[HN Gopher] Routed Gothic Font
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Routed Gothic Font
Author : pabs3
Score : 241 points
Date : 2022-02-03 09:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (webonastick.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (webonastick.com)
| barnabee wrote:
| I don't know... maybe it's just not ugly?
| typon wrote:
| This post reminds me: every time I order any product from China,
| the labels always use this "ugly" font that an hour of Googling I
| couldn't find the name of. Does anyone know what font this is?
| Somehow every factory in China seems to use it. It's actually
| quite legible - not a bad design for making unambiguous labels
| mminer237 wrote:
| SimSun? Basically there's only one or two Simplified Chinese
| fonts in Windows, so everyone uses the default Chinese font for
| everything. That's why it's so popular, and they just use the
| same font since it also includes its infamous Latin characters.
| In addition to being overused and Latin characters not being
| the focus of the font, part of the reason its ugly on top of
| that is that since Chinese is generally monospaced, the Latin
| characters are also monospaced at half width and just generally
| sized weird to fit in better with Chinese.
| typon wrote:
| Thanks for the font name and the explanation!
| hda111 wrote:
| I don't like this font at all. When you make a font for technical
| writing use a font that allows to differentiate between l1I and
| 0Oo.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Someone make a monospaced version so I can use it in a terminal.
| :)
| Semaphor wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399161 2 years ago, 57
| comments
|
| Anyway, I wanted to ask: Why is it ugly? What about it is? I
| found it beautiful and much better looking than most fonts I see
| on the web nowadays.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I thought that it's meant look imprecise which communicates
| that it's not final.
|
| similar idea and discussion from RoughViz:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648968
| tasha0663 wrote:
| It doesn't look imprecise per se. These are just the
| letterforms you can get out of wood with a router.
|
| I'm curious why it's associated with blueprints, but I have
| no insight into the history of applying type to blueprints.
|
| EDIT: to answer my own question, it has to do with the
| scribing device used for Leroy letters. One of which was used
| to source this font. Nice description of how it was used here
| https://kleinletters.com/Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-
| mar...
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It makes me think of a 1970s carpeted office. Also of computers
| running Windows 95 in a local library that are infuriatingly
| slow and where right click is disabled in Internet Explorer.
| yuubi wrote:
| Letter shapes usually have curves a bit more complicated (in
| the sense of "how many parameters do I have to write down to
| reproduce it?") than this typeface. It feels like it's made of
| straight segments and ellipses, and all the strokes are uniform
| width and have round ends.
|
| Also, the 'a' and 't' look like the kindergarten versions
| instead of the more usual two-story 'a' and 't' with some sort
| of curve at the bottom.
|
| Most of this is almost certainly driven by the context this
| typeface was designed for. The simple shapes probably come from
| usability considerations for the lettering machine: the user
| had to trace each stroke in the template by hand. The uniform
| stroke weight and rounded ends come from how the engraving tool
| worked: basically a drill bit you drag sideways.
|
| The curves are probably that way because there was a fashion
| for "modern" shapes a while back, which meant roughly
| "describable with a simple formula and few parameters"
|
| We're accustomed to typefaces that were designed for use in
| movable type, where variable stroke weights and end shapes are
| basically free.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Interesting, that might be it. I already dislike serif fonts
| because I find they have too much complexity. So the
| simplicity of this font might be what draws me to it and is
| disliked by others.
|
| I also do enjoy the rounded ends.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Some people dislike anything that vaguely reminds them of Comic
| Sans fonts I guess.
|
| Personally I think it resembles VAG Round a lot, which is a
| font fairly common in Germany (possibly because it was designed
| for Volkswagen)
| tokai wrote:
| Oh I didn't even connect it to comic sans. It's very nice,
| but nothing overwhelmingly different from another grotesque
| font with rounded ends. CS is a script font and not a
| grotesque so thats annoying if that is really the reason to
| call it ugly.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| You realize that "grotesque" is often considered an English
| synonym for "ugly"? The entire style of font has been
| considered "ugly" for a lot longer than Comic Sans has
| existed. It's a form that's not often symmetrical or exact
| so it is an "odd" form and a lot of people historically
| have found "odd" to be "ugly".
|
| (Also, Comic Sans fits the definitions of both script fonts
| and grotesque fonts, so it is probably extremely subjective
| which bucket you prefer to define it.)
| egypturnash wrote:
| "grotesque" is also a term of art in font circles for a
| certain kind of sans serif, which leads to endless
| confusion.
|
| "Look at that gorgeous grotesque" is a perfectly decent
| sentence for a designer to say.
| tokai wrote:
| I dont understand why you think you little language
| lesson is relevant. As you write yourself the true
| (german) meaning of the term is strange. Laymen thought
| they were bizarre and maybe ugly. But for most other they
| were seen as very aesthetic from the onset. Which is why
| these new fonts absolutely dominated the fraktur fonts.
| The reaction to them was more about a culture shock than
| an aesthetic disapproval.
|
| It is a historic term and any interpretation were you
| call CS grotesk would be suspect.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The etymology of the term is from Latin (for "hidden
| grotto"), and English inherited denotations (Dictionary
| meanings) both from German font usage and from French. I
| was pointing out the connotation (colloquial meaning) in
| English of "ugly" simply that it shows evidence for a
| long standing cultural bias. Enough of a long standing
| cultural bias that people may call them "ugly" simply out
| of "cultural habit" without examining where that bias
| came from or why they feel that way.
|
| I also subjectively think many of the grotesque fonts are
| quite pretty, and I like Comic Sans too, but if you are
| asking _why_ people think they are "ugly", one of the
| reasons is "subconscious cultural bias" and the "language
| lesson" was pointing out deep evidence of that (at least
| in English speaking cultures).
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Many people don't know this font and yet it turns out spent
| some part of 16 years pressing their fingertips on it:
|
| https://jalopnik.com/see-if-you-can-spot-the-vw-
| connection-i...
| mkl95 wrote:
| It looks like old guy Comic Sans, although there's something more
| charming about it.
| aught wrote:
| these are beautiful
| leephillips wrote:
| Everything about this web page is awesome. The rest of the site
| is pretty sweet, too (there is a "proof" that p is rational that
| I enjoyed).
|
| I especially like the links to related work. Too many people
| write about what they made, or put up a page explaining
| something, giving the impression that they are the only ones who
| ever wrote about the thing or did any work on it in the history
| of human thought. The web thrives on linkage.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> The web thrives on linkage.
|
| It does, but a business never wants you to leave their site so
| outbound links are considered bad. Oddly, they love inbound
| links which would be outbound for someone else. Some people
| extend this to their blogs, as it is definitely important for
| SEO using the original page-rank algorithm.
|
| Now that I think of it, having no outbound links is a great way
| to rank a page as _less_ useful in some sense.
| leephillips wrote:
| It does make it less useful, in an objective sense. Before
| the web, the practice of linking to other work, through
| footnotes, references, or just mentioning it in the text, was
| essential for anything to be taken seriously, and an absolute
| requirement for any scholarly publication. The web is,
| potentially, a wonderful evolution of this custom. You're
| right about some commercial sites avoiding outbound links,
| but none of the ones I write for; all my editors encourage
| it. And there is no excuse to find this tendency to isolation
| on a personal site. I tend to avoid reading, and especially
| linking, to resources without good outbound links.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| The author says he copied the font from a Leroy Lettering set. I
| don't get how he can copy a font from that set and then
| distribute it with an open license?
| pronoiac wrote:
| This delves into the details:
| https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/font-law-licensing/
|
| > Among other ways, you can lawfully print every glyph on a
| printer, scan the image and then trace each image on your
| computer (none of this would involve copying the software or
| program representing the fonts).
| dsign wrote:
| Totally off-track, but seeing this font made me wonder: we have
| steam-punk, which is nostalgia for the times of the steam engine.
| Isn't it time we have a similar genre for the technology of the
| mid-twentieth-century?
| goblinux wrote:
| Also check out atompunk, which is a jetsons-esque atomic
| powered future. The Fallout video game series is a great
| presentation of cool atompunk tech/aesthetic
|
| Also all these:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Retrofut...
| mhandley wrote:
| Sounds like you're describing Dieselpunk:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk
| dsign wrote:
| Ahh, thanks!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I read a lot of papers about space travel, nuclear energy, and
| other technology from the 1960s and 1970s and love the use of
| typefaces similar to this.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I think it would be easier to evaluate this font if the page were
| not using -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
|
| which IMO really should be a last resort, and with this
| particular colour combination triggers halos that detract from
| readability.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| I don't see that anywhere in the page source. And when I try to
| manually inject that css it says it's an invalid property name.
|
| For context, I'm using Firefox on Linux. Also I haven't done
| any real front-end work in 10 years, so forgive me if I am
| missing something obvious here.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| It's an invalid property in Firefox, yes, so you're not
| seeing its effects.
|
| Firefox may simply not display it in the inspector, I'm not
| sure!
|
| Anyway it's in app.css on line 185; it's applied as a body
| style. Looks like it comes from Zurb Foundation (ugh).
| antihero wrote:
| My word, that is so much nicer. I wish people would stop doing
| this.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts might notice that Routed Gothic
| is a fairly good match for the "Gorton Modified" legends on
| Signature Plastics keycaps. Last year I put together an HHKB-like
| homage to the BBC Micro keyboard, which required custom keycaps
| to get the ECMA-23 bit-paired layout. I mostly used Routed Gothic
| to design the keycaps: https://github.com/fanf2/kbd#gorton-like-
| fonts
| pandemiclatte wrote:
| For years I used Staedtler's alphabet rulers to make annotations
| in my notebooks. This font brings back such good memories!
| thanks!
| [deleted]
| acomjean wrote:
| The old drafting font templates. When I started engineering they
| still did some of the plans by hand, using these templates to
| write out the lettering with a pin that would convert it to pen.
|
| They used it on some comics too.
|
| https://kleinletters.com/Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-mar...
| grapescheesee wrote:
| Very sweet, I was wondering how it was implemented. The scriber
| image really makes the letters more into the artwork of the
| era.
| jaclaz wrote:
| In those times (and yes I am old enough to have actually used
| them) we used plainer normographs or lettering guides[0]
| where the ink pen was used directly inside the template.
|
| Before the advent of so-called isograph/rapidograph pens, we
| used those weird looking pens as depicted in the wikipedia
| article and you had to be very, very careful as it was very
| easy to inadvertedly ruin a drawing with ink coming out of
| the (open top) reservoir.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettering_guide
| fancy_pantser wrote:
| Another variation, inspired by nautical signage:
| https://simplebits.com/products/ships-whistle-font
| leke wrote:
| Another font for my collection :)
| qwtel wrote:
| I suggest opening the dev console and adding "text-transform:
| uppercase" to the body element which makes it more obvious that
| it is in fact the same font as in the 1970s drawing. It also
| makes it look less ugly, in my opinion.
| kosma wrote:
| A side question, does anyone know of a good source of some high-
| quality, old-looking drawing templates (say, DIN A4
| frame+information in the bottom right), or a way to make a new
| template look "old"? I'm absolutely loving the blueprint
| aesthetics but I struggle to find good quality scans of the stuff
| to use in my own projects.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| _" A clean implementation of a common lettering style found on
| technical drawings, engraved office signs, computer and
| typewriter keyboards, and some comic books and avionics from the
| mid-20th century."_
|
| Thanks to the authors/designers.
|
| I remember orange-red ink on cream paper on the circuit diagrams
| (schematics) glued in the lids of war-surplus electronics. Also
| the fold out circuit diagrams in Iliffe press books. I shall use
| is as the font for maths revision posters this year.
|
| I suspect that the letter forms that I remember were drawn in pen
| with stencils on the drawing board.
| samwillis wrote:
| A truly ugly and yet beautiful typeface is the original Art
| Nouveau Paris Metro font _Metropolitaines_ from 1901:
|
| http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-43924.html
| RedShift1 wrote:
| It does have a certain charm but the I and 1, O and 0 not being
| distinct enough prevents me from actually using it.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I rent a home and wanted to map the circuits and fuses to
| lightswitches and outlets. I documented it in Excel and used
| the "National Park" font to make it look like an old school
| schematic.
|
| I used that font for the reason you described.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Those who remember old Borland's graphics.h, remember it came
| with an interesting set of fonts. Those were born in the 50's and
| are known as "Hershey fonts".
|
| There is a modern implementation compatible with the old Borland
| fonts: http://libxbgi.sourceforge.net/
|
| Disclaimer: I implemented it.
|
| Watching bgidemo.c running correctly on a modern machine is
| indescribably cool.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Inkscape supports converting text to a variety of stroke fonts:
| Extensions - Text - Hershey Text.
|
| The fonts are SVG, stored in
| /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/svg_fonts/ under Linux.
|
| I recently took EMS Readability from there and adopted it into
| a code base that is generating reMarkable documents with
| strokes and all (rather than PDFs) in support of reverse-
| engineering actually _good_ rendering, as I wanted text in my
| generated documents.
| miohtama wrote:
| Nice work! If I recall correctly, I used these when I was
| studying C in high school.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I'm sad to see graphics.h is still used in Pakistan, India
| and Brazil.
| waynecochran wrote:
| That's sad because its antiquated and means folks are still
| using DOS?
| marcodiego wrote:
| That's sad because it means there was no evolution in the
| last 20 years. People learn something, teach it and it
| gets frozen. Nothing new is learnt for decades.
| waynecochran wrote:
| It's weird there is someone still teaching using Borland
| C ... that is early 1990 stuff... and using DOS! That's
| closer to 30 years! It must be a cost thing.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I don't think it is a matter of cost. I think it is a
| matter of what the teacher knows.
|
| Just to be clear: I didn't say Borland C is still used in
| Brazil. But you still can find CS courses teaching
| graphics.h just the same way. Actually, if it is used
| just for demo purposes I'd see no problem, it is still
| somewhat adequate for the purpose. I doubt that, though.
| eloisius wrote:
| I've seen some references to Hersey fonts in OpenCV's text
| rendering. I wonder if those are from the same lineage.
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(page generated 2022-02-04 23:01 UTC)