[HN Gopher] The end of Type 1 fonts
___________________________________________________________________
The end of Type 1 fonts
Author : pavlov
Score : 165 points
Date : 2023-02-20 10:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (typenetwork.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (typenetwork.com)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| There I was thinking they cured diabetes :-(
| romeros wrote:
| yeah me too. :-( dang should change the clickbaity title.
| coldtea wrote:
| No one involved in typography, typesetting, DTP, and graphic
| design (the target audience) would even conflate this title
| with diabetes...
|
| The website is called "typenetwork" even.
|
| Not everything is "clickbait"...
| frogulis wrote:
| "type" is a very common and overloaded word. Consider its
| meaning for designers, programmers, taxonomy, keyboard
| enthusiasts, diabetics, Pokemon fans, and so on.
|
| The website being called "typenetwork" doesn't clarify much
| to me.
|
| If I had to pick a topic to associate "type 1" with, it
| would be diabetes, personally.
|
| You're absolutely right that it's not clickbait, but it
| _is_ confusing, considering we 're not on a website focused
| on typography or graphic design.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _" type" is a very common and overloaded word_
|
| Yes. Just not in the audience of that publication.
|
| You're just not their type of reader (pun intended)
| Sharlin wrote:
| The point is that the _HN_ title should be changed in
| this case, even though the normal advice is to keep the
| original title.
| ptero wrote:
| The request was not to change the title on the linked
| website, but have a HN title reflect the clarification
| that is important for many HN readers.
| pastage wrote:
| My thoughts went; diabetes.. network provider. I have
| worked extensively with PS Type 1 fonts. The title is
| unnecessary short, even if this was a PostScript working
| group.
| BongoMcCat wrote:
| I clicked the comments here just to find out what type 1
| means, I saw that the site was called "typenetwork", and
| that didn't mean anything to me.
|
| It might not be clickbait as in it is not intentionally
| misleading, but it still is a very confusing title.
|
| Not everyone that visits this site is a typography
| expert...
| moomin wrote:
| Which made me think it was going to be about Haskell.
| spirit557 wrote:
| Well, type 2 is definitely curable and reversible. type 1
| diabetes..... yea no.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Type 2 can be managed, mitigated, and treated; but it cannot
| (currently) be cured. The actions taken may prevent all the
| symptoms, but the underlying condition is still there.
| spirit557 wrote:
| Hyperinsulinemia is reversible. You reverse insulin
| resistance by stopping the constant, excessive stimulation
| of insulin. That's the disease, that's what does the most
| damage over the longest period of time years and years
| before an a1c exceeds the thresholds on a test. Once people
| restore their sensitivity to insulin and they change their
| diet, eating habits, they don't have type 2 diabetes. They
| have normal a1c, they have normal Kraft tests. They don't
| need medical intervention. They don't need drugs anymore.
| They will have normal a1c and healthy glucose metabolism
| proved by advanced lipid panels. We've known since the
| Kraft tests in the 1970s that type 2 diabetes can be
| predicted atleast 5-10 years before an elevated a1c would
| allow a doctor to diagnose a patient as type 2 diabetes.
| Insulin resistance is accurately measurable for decades
| now. Type 2 diabetes is curable.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| All of the things you've stated can also be explained as
| it being mitigated / in remission. It's no longer
| effecting the person, but that doesn't mean they no
| longer have the "condition".
|
| To quote diabetic.org [1]
|
| > So, can type 2 diabetes be cured? The answer is no.
| Type 2 diabetes is a chronic medical condition with no
| cure.
|
| > Instead, it's best to look at it as a manageable
| condition. For some people, remission is possible.
|
| [1] https://www.diabetic.org/type-2-diabetes-can-it-be-
| cured/
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I mean, I'm pretty sure you'd have heard about that from about
| a million other outlets before seeing it here, no? It'd be
| Nobel Prize winning level stuff.
| Sunspark wrote:
| This is the same as saying "we are removing your ability to look
| at jpg, use heic instead".
|
| T1 is a perfectly fine file format with many quality fonts. It
| does not burden a system to have it. Support is not lost on Linux
| systems which use the freetype renderer.
| maxnoe wrote:
| This is about removing support from applications _creating_ PDF
| files (InDesign, Acrobat, ...).
|
| From the article:
|
| > Keep in mind that older PDFs created with Type 1 fonts are
| safe--as long as their font data was embedded in the PDF when
| it was made. PDF readers, whether from Adobe or elsewhere, will
| continue to render these documents as they always have.
| layer8 wrote:
| This is the part I don't understand. They retain the ability
| to render Type 1 glyphs, but they remove the ability to load
| those from external font files, and/or don't ship any "built-
| in" Type 1 fonts anymore?
|
| My question is just about rendering/viewing. I understand
| that support is completely removed for authoring.
| hulitu wrote:
| > are safe--as long as
|
| This does not sound like "safe" to me.
| andylynch wrote:
| This is why PDFs intended for long term use or wide
| distribution should always (and often do) embed nom-
| standard fonts (eg as in PDF/A).
| acomjean wrote:
| My usecase is to create pdfs through the "print to pdf"
| menu. I kinda assumed the fonts were embeded.
|
| I don't seem to have any options when creating pdfs to
| embed or not embed fonts. Is this some feature of PDF
| creation software?
| andylynch wrote:
| Yes. From the top of my head the usual print to PDF
| behaviour is to embed the relevant subsets of any font
| other than the fourteen core ones given in the PDF
| standard.
| chalst wrote:
| The default is to mostly embed, except for a number of
| standard fonts.
|
| You can list the embedded fonts using standard tools. The
| pdffonts binary is pretty universal, as part of the
| Poppler set of tools.
| crazygringo wrote:
| PDF's have virtually always embedded fonts except for a
| small collection of core fonts like Times New Roman that
| are part of the PDF standard. You've got to really go out
| of your way _not_ to embed, and I 'm not sure which
| software even gives you that option at all.
|
| Otherwise it's kind of defeating the whole purpose of a PDF
| which is that everybody sees the same thing. Font embedding
| has been with PDF from the start.
|
| It's safe.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Not sure if this is the kind of not-embedding-fonts
| you're referring to, but in layout and design software
| you often see PDF saving options to either rasterize
| fonts or embed the fonts as vector curves.
|
| I believe both Gimp and Inkscape have been able to do
| this for a while, for example.
| aidos wrote:
| Unless I'm missing something, if the fonts aren't embedded
| in the first place then it shouldn't make any difference.
| The text should be encoded properly so that it can render
| now without the fonts (in which case we know which glyphs
| to use), the same will be true later.
| Someone wrote:
| From what I understand, currently, if the font (actually:
| the parts of it needed to render the PDF) isn't embedded,
| but you have the font installed, the renderer will use
| that font, an you'll see the document as intended.
|
| When support is removed, the renderer will look for/guess
| at the best replacement you have installed. As the
| article says, that may have subtle or not so subtle
| differences.
|
| I don't think it will be that bad, though. If you care, I
| think you'll already have embedded fonts in your PDFs for
| decades, even for fonts that 'everybody' already has,
| because the probability that 'my Font' is exactly the
| same font as 'your Font' is fairly slim.
| aidos wrote:
| As you say, I feel like it probably doesn't really matter
| that much. If you're relying on a PDF rendering correctly
| based on an unusual local font then you're in trouble as
| soon as you send the document to another machine. If you
| have the Type1 font locally, you could always convert it.
|
| You could have a situation where your font has really
| weird cmaps and without that specific font the text
| becomes garbled. More likely, you can substitute it for
| another font and it's mostly fine.
|
| Keep in mind that the PDF standard has 14 base fonts that
| are used for a lot of documents that people send about.
| https://appligent.com/what-are-the-base-14-fonts/
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I don't have a dog in this fight, but this sounds to me
| like an optimistic view of people and their behaviour.
| Someone wrote:
| Your typical "save as PDF" will embed fonts nowadays.
|
| I think only professional (typically commercial, costing
| serious money) PDF writers have had a flag to NOT embed
| fonts in PDFs for decades.
| II2II wrote:
| If the document was intended for distribution, it is likely
| that any non-embedded fonts are going to be common system
| fonts that will either have direct replacements or
| compatible replacements. Of course all bets are off, if
| someone created a document for personal use, to share with
| family/friends, or simply didn't know what they were doing.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| And a fair number of old Adobe, Apple, and BeOS technical
| docs lack embedded fonts for some reason.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Can you send a link to an example? Which fonts were they
| using that weren't embedded?
|
| Never in my life have I come across a PDF intended for
| public distribution missing an embedded font. (The sole
| exception being the PDF standard fonts like Times New
| Roman that are never embedded.)
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I remember an Adobe presentation[1] tried to walk back
| the "14 standard fonts" thing as being an Acrobat
| "convenience" feature rather than a PDF standard feature,
| probably because it doesn't look good to attempt to
| standardize a (format unimplementable without a) set of
| fonts you're unwilling or unable to let people freely
| redistribute. (But then that presentation also promised
| the nascent ISO PDF standard would always stay accessible
| free of charge, and we know how that turned out.)
| Certainly PDF/A does not permit you to omit them, though
| that's only one specific kind of PDF.
|
| In any case, sure, here you go:
|
| - The _Be Book_ [2] for DR8 uses but does not embed
| AvantGarde-* fonts.
|
| - _Inside Macintosh: Interapplication Communication_ [3]
| uses but does not embed Palatino-* fonts (for this one I
| could be convinced it's because the uploader merged the
| original per-chapter PDFs[4] incorrectly, though).
|
| - The _Mac OS 8 Human Interface Guidelines_ [5] also have
| the Palatino problem (and look legit, even though other
| Apple HIGs from that era do embed their fonts).
|
| - Even the bloody spec[6] for PDF 1.3 uses and does not
| embed Caecilia-Heavy and MyriadMM_565_600_, whatever
| those are.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poc9PVmFzpc
|
| [2] http://bebits.irixnet.org/be/docs/DR8/BeBook/acrobat/
| 05_Medi... and others in that directory (1996 metadata)
|
| [3] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Interapplicatio
| n_Comm_... (1993 copyright, 2014 metadata)
|
| [4] https://thrysoee.dk/InsideMacintoshInterapplicationCo
| mmunica...
|
| [5] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGOS8_Guidel
| ines.pd... (1997 metadata)
|
| [6] https://web.archive.org/web/20101214132912/http://par
| tners.a... (2000 metadata)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I took a look at a few of these, and some of them are
| maybe just strange bugs.
|
| E.g. the Adobe PDF spec embeds almost everything
| including most versions of Myriad, just not those two you
| mention. Similarly the Apple Guidelines embed Palatino
| Roman and Standard (as TrueType), just not Bold (as Type
| 1).
|
| The Media Kit one does just not embed anything though (no
| Avant Garde), so that's clearly intentional.
|
| It does make me wonder if technical documentation
| intended for a specific platform would sometimes try to
| save space by not embedding fonts standard not to PDF but
| to the platform. E.g. Avant Garde has shipped with Macs
| for a very long time. Still, what a terrible idea.
|
| But fascinating to see documents with these problems in
| the wild, first time I've ever come across it. Thanks for
| taking the time!
| jasomill wrote:
| As another data point, I've run into a variety of old DEC
| VMS documentation prominently featuring non-embedded New
| Century Schoolbook, _e.g.,_
|
| http://www.vaxhaven.com/images/a/a7/AA-PS6KA-TE.pdf
|
| It's probably not a coincidence that New Century
| Schoolbook was one of the fonts included with all
| PostScript Level 2 printers, but not included with older
| PostScript printers or Acrobat.
|
| Note that the documentation in question was originally
| distributed as PostScript .ps files, not PDF, and it
| indeed makes no sense to embed New Century Schoolbook in
| a Level 2 or higher PostScript file, for both practical
| and likely legal reasons.
| jasomill wrote:
| Per a handy diagram in MacWorld's review[1] of the
| original release of Myriad as one of the first multiple-
| master[2] Type 1 fonts, "MyriadMM_565_600_" is a
| semibold, regular-width instance.
|
| Myriad Pro Semibold and Myriad Variable Concept Semibold
| should both be very close matches.
|
| Myriad Variable Concept is bundled with the current
| version of Adobe Illustrator (and possibly with other
| Adobe apps not currently installed on my system); Myriad
| Pro was bundled with most (all?) versions of the pre-
| cloud Adobe Creative Suite, and has the benefit of being
| a traditional, non-variable OpenType font that should
| work pretty much everywhere.
|
| This suggests an interesting question: are tools
| available to faithfully convert multiple-master Type 1
| fonts to variable OpenType format?
|
| "Caecilia-Heavy" is PMN Caecilia 85 Heavy; Caecilia LT
| Std 85 Heavy, a currently-available OpenType font, is
| presumably a close match.
|
| Both Myriad Pro and Caecilia LT Std 85 Heavy are included
| in Adobe Font Folio 11 and, um, _maybe_ available for
| activation via Creative Cloud, but this is not
| immediately clear from Adobe 's Web site, and I'm having
| problems launching the damn CC app to check.
|
| Of the many Adobe products I happened to have licensed
| before discontinuation in favor of a subscription-only
| replacement, Font Folio is probably my favorite. And,
| unlike older Adobe applications, it's still 100%
| compatible with every modern OS, and likely to remain so
| in perpetuity.
|
| Or at least until OpenType is deprecated in favor of some
| dystopian online-only replacement...
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9207_July_1992/p
| age/n19...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Back then it could have been due to file size?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Coupled with the lack of builtin compression in
| contemporary PDF versions (and a strange but widespread
| aversion to gzipped pdf), perhaps, but then there
| shouldn't be anything special about those particular
| companies. Maybe there isn't, though, maybe that's just
| where I come across mid-to-late-90s PDFs.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Actually it's the same as "removing support for XBM because
| nobody uses it anymore".
|
| Would you not make completely out of scale comparisons just to
| be contrarian on HN? Please?
| hedora wrote:
| How many xbm files were used to store archival copies of
| documents?
|
| Adobe Reader has always been terrible; I'll happily continue
| to avoid Adobe software whenever possible.
|
| However, I hope this doesn't lead to other PDF software
| ending support for Type 1 fonts.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > It does not burden a system to have it.
|
| Any and all software is a burden.
| legulere wrote:
| There's no code better than no code.
| pilif wrote:
| _> It does not burden a system to have it._
|
| any file format you support poses a significant attack surface,
| especially an old and creaky one whose parser you've written in
| the 90ies and ever touched.
| hulitu wrote:
| > any file format you support poses a significant attack
| surface,
|
| and yet the trend is to use more and more libraries,
| sometimes from dubious sources and sometimes (hello npm) with
| malware.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Any old code is burden by definition.
|
| You can still use old versions of Adobe software. (I... guess?
| I am not sure how do the Adobe Creative Cloud licensing
| shenanigans work nowadays, I haven't used Adobe suite for ages)
| upofadown wrote:
| Adobe doesn't support bitmap fonts either, but that doesn't stop
| me from using them in my terminals. This is only limited to a
| single producer of software. It will be interesting to see if any
| other generators of PDFs will pay any attention...
| simooooo wrote:
| But it's THE producer of PDF software.
|
| Several of my clients are already moving their entire catalogs
| to new fonts
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Correction: it's _the_ producer of PDF software with up-sells
| baked into it, even if you paid for the full-fat Adobe
| Acrobat with a perpetual license (which is still a thing,
| fortunately) you still get steered towards using their
| Subscription SaaS features like Adobe Sign, Document Cloyd,
| etc.
|
| Fortunately Adobe's PDF specification is an open, public
| standard (a surprisingly altruistic move for a company
| seemingly ran with the same level of malevolence as if
| Lucifer got himself an MBA) so now, in 2023, there's no
| shortage of high-fidelity PDF viewers and virtual printer
| drivers. Browser JS-based PDF viewers are the best thing to
| happen in this area in decades - remember all those Acrobat
| Reader splash screens in the early-2000s?
| snotrockets wrote:
| Correction: It's the producer of enterprise-adjacent PDF
| software, with some offering for smaller users.
|
| Adobe is focused on capturing the media producing pipeline,
| and there is where it puts most of it efforts.
| detourdog wrote:
| Yes, at this point type 1 fonts are bigger than Adobe. Type 1
| fonts just exist. Adobe needs subscriptions to exist.
| schrijver wrote:
| You should be able to convert them to OTF files with Fontforge.
| OTF supports both Postscript outlines (cubic bezier) and TrueType
| outlines (quadratic bezier). That should be lossless for the
| curves, however does someone know if it's the case for the
| kerning data as well?
| elmimmo wrote:
| You are but, as of today, reliably, only via the GUI, and
| therefore, one by one, not in batches via scripting due to a
| bug[1]. That is the case at least for Type 1 Mac fonts.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/4668
| elevaet wrote:
| I got nerd-baited, expecting this to be about Type I
| Civilizations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
| holistio wrote:
| I was expecting the end of Type 1 diabetes.
| [deleted]
| elevaet wrote:
| I like this one better
| mtrycz2 wrote:
| It's a common problem on HN to have too little context. Even in
| the tech space, there is so many subdomains, that it's easy to
| get confused. It also doesn't help that often (not in this
| case, tho) writers assume you already know what they are
| talking about.
|
| A couple of words of context (or maybe a "category tag"?) would
| be so much helpful, most of the time.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Just append the word "fonts" to the title.
| msla wrote:
| That, and the re-use of abbreviations.
|
| Like VM for example: Is it Virtual Memory, Virtual Machine,
| or Virtual Machine? Distinguishing Virtual Memory from the
| other two is easy, but is a Virtual Machine a bytecode
| interpreter like the JVM or a hypervisor like IBM's VM or
| Xen? You might well have to think hard about the VM settings
| you use for a VM that runs on a VM.
| [deleted]
| zorked wrote:
| Moderator: title request change to "The end of Type 1 fonts" to
| disambiguate from Type 1 errors, Type 1 diabetes, etc.
| jcutrell wrote:
| Was going to mention this, and also the Bezos classification of
| Type 1 and Type 2 decisions - definitely would benefit from a
| better title.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Yea I thought it was about Type 1 decks in Magic the Gathering
| ant6n wrote:
| I thought it was type 1 personalities.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Oh, I thought it was Type 1 Fun:
|
| https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
| comradesmith wrote:
| I thought this would be about the transition to a Type 2
| Civilisation...
| dmak wrote:
| Me too! I was so disappointed when I saw the article.
| lucakiebel wrote:
| We would have to be a Type I civilization first, we're only
| at about 0.73
| sealeck wrote:
| (cc @dang)
| ho_schi wrote:
| I also expected sth. about diabetes.
| gpvos wrote:
| Good to see PDF viewers will at least keep supporting it.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Good to see PDF viewers will at least keep supporting it.
|
| No, the reason PDFs created with these fonts will remain
| viewable is the same reason printed documents will remain
| readable. The glyphs used are part of the document. You don't
| need to have the font installed or even have the ability to
| render fonts to display a PDF, that's the whole point
| (*Portable* Document Format).
|
| You may have noticed that some PDFs, especially older ones,
| either don't allow text to be selected or have weird behavior
| when selecting where the selection might go in a line across
| columns instead of following the text. This is because they
| don't include the metadata required to explain the document as
| text, it's just a bunch of glyphs.
| gpvos wrote:
| Well, they are embedded in the PDF _as a Type 1 font._ That
| support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font
| rendering depends on a library shared with other software
| that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be
| in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO
| standard).
|
| Reasons for text selection going across columns can be very
| varied, although indeed documents with metadata will also
| otherwise usually be structured enough to have proper text
| order.
| numtel wrote:
| That's a misleading headline if I've ever seen one.
|
| Type 1 without extra qualifiers refers to diabetes.
| russdill wrote:
| And see here I was hoping it was a discussion of post Kardashev
| type 1 civilizations.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I think you might be biased. I didnt think about diabetes in
| the slightest when seeing the headline.
| admash wrote:
| Oddly enough, I was not misled and assumed that it referred to
| Adobe Type I, given that is HN and end of Type I diabetes would
| be making headline news in most all other news outlets. Which
| it is not.
| numtel wrote:
| An article about therapies under development before they
| reach the market would absolutely fit on HN while being
| ignored by news outlets.
|
| I guess that article would be titled, "The _coming_ end of
| Type 1 "
| nyrikki wrote:
| It was type 1 errors or "false positives" that popped into my
| head especially as a post just a few lines down had "false
| positives" in the title
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Type 1 without extra qualifiers refers to diabetes.
|
| That may very well be accurate.
|
| In your world, though.
| bawolff wrote:
| Personally i thought it was clear. This is a tech website, and
| we're obviously not going to solve type 1 diabeties overnight
| out of nowhere. That's two context clues for what it is about.
|
| [Which is not to say that the headline shouldn't be
| disambiguity]
| gpvos wrote:
| Also, Type 1 fonts have been on the decline for a long time,
| so announcing their end is a likely thing to do.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| We are not writing here for AI bots but for humans. In this
| (CS) context, the first association clearly isn't about
| diabetes.
| hnbad wrote:
| I'm not sure what "this context" refers to. The site
| (typenetwork) is probably more "design" than "computer
| science". The HN user base includes a lot of people from
| computer science backgrounds but not exclusively so, nor does
| the majority of the articles featured on here (remember that
| "tech" does not mean "computer science"). HN itself is an
| outlet of a venture capital startup accelerator. I'd say the
| expectation for HN users would be to at least be "tech-
| adjacent" but computer science is neither a necessary nor
| sufficient part of that and the topics in submissions far
| exceed direct professional interests (or even "hacking" in
| any sense of the word, despite what the guidelines suggest).
|
| An article about research that could mean the end of Type 1
| diabetes would hardly be out of place here, though I agree
| that assuming that "Type 1" without qualifiers automatically
| refers to diabetes is not a safe bet here, if anywhere.
| bawolff wrote:
| > (remember that "tech" does not mean "computer science")
|
| If you're going to be that nitpicky, this article isn't
| about anything that could reasonable be called "computer
| science" either
| Dalrymple wrote:
| This headline is also initially alarming for those interested
| in the most performant type of hypervisor.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| To you it does.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| It's where my head went too and I'd be in favour of the
| headline being updated, but I don't think diabetes owns the
| association between a letter and number.
| skissane wrote:
| I immediately thought it was about fonts, because I saw the
| website was "typenetwork.com"-never heard of them before, but
| their name rather obviously suggests typography over anything
| else.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't associate "type 1" without context with
| diabetes over its other possible meanings (type 1 fonts, type 1
| errors, type 1 hypervisors, HIV type 1, herpes type 1, etc).
| Diabetes may well be the most famous example, but numbered
| types are very popular in medical science, and many other
| fields besides
| pastage wrote:
| That is an interesting fact, considering you seldom see type
| 1 refering to diabetes without the qualifier. I guess medical
| society is used to naming things and the problems with that.
| (Even though T1D is really too broad, often used to describe
| other types of diabetes)
| thom wrote:
| I was worried that Wizards of the Coast had announced the end
| of the Vintage format.
| pantulis wrote:
| I remember installing Adobe Type Manager from 3.5'' diskettes on
| Windows 3.1, with a special supplementary disk that included the
| Lucida fonts. "Goodbye Times New Roman!"
| manv1 wrote:
| Some of the fonts (Beowolf) will never be duplicated because the
| font re-renders itself every time, which lead to some neat
| effects when ripped for print
|
| There's an OpenType version, but since TT fonts aren't programs
| the way Postscript fonts are it's not really the same.
|
| https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf
|
| I believe it's still the only RandomFont ever made.
| nereye wrote:
| For other examples, see
| http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html.
|
| Amongst other things, assuming what that page says is true,
| only Type 3 fonts support that (randomizing glyphs at render
| time), not Type 1.
| ncphil wrote:
| "No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more modern
| vellum based media."
|
| And then, the Dark Ages.
|
| Of course, backwards compatibilty will be maintained: at least to
| the end of the century?
|
| Digital culture is already so ethereal, fragile, that you have to
| wonder if millennia from now our descendents may posit this
| period as another "dark age" because none of what we've generated
| since the 90s will remain (or be decypherable).
| OliverJones wrote:
| My brother the academic librarian / archivist has, for many
| years, been warning about this kind of obsolescence. It's
| necessary for we software folk to ask ourselves "two centuries
| from now, how will people make sense of our digital files?"
|
| One of the challenges is, of course, that it isn't obvious to
| any generation of creators what will be of lasting value.
|
| Academic archivists and MLS degree holders can't do it all, any
| more than they could control the 19th-century paper factories
| that churned out all that junk paper that turned brittle in a
| few decades.
| thfuran wrote:
| Two centuries? I don't have an optical drive or zip drive or
| any flavor of floppy drive anymore. Lots of files from the
| last two decades are inaccessible to me even before
| considering whether they're still parseable / executable.
| antisthenes wrote:
| I think we can safely view the 1980s/1990s as the testing
| grounds for finding out what works and what doesn't.
|
| Naturally, the things that worked were acquired and
| consolidated by larger and larger companies, which allowed
| tech to be cheap and commonplace.
|
| The #1 necessary factor for something being accessible
| later on is the sheer amount of popularity it enjoyed in
| the past.
|
| E.g. I think some common interfaces, like SATA / USB Type-A
| will never die, willing to take a $10k long bet that they
| will still be easily accessible in 15-20 years. Maybe not
| as popular as some newer ones like M.2 or USB-C.
|
| > Lots of files from the last two decades are inaccessible
| to me
|
| Yes, but not by volume. The amount of files ever stored on
| all 3.5 floppies in the world could very easily fit into a
| single server rack these days.
|
| Are these 0.01% of files more valuable in proportion than
| others? If not, then it makes 0 sense to focus on
| preserving those interfaces.
| thfuran wrote:
| Is the data produced in the past month more valuable
| than, say, all the writings of the 1st century just
| because there's more of it? Would the data produced in
| the first week of 2099 be worth more than all of history
| prior to 1900 just because there's more?
| antisthenes wrote:
| I think the point is that small data can be continuously
| carried over to new mediums if it's valuable enough.
|
| How many pre 1st century writings will fit on a 20TB hard
| drive? I'd venture to say - all of them.
|
| > Would the data produced in the first week of 2099 be
| worth more than all of history prior to 1900 just because
| there's more?
|
| No, and I think that's why we're mostly in agreement.
| Valuable and small data will always have accessible
| interfaces, because it is propagated throughout many
| mediums.
|
| If there's an apocalypse scenario looming, you bet your
| butt that someone will be printing the most valuable
| information to good old paper, in case all machine-
| readable interfaces vanish overnight (unlikely scenario
| that I'm not going to lose sleep over).
| SideQuark wrote:
| The Dark Ages had nothing to do with changing writing media.
| Also modern scholars don't use the term as they're learned
| there was a lot of stuff discovered and done during the "Dark
| Ages".
| klodolph wrote:
| I am somewhat more hopeful. There are conversion tools.
| Fidelity is reportedly not perfect--I haven't seen problems,
| but the metrics may not match exactly. Tools like FreeType,
| FontForge, and GhostScript will remain in their current form,
| even if development / maintenance is abandoned.
|
| Archivists have all sorts of guidelines for how to preserve
| digital media. We won't save everything, but we ARE churning
| out plenty of people with master's degrees in library sciences,
| who often go to work (in some capacity) preserving the world's
| digital data.
| kps wrote:
| The article is vague, but OpenType CFF fonts remain
| supported. These are Type 1 outlines in an OpenType
| container. Type 1 fonts should be 1:1 convertible to OpenType
| CFF, techincally. The hitch for commerical users is that
| fonts often have ridiculously restrictive licensing
| forbidding this rewrapping.
| xp84 wrote:
| If there's anything I've learned in my career, it's that
| almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font
| licensing, let alone abides by it. And in general it's
| usually the kind of thing that the "font police" has
| limited ability to discover from outside the business.
|
| In practice, people will do what they need to do to use
| their software, and tbh, there may be legal exceptions for
| interoperability, such as the DMCA has. You're allowed to
| circumvent DRM, under DMCA, if you're doing so solely to
| enable interoperability with different software/hardware
| (rather than, in order to distribute it). Not a lawyer,
| don't @ me.
| perardi wrote:
| _almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font
| licensing_
|
| Ha, that seems to imply that people even _know_ there's
| such a thing as font licensing.
|
| I've been a graphic designer for a long time now, and I
| barely even remember font licensing exists. Even though I
| know better, my gut instinct is "well we paid for it, we
| can use it however we want internally, send it along with
| the InDesign file to the printer, why not?"
| xp84 wrote:
| The super fun thing about fonts that isn't quite
| intuitive to most, is that once you rasterize them you're
| freed from all shackles, meaning you can use a $12 font
| license and make an iconic piece of art, _print it out_
| and sell 50,000,000 copies of it and make a billion
| dollars, and you 're completely in the clear. Or even
| produce a JPEG and sell that the same way.
|
| But if you make it into a webfont and _render_ that same
| font in a browser as text, lawsuit city.
| zorked wrote:
| Depends on country. Font makers scanning magazines to
| check which ads use unlicensed font is a thing that
| exists. Also for TV. And often a TV license is different
| from a print license.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's a lesson in what happens when you give private for-profit
| entities responsibility for public goods.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Fonts aren't public goods. Same as computer programs aren't
| public goods either.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The historical record is a public good.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The historical record isn't saved as Adobe Illustrator
| and InDesign files.
|
| Final products are saved in things like PDF's which
| continue to work just fine.
| nerdponx wrote:
| At some point, does not the software itself become part
| of the historical record? Otherwise we wouldn't care
| about things like the Internet Archive hosting its DOS
| emulator.
| crabbone wrote:
| I studied graphic design and designed (by hand, and later
| "digitized" some using Fontmaker and Freehand) about a
| dozen of fonts.
|
| So, about that "public goods" part... Are works of art a
| public good? I think, well... there isn't a very good
| definition of what constitutes public good. Usually, this
| is used in the context of economics, describing a good or a
| service managed by the government and provided to most of
| the population governed by the said government.
|
| Some works of art do provide a service, in a way (well,
| entertainment is a kind of service, right?) and some are
| sponsored and otherwise managed by the government. Not
| every work of art earns the same attitude. The governments
| are very selective about what works of art they put on
| display in museums that are free for the general public to
| attend. Museums are public good though, right?
|
| So, back to the fonts. The ones I developed, well... they
| are barely more than just an art academy student projects.
| I showed them to couple of my friends and my dad... and
| that was it. I doubt the government of whatever country I
| end up in will want to invest much efforts into preserving
| those. However... the teacher of my teacher (when it comes
| to fonts), Bazhanov created this font:
| https://meganorm.ru/Index/42/42375.htm . The "GOST" in that
| document means that this font received a government-managed
| identification number. The font is still in use today, and
| the government released the IP of that font to the general
| public to use. I don't know if the government has any kind
| of a digital storage for the modern fonts and how would
| they be admitted there, but, back in the days when the
| linked font was accepted into publishing industry, the
| original films with the letter outlines were placed in an
| archive managed by the state's standards committee (that's
| what "GOST" stands for).
|
| Bottom line: it's complicated, and fonts aren't
| automatically public goods, but some of them are promoted
| into being public goods, based on many criteria, so, it's
| not easy to tell which are public goods and which aren't.
| imagineerschool wrote:
| Not with that attitude
| Swizec wrote:
| > Digital culture is already so ethereal, fragile, that you
| have to wonder if millennia from now our descendents may posit
| this period as another "dark age" because none of what we've
| generated since the 90s will remain (or be decypherable).
|
| Mark Lawrence kinda explores this idea in his Prince of Thorns
| universe. Former AI researcher, now fantasy author.
|
| Without spoiling the books too much: There's a lot of stuff
| left over from The Ancients who had these weird rectangular
| things that sometimes pop to life and do magic, but are
| otherwise inert, useless, and have no moving parts you can
| analyze. Very strange black rocks that seem to do things when
| you hold them just right but nobody knows what makes the
| assembly work, or how, or when it might suddenly pop into life.
| You kinda just fiddle with it until something happens and hope
| for the best.
|
| Oh and The Ancients had a lot of "liquid stone", which is very
| strong and would come in handy for building forts, if anyone
| knew how it works or how to make more.
| Filligree wrote:
| Concrete is an old, old recipe though. It's hardly some
| complex modern novelty. I wonder how it got lost.
|
| Does the series involve recovering this lost knowledge? Or is
| it just the backstory for a fantasy novel?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Concrete requires a lot of energy to produce and the
| ongoing practice of making it would stop if there was ever
| a collapse of civilization.
| a2tech wrote:
| Some of it, but its just there. It comes up sometimes but
| isn't omnipresent.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> "No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more
| modern vellum based media."
|
| > And then, the Dark Ages.
|
| Nitpick, but IIRC vellum is far more durable and long-lived
| than papyrus.
|
| > Of course, backwards compatibilty will be maintained: at
| least to the end of the century?
|
| > Digital culture is already so ethereal, fragile, that you
| have to wonder if millennia from now our descendents may posit
| this period as another "dark age" because none of what we've
| generated since the 90s will remain (or be decypherable).
|
| One of the ways software engineers (and software engineering
| organizations) tend to be terrible is they prioritize their
| myopic desires over others' long term needs. Part of that is
| probably driven by software engineering's tendency to create
| systems that require constant active upkeep (due to its
| deficiencies), which leads software engineers to think it's
| right for _everyone_ should be forced to perform constant
| active upkeep (or they "get what they deserve").
|
| IMHO, the right thing to do is to carrying around some legacy
| baggage to prevent old documents from becoming unusable.
| xp84 wrote:
| In a way, I think I'm comfortable with no one 200 years from
| now being able to read every tweet, because nobody bothered
| to keep an archive of all of Twitter and move it from one
| form of media to another.
|
| I'm sure there was a great deal of stuff of little value
| being spoken but not chiseled in stone in 100 BC as well.
| Only important stuff survives.
|
| If we have anything of great value to say, _then_ let us put
| it intentionally in an archive for posterity. There is a
| limit, after all, in how much time future historians will
| have to read our stuff. Nobody can read all of Twitter today,
| nor in 200 or 2000 years.
| lucumo wrote:
| > software engineering's tendency to create systems that
| require constant active upkeep
|
| Nearly everything requires active upkeep, especially if it
| interacts with a changing environment. Software is no
| exception there.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Nearly everything requires active upkeep, especially if
| it interacts with a changing environment. Software is no
| exception there.
|
| In some cases, but software engineers tend to decide to
| make that environment change _more_ , so even if your
| environment _isn 't_ otherwise changing, you still have
| deal with a bunch of change (e.g. you don't get to have
| software unless you can pay someone to regularly track
| framework updates, because some software engineers would
| rather not do the work to maintain backwards compatibility
| or support old versions).
| enriquto wrote:
| Maybe that's the point? Breaking backwards compatibility,
| even if for a noble intention towards a better future,
| results in practice in annihilation of the past. No good deed
| goes unpunished.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| How does it work when they are embedded in a PDF?
|
| Does the renderer have explicit support for these fonts or are
| they embedded in a way that transcends the format itself?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| They are embedded as postscript subroutines so all is well that
| way.
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