULAs and standard practices for mobile?

Stuart A: Its wide open. Large publishers of ebooks and independent app developers really want to have fonts in their products. They want to be treated fairly too. Requests are coming to Font Bros, 3-4 per week, and we’re handling them. We’re gauging the comfort level of what is fair. We want to capture the value to the use, is it static or dynamic text? Is it for any publication of just a small line of books? We discuss these things with the buyer so they get a fair deal.

Mike A: App developers are aware of this because Apple terms say their asset licenses must be sorted out. If the price isn’t right they will prefer not to use the font.

Frank Wildenberg Q: Many customers are confused by the various EULA policies for sure. All the big foundries had the same licensing for DTP with various prices, CPUs and so on. But now, everyone goes their own way on new license options and people really are confused.

Stuart A: Right, many foundries prohibit output to a linotronic device, or users in a geographic location; but geographic location isn’t like it was any more in business. At Font Bros, we want everyone on the same agreement so that the negotiation position for us is strong. Every year we update our EULA and we track which users have which versions. Most foundries just dont track that. We also think its important that people don’t feel tricked.

Christopher Slye Q: There are 1,000s of apps with Adobe fonts which is never allowed, same as Monotype. You can say the font industry hasn’t kept up with the market, but we try.

Stuart A: A font designer showed me a tool to sniff fonts in use from the apps database, and thats a great tool we will put into fontsnitch.com – and we’d like.

Sam Berlow Q: Of the 1,200 apps with our fonts, about 10% are licensed. I think apple can help us all a lot.

Stuart A: Right, legally they say this although they aren’t policing for us.

Sam Q: We police one by one and its successful but painful.

Simon Daniels Q: I think the key thing is for people to get clean. People are open to pay to get legal than pay in effort to redo their app.

Stuart A: Right, more people want to get legal, and they don’t want a C&D letter on their app or get sued. Online stationary companies, their users can use our fonts and they got only a single user license.

UPDATE! The workshop is now discounted by 25%

I will run an informal 3-day FontForge-based typeface design workshop in beautiful Lurs, southern France, during August 16-18.

This event is intended for beginners and tickets are €100  €76 please contact Camille Boulouis (camille.boulouis@gmail.com) to book a place.

Workshop Details

This 3 day workshop inspires beginners with confidence in type design, using the libre font editor, FontForge.

The workshop is customized to meet the level of experience shared by the group, and all that is required is a laptop, a soft pencil, loose paper and a creative mind.

Day One

We start with drawing techniques specific to exploring type forms, and experiment with a new collaborative type design processes. We place type sketching in the context of the overall type design process.

The afternoon session is spent sketching, and installing FontForge and Scribus onto your laptop.

Day Two

Digital font creation is the focus of the second day. We will each start with the sketches of the previous day, and use them to build a functional typeface design and a font we can take home.

The afternoon session will include a discussion of the various kinds of font formats in use by graphic designers today, and the differences between fonts made for printed graphic design and for the web.

Day Three

Finally, we explore ‘advanced’ topics: designing italics, drawing lighter and bolder weights, extending a font with accents, and adding OpenType features.

My proposal to present ttfautohint with Eben Sorkin has been accepted, so I will be in Hong Kong in October!

Here is the proposal text:

Title: ttfautohint: libre autohinting for web fonts

Hinting TrueType fonts can be a slow and expensive process, but it is required by Windows XP, and many fonts lack good hinting totally because they are converted to TrueType from OpenType-CFF. FreeType is libre font rendering software used in many phones, tablets and other computers, that autohints TrueType fonts during its rendering process.

In 2010 Dave Crossland suggested the idea of building out FreeType’s rendering system into an autohinter to Werner Lemberg, the primary developer of FreeType. Werner made a prototype thanks to financial support from the Google Web Fonts team, and it produced results that received some warm attention from professional type designers.

Werner is now working full time on the project while seeking financial support from the wider typography community to continue this work. He has raised over $40,000, and supporters include Google Web Fonts, Extensis WebINK, FontLab, and many individual type designers.

This talk shows the quality of hinting that ttfautohint produces today and outlines the roadmap for the future. Eben Sorkin is a professional typeface designer, and he will present the integration of ttfautohint into his web font design process.

This little program is set to improve the quality of web typography!

Learn more at freetype.org/ttfautohint