I thought, once, that it would be a good idea to document the progress of my typeface development. It has since evolved into a traveller's log, I gather. Are we headed the same way, stranger …?
September 2, 2004 - … with love and squalor
Today I was looking and sweeping through the old, archived backup somewhere on my Linux partition where I found my bitmap fonts along with a lot of other crap that had some relation to them. About four years ago I wrote the following in the README file of one of my packages:
Hello, reader. I started this project. My name is Sergej Malinovski. You can contact me by email [sergej@nospam.dk] and you can visit my site at http://dreamer.nitro.dk, if you want to read some strange blather of a madman (mostly in Danish). I seek people who want to take font making seriously and wants to join my struggle for a better World to live in.
I have another email address now, and I don't have any strange blather on my webpage — or at least not of a madman. You won't find any Danish prose either. I no longer seek people, and I don't want anyone to join my struggle, which I don't have. The project I ended. My name is still the same.
A year later I had added a few lines to that paragraph:
I know the struggle is pointless. But I can't stand the ugly fonts made by some clueless UNIX/Adobe madmen. Let me tell you something, however. I don't like making fonts. I hate it. It is boring and time consuming. As soon as I am finished with fonts that work, the subject of bitmap fonts on Linux will be closed.
By Adobe madmen I was refering to people who converted Adobe's outlines to bitmap fonts.
A year later again, in 2002, I decided to shorten the whole thing:
I (Sergej Malinovski) started this project to unfuck the GNU/Linux font world. I seek people who want to take font making seriously and want to join my lazy crusade to do... whatever. This project is made not because of love for the font types, but because of love for reading text on-screen without thinking about fonts. You can contact me by email [sergej@nospam.dk].
I am typing this in Debian right now, but only because I don't have much of a choice. Type situation in the Linux world has not undergone terribly much change these last few years. The free "web fonts" from Microsoft that a lot of Linux distributions use are quite old compared to what is being shiped with Windows XP, and they don't look very good on paper. The FreeType renderer has been improving, but there is nothing good to render.
After abandoning the bitmap fonts, in the summer of 2003 I decided to take over the world:
My plan to take over the world is not to be the next Richard Feynman, Федор Достоевский, Bruce Lee, or 東山 魁夷, but to make a free, legible Unicode font type for my own needs.
That was about a year ago, and no longer a valid statement (like all the previous ones). The rest is more or less documented in this progris report.
August 22, 2004
Due to time constrains I'll probably be taking a break from my typographic endevours, so I'll sum up what I've done so far.
First, I wrote a short progress piece back in May but never published it (it was simply commented out in the HTML) because I didn't finish it. I can't remember much of what else I wanted to say, but I want to keep it for posterity:
May 5, 2004
I have decided that I'll drop the design with stressed downstrokes for two reasons: 1) it adds an overall complexity to the design, 2) I figure it would be too hard for me to keep such design consistent over many Unicode ranges, 3) it's fucking hard to hint in certain situations, i.e. letter k. In other words it's too big a mouthful and I want to bring my typeface to a usable state before I'm too old to ride a bicycle and have forgotten how to count. I do like stressed downstrokes, obviously, but they'll have to wait.
I've been thinking for some time if I should use Type1 splines when designing glyphs …
Okay, I'd like to say something about my sans serif typeface, Summersby, in it's current incarnation.
I see in the Apache logs that people download a few copies a day. I don't like that because the typeface is not very good and I don't like the idea of people wasting their time looking at my shit. But I don't want to remove it either because then there won't be anything tangible in my typography section, and would be blasphemy on my part. I hate hand waving without some kind of byproduct.
I haven't worked on Summersby for a while, I think. I don't really count the days, so I don't know. And I don't care. But I have not given up — that is out of the question. This little project of mine is not dying, in case someone out there is wondering. I've used some of the time to think about where my overall design is headed, copyright, licenses, laws in general, about the priorities and goals, and so on.
To go into details with all of that would take me too long, but I think I'll write about some of it at a later point.
For a change I tried to make a script typeface of my handwriting a few month ago, but I didn't get very far. Scaling and outlining the imported scans so that letters would look consitent was more difficult than I expected. I don't mind, though. I just wanted to see how one would go about doing it …
The last couple of weeks I've been making a serif typeface. I only managed to make the Latin uppercase, A-Z, and I don't consider it anything else than a simple draft.
July 20, 2004
I've added a new section, q & a. It's nothing serious, for now.
July 2, 2004 - Something is rotten in the state of … Adobe?
I think the reason I don't write that much lately is that when I want to write or say something, I want to say more than I can handle, so I sort of just let everything fall to the ground. Maybe it's for the best — history has shown that I'm often wrong. I sometimes angst about forgetting some of my thoughts if I don't write them down, but I think I'm finally getting over it. Whatever is forgotten is not very important to begin with.
The other thing I have gotten over since I started developing the typeface is my ego. I remember a coversation I had with Adam about my design of letter B (just to take something as an example), and I no longer maintain the position I expressed at that time. What I maintain as a guide towards a better typeface is my esthetical judgement, and that alone. I think it too has undergone some changes in the last half a year or so, and I consider it now to be more in tune with the general evolution of typographical esthetics.
Anyway, I was going to write about something else, as the title of this entry indicates. I read the description of Adobe Cronos typeface at Adobe Type Library website. I read the last part, “U.S. Patent Design 400,913.” and wondered what the fuck it was supposed to mean. I've never seen something like that before, so I got curious. After googling around, I found an interesting document: The Adobe Cronos story. I also tried to view the patent on the U.S. Patent Office website, but it locked my browser and I didn't bother to pursue this further. I don't have reason to side with anyone in that story (least of all with a moralist like Hrant H. Papazian), but I've always been somewhat entertained by the idea of having a several centuries old typeface like Garamond be part of a series called Adobe Originals.
I got a desire to read more on Carol Twombly after this story.
May 4, 2004
Damnit, every time I read Typophile Forums for more than five minutes I want to throw up.
April 20, 2004 – FreeType rendering
I recently played around with my typeface in Debian. There are some fatal problems with it. I also tried to run FontLab through WINE and it did, but it was dog-slow so didn't bother testing it further.
I got my hands on FreeType rendering utilities for Win32, including a port of ftview. It's exactly what I was looking for ever since I started creating my typeface. Now I can easily see how my font is rendered on Linux-based systems without rebooting. Here's a screenshot of my latest version:
There is a weird problem with hinting at certain sizes, and it is recurs at larger sizes as well. I'll write to the FreeType developers some time. I have one earlier version of my font and this problem isn't present, so I must have hinted something recently in some peculiar way.
I want to know how Bitstream Vera was hinted …
January 8, 2004 – s
Sat down and made a nice s.
Redesigned the whole typography section and planned to restructure and edit the content.
January 7, 2004 – Scharfes s
Generally speaking, I'm doing a bit of research on type design and typography these days, of the fluffy kind. I don't really have non-technical problems designing my typeface, so it's not like I need to do additional research, but I think research could change the direction in which I want to go with my typeface. Nothing drastic, of course, but a bit refinement will do good.
I got two books today, one called Liber Librorum and one called Liber Librorum. One very thin and one very thick. The thin one isn't really a book but a collection of pamphlets. So, I was looking through one of these, in German, typeset with Aldus, and I finally realized why ß (scharfes s) looks the way it does (I always wondered about that …). I wouldn't have if I didn't research calligraphy prior to that, so the time wasn't completely wasted. Now I can design ß as it was supposed to be.
The reference to these books is from Knuth's Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About which was a nice disappointment. (Maybe it's a good idea to talk even rarer about those things?) Well, actually, I think there was only reference to one Liber Librorum, the one with pamphlets, but there were two books with such name in the library database so I ordered both. The other one is about history of books, in Deutsch. Since there are interesting chapters about Chinese and Japanese history, I have a bit of motivation to repolish die Deutsche Sprache daß was never polished to begin with.
January 6, 2004 – Testing new design
I've read Knuth's Digital Typography. Didn't like it that much. I have a lot to write about what I'm up to these days, but I don't feel like doing it right now.
Experimenting with Russian in LaTeX today, I stumbled upon weird type rending in both PDF and PostScript outputs. I wonder what's up …
