Phinney on Fonts

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  • “Is it possible for two different designers to come up with the same type of font design?”

    Probably. It all depends on your definition of “same type.”

    There have been tens of thousands of type families created. New typefaces generally have some similarity to existing ones. After all, if they didn’t have some similarity, we couldn’t even recognize the characters, right? It is just a question of how similar they are.

    Some areas of type design have less room for variation than others. For example, making a humanist sans serif that is deliberately very neutral and without strong flavor really limits the scope. As a result, typefaces such as Myriad and Segoe have significant resemblance to the earlier iconic humanist sans, Frutiger. A few people see Myriad and/​or Segoe as derivative or even knockoffs of Frutiger. I wouldn’t say knockoffs, and probably not even call them derivative… although to be fair, Frutiger established what has become an entire genre of typefaces! I believe that Myriad and Segoe each innovated about as far as it could within that general genre, essentially in opposite directions from Frutiger, but without having some methodical scheme of must-be-different-as-much-as-possible.

    Frutiger (Linotype, Adrian Frutiger, 1975):

    Myriad (Adobe, Twombly/​Slimbach, 1992):

    Segoe (Monotype, Steve Matteson, 2004):

    Yes, they all have similarities. But they also all have differences (and not just that the “regular” weight of Frutiger is bolder!). One systematic difference: Frutiger has strokes cut at a slight angle but near the vertical, Myriad at a right angle to the current stem, and Segoe keeps rigidly to the vertical/​horizontal ending cuts. This is not just a technical difference; it creates an entirely different feel for each typeface. Myriad is the warmest and most friendly of the three, and Segoe the most… constrained.

    Frutiger himself in his Complete Works wrote:

    “That Adobe, in 1992, would bring out a similar typeface to *Frutiger* — […] — I found that a little inappropriate. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t write such a letter today. My perspectives have widened; of course that’s got something to do with age — you get more easygoing. Why shouldn’t a good typeface be developed further by a third party? When I see today that someone has taken my thoughts and developed them further, I’m even proud of that.”

    (Hat tip to Kris Sowersby for pointing out the quote!)

    I am reminded of a science fiction story (as best as I recall it) about a future dystopia in which experiencing art/​music/​literature of the past is forbidden. A composer is caught having listened to a bunch of Beethoven. But she was so careful not to be influenced! How was she caught? All the Beethoven-​like elements in her compositions suddenly disappeared after she was exposed to Beethoven and suppressed previous naturally-​occurring similarities.

    I think that is instructive on several levels. 😄

    We are certainly influenced by other works, but trying too hard to avoid any such influences may lead to more distortion of free creativity than simply accepting that some similarities are likely to occur —especially in a craft that has hundreds of years of history, and usually needs to meet certain functional needs.

    This does not mean that you can’t be excessively derivative. That is still true.

    But a typographer or type designer may see more differences than the average lay person. And even experts may disagree on how similar two typefaces are — in a recent French font case where Jean François Porchez sued Jean-​Baptiste Levee, both sides had heavyweight opinions in their favor.*

    Also, none of this is to say that “revivals” of old typefaces, or other derivative riffs on an existing design are, or should be, forbidden — as long as that design is no longer protected, or is open source, or permission is otherwise obtained.

    I have myself done a fairly straight revival of Hermann Ihlenburg’s Columbus (1892), as well as a revival-​plus-​massive-​expansion of Morris Fuller Benton’s Bank Gothic (1930–35). In both cases the original designer and even the company that issued the typeface are both long gone.

    This is arguably starting to drift toward a discussion of when it is legally okay to make a similar font, as opposed to ethically. That is a much more complex question, with an answer that may vary at least somewhat depending on the jurisdiction, and whether the type designer availed themselves of registration for their design (meaning design patent in the USA, other kinds of design rights elsewhere).

    * Including my own.

  • “How do you get an image into something like an emoji, so that when you paste it it is treated like normal text (without Unicode)?”

    Imaginary physical emoji being added to a document

    tl;dr: You can’t do it without actually making it an emoji, or using a custom font that has the character.

    Emoji are text. Unicode is the global standard for text, and especially for large character sets. This is the strength of emoji and what makes them work as well as they do. (Not perfectly, but as well as reasonably possible.)

    Unicode (including the emoji parts of the standard) is exactly what enables emoji to be copy/​pasted as text. It is a vital part of the tech behind emoji. Emoji have standard Unicode codepoints, and an understanding of those is shared by essentially all the world’s computers and digital devices… and that is why emoji work across nearly all different devices and technology platforms.

    Just like any other text, you need a font that supports the particular characters in question; in this case, the particular emoji characters. Luckily operating systems (and some apps) come with emoji fonts for this purpose, and those fonts get regularly updated, so when you update your OS (or app) you get a newer font with the latest emoji included.

    But let’s take all the bits of the question one at a time and break it down for you.

    (This post started as one of my Quora answers, years ago. Since revised and updated.)

    First, what do you consider “normal text”? You must be part of the minority 15% of the world’s population that has English as their first language, so even ASCII is more-​or-​less sufficient for you. But for the other 85%, there is no single obvious standard… other than Unicode. And in fact, Unicode is “normal text”: starting in ~ 2011, more than half of the world’s 10 million most-​used web pages were already encoded as Unicode. By 2023 it was about 98%. So, I think it is safe to say that the encoding used by 98% of all web pages (and a similar proportion of desktop applications and operating systems) is normal text, pretty much by definition.

    Let’s temporarily ignore that, and still talk about ways of communicating “something like an emoji” without Unicode.

    What counts as “something like an emoji”? You can have an image in HTML/​CSS that has “alt text” with a description. That text is normal text, and the full text includes the URL link to the image. That doesn’t require Unicode, something that supports even one language is sufficient (for just that one language!). That does not seem much like an emoji to me, but fine, the stuff you paste is indeed treated as text. However, the image part of that is not text, and will not come along when you copy/​paste text alone. So… maybe that part is a “fail”?

    Another obvious answer would be… you can invent your own competing standard to Unicode! It would have to work pretty much the same, including the idea that all operating systems and software vendors would need to support it. So you would have to convince everyone that it was worth doing so. That’s a process that took decades for Unicode, even though all the biggest players in operating systems and software were backing Unicode, and there wasn’t a viable alternative!

    So if you want to compete with Unicode… well, good luck with that. It was long and slow getting everything to support Unicode, even though the alternative was badly broken; even if a slightly better alternative existed, it would not be worth the immense effort to switch or support it, because the additional benefits (if any) would not be worth the effort. Unicode has its flaws (ahem, Han unification, ahem), but I don’t expect to see any real contender to Unicode in my lifetime.

    OK, there is a slightly more sane answer, but it is not terribly reasonable, for most people. You could design/​engineer a custom font that uses an arbitrary non-​standard code (could even be ASCII!) or a ligature (so you can spell out the word) and then create a web site that hosts that font, and then you can input your own text on that web page, including your custom emoji-​like character. And it will show up just fine. Until somebody tries to copy and paste it… anywhere else. At which point it will be broken. So it doesn’t really meet that important criterion.

  • Also, Quora Lies: WW2 Arial, Helvetica, Courier; also Times misinformation

    About a month and a half ago, I explained a bunch of reasons I was migrating my own content off of Quora, the knowledge-​sharing site. I failed to mention one of the most egregious issues: Quora has its own AI assistant bot that provides “helpful” but often (usually?) false answers to questions, and often inserts them ahead of real answers created by humans. It lies.

    Here is a great example, answering “What font did the US military use in World War 2 era documents? (an example is in the details)”

    During World War Il, the U.S. military primarily used Arial and Helvetica fonts in their documents, particularly in official communications and reports. These sans-​serif fonts were favored for their clarity and readability.

    However, it’s important to note that many documents from that era were also produced using Typewriter fonts, such as Courier, due to the prevalence of typewriters at the time.

    The specific font used could vary depending on the branch of the military and the type of document being produced.

    Most egregiously, every specific font reference in that blurb is a lie. World War II ended in 1945. Courier was invented about 1956, Helvetica about 1957, and Arial in the 1980s (only popular after 1992 when bundled with Windows 3.1 and Word). So none of those three typefaces even existed yet, during the war.

    Oh, also the example in the question details? 

    That is Bernhard Gothic, which wasn’t even mentioned by the AI bot.

    Google’s Slightly Less Awful Answer 

    Of course, AI hallucination is hardly unique to Quora. Google today helpfully answered “what fonts did the us military use in ww2” with an AI summary, claiming that:

    The US military used a variety of fonts during World War II, including:
    LL Akkurat, Akzidenz-​Grotesk, Albertus, GT America, Avenir, Caslon No. 471 & 540, Cooper Black, Franklin Gothic, Futura, Futura Condensed, Futura Extra Bold Condensed, Georgia, Gotham, Harbour, Helvetica, TWK Lausanne, Microgramma, Montserrat, Optima, Suisse Int’l, and Windsor.

    About half of those did not exist yet, specifically: LL Akkurat, GT America, Avenir, Georgia, Gotham, Harbour, Helvetica, Microgramma, Montserrat, Optima, Suisse Int’l.

    I guess 50% is considerably better than Quora’s zero percent, but still, ouch.

    Interestingly, as my colleague and font ID expert Florian Hardwig points out:

    Google’s answer is swiped from @FontsInUse. The non-​standard phrasing with “Caslon No. 471 & 540” being grouped together and “Futura”, “Futura Condensed”, and “Futura Extra Bold Condensed” being listed separately suggests as much. All names appear in the site’s top menu – which is identical for all pages, including those related to WWII. Very intelligent.

    @[email protected] ’s recent contribution lists some of the fonts actually used by the U.S. Army: Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet 64, “FASCISM!”

    Although a serious contribution, of course this last is only what the US Army happened to use in a single document, and is not an attempt to provide a general answer. But unlike the Google AI failure it at least does exactly what it claims to do.

    I should add that Florian is one of a very small handful of people who are the world’s true masters of font ID. He is incredible—I have gotten his help on a couple of especially troublesome font forensic cases; never regretted, always impressed!

    Another Quora Howler

    What are the differences between Times and Times New Roman? Which one is considered better?

    Right after I first posted this, I went to grab some more of my own content for a post about the history of Times Roman, to add to a draft-​in-​progress adapted from a couple of my Quora answers. This was literally the very next Quora bot post I read, after I created this blog post. Once again, it is howlingly, insanely wrong (and tops all but one of the human answers):

    Every single section of this is wrong. False. All of it.

    Name: Properly it is Times Roman rather than just “Times.” Personally I often use “Times” when I want to refer to both Times Roman and Times New Roman. (Or I will write Times (New) Roman, that also works.)

    Origin and Design: The two typefaces are the same design. To the extent that they differ, Times New Roman is the original designed by Morison (with one r not two) and Lardent at Monotype, and Times Roman is the adaptation by Linotype. But they both went into general use on the same day, at different locations printing The Times of London. So this section is wrong in about three different ways, plus it spells the name of the designer wrong.

    Character Design: All lies. Neither is more compact. Every normal character for each is exactly the same width, because they needed to be perfectly compatible!

    Legibility and Aesthetics; Which One is Better: All lies. Although the serifs of Times New Roman are indeed the tiniest hair finer in modern digital versions, the real answer is, normal people can’t tell them apart, and even most typographers need to look at one of just a few particular characters to be sure which one they are looking at.

  • About .notdef: the symbol (not emoji!) that is often an “X” inside a tall rectangle

    I have fielded many versions of this question: “What does the emoji with an X in a large rectangle mean?” or “When texting, what is the meaning of the symbol with an “X” inside a tall rectangle?”

    That it is an X-​in-​a-​tall-​rectangle is just the most common rendition, although not the only possible one, for the “.notdef”. A variety of font-​specific notdefs are shown above.

    It is not an emoji, but you can get it instead of an emoji or other unusual character. A notdef (undefined glyph) is what gets displayed when a character is specified in text, but your current font does not support that character. Most commonly it happens with a newer emoji, but it could be in an unusual language or a new currency symbol, or… well, something unusual.

    This problem is not unique to texting, but applies to all kinds of displays of text on all devices, whenever the needed character is not available in the available font(s).It is an indicator for a “missing character,” which stands in for an emoji or any other character that your device or current font doesn’t have a glyph to display it with. This makes it a very special symbol.

    (A particularly hefty notdef, that I designed for one of my typefaces. The font is quite bold, so I made the outer box of the notdef quite bold to match. How font-​specific should a notdef be? As I get older and hopefully wiser, I gravitate towards what seems to be a near-​concensus view that it should contrast with the font, so users realize something is wrong. That means matching weight is actually a bad idea. Oops.)

    This is more common when you are receiving rather than sending a text, since you are unlikely to enter a character that you don’t see correctly. But it can happen when you try to view a web page, or copy text from a source and paste it somewhere that it comes out in a different font.

    Often there is some kind of font fallback available; your phone (or computer) tries to display unusual characters and emoji in some other font, that supports those characters. That is why in some situations you can see a name and some unusual character in the name is displayed in a different font than the rest of the name. But phones have limited storage space, and whether it is a phone or computer, there are over 150,000 characters defined in Unicode, with more added every year.

    So when your phone (or web browser or computer) runs out of ideas on how to display a character? You get a notdef.

    If you copy and paste a notdef on your computer or into a text or email you are sending, you will probably be copying some specific emoji or obscure character. That means that some other person who receives that (or later views the same file on their computer) may well see something else entirely!

    Even if they do see a notdef, it may look different, depending on the font they see it in. Here are the most common/​standard approaches to the notdef, as defined in the OpenType specification.

    The thinner box creates a very different appearance compared to the X-​in-​a-​box approach, doesn’t it? Note that these are general approaches, not precise glyph outlines that a font maker would use directly.

    The plain rectangular box is the style of notdef that was common in PostScript Type 1 fonts, back in the 1980s–90s. But it has fallen out of favor. I believe the main reason for this is that as a shape it is not as distinctive, and hence more easily missed by someone looking over some text.

    That plain box is the origin of the slang term “tofu” for the notdef, over some notional idea that it resembled a piece of tofu. I originally thought Google staff invented this slang, as the first time I remembered seeing it was in publicity for Google’s “Noto” universal font set (“Noto” being short for “no tofu”!). But my font colleague Denis Moyogo Jacquerye pointed to this thread on the Unicode mailing list in spring 2009, and says it was one of a number of references around that time. John Hudson seconds encountering the “tofu” term in Unicode circles, so I may have been hasty in assuming it was a Google invention. 

    The question-​mark-​in-​a-​box is used in many of Microsoft’s fonts, such as Calibri. Note how the question mark inside the notdef is in the style of the font—it isn’t just a generic one. This style was invented by John Hudson during the development of Calibri and the other so-​called “ClearType fonts,” that shipped in January 2007.

    “The ART [Advanced Reading Technologies] group had used a spiral .notdef in Palatino Linotype, but it had caused confusion because it wasn’t recognised by users as a missing glyph indicator. For the C* fonts, I suggested that a) a box of some kind was necessary, and b) a question mark would indicate uncertainty: there’s a character here, but we don’t know how to display it.”

    John Hudson on Mastodon, 17 Dec 2024

    A plain rectangular box was the style of notdef that was common in PostScript Type 1 fonts, back in the 1980s–90s. But it has fallen out of favor. I believe the main reason for this is that as a shape it is not as distinctive, and hence more easily missed by someone looking over some text and trying to spot errors and glitches. When I was at Adobe, we went from the empty box to the X-​in-​a-​box style as part of our transition from PostScript Type 1 to OpenType, from 1999–2003.

    HOW DO I GET THE RIGHT CHARACTER INSTEAD?

    Updating to the latest OS for your phone (or computer) usually also updates your Unicode and emoji support and system fonts. If the problem is in an app that has its own Unicode/​emoji/​fonts, then updating that app may help.

    Many apps and OSes will use “fallback fonts” when the current font does not support a needed character. In that case, the above advice is good: you need better support from some core system font.

    (This was originally written for Quora, but as Quora continues to turn to garbage, one of my answers on this, despite having the most upvotes, was made invisible by the system for unclear reasons. So I have merged my answers to two similar questions into one, and posted it here.)

  • “What does a design brief for a new typeface (font) look like?”

    Many of the same questions could reasonably be in play, whether one is choosing an existing typeface, commissioning a typeface, customizing an existing typeface, or designing a new typeface oneself. There may not even be a “typical design brief” for a new typeface—but there are certainly elements one should include and things to consider.

    A design brief is sometimes neither written down, nor clearly developed. I encourage both aspiring type designers and clients of custom type design projects to go through the same process: write it all down. It will be helpful, often immensely, to articulate questions and goals clearly. It sets everyone’s expectations and creates reasonable limits.

    Even in a solo project, sometimes there is a temptation to allow “goal creep” and more gets added to the project in small pieces, with a final scope that is considerably more than originally intended. Writing out a design brief can help prevent this.

    Many clients don’t know what questions to ask, so the design brief is something that usually gets developed in collaboration between the type designer and the client. Or, when there is no specific client, it means asking the questions of yourself, to better focus the design process. Being specific is restrictive, but this is likely to result in a more successful design outcome—even if the final fonts are used in ways beyond what was originally intended (consider Bell Centennial, originally designed for telephone books).

    A design brief may be a living document, revised over time during the early stages of the project as it unfolds. There may be a first round brief written in the early exploratory stages, and a later “final” brief to guide the full execution.

    In any case, when taking on a new typeface design project, some good questions to ask might be:

    Who is the client, or target customer?

    Hypatia Sans: Myself/​graphic designers. But I also wanted something Robert Slimbach would say was good, original, and versatile enough to be an “Adobe Original.” In case you are wondering what it looks like… this entire blog is set in Hypatia Sans, both body text and headlines.

    Extensis logo redesign: Software company Extensis (my employer at the time)—makes font management & digital asset management apps.

    Is it replacing a current typeface? If so, what does the client like and dislike about the current typeface? What is motivating the change?

    Neither project was approached as a font replacement. For Extensis, I was specifically trying to ignore the previous logotype (which I disliked very much), just starting over. But along the way, I made a full basic-​character-​set font.

    If they considered off-​the-​shelf options, what did they consider and what did they like about each of them? What did they dislike about each of them? Why did they not go with any of them?

    Hypatia Sans: Although not replacing a single existing typeface, I was trying to differentiate it from other geometric sans. Futura was too cold, but the classic proportions of the caps were good. Instead of imitating them directly, I instead looked to the same source, classical roman caps (e.g. Trajan) for proportions. The Futura lowercase was too cold, but Avenir lowercase was too bland.

    Extensis: I found this part incredibly helpful in the process of creating a new logotype recently for a font software company, Extensis. We looked at a bunch of specific typefaces and rejected them for a variety of reasons. In the end I took an existing typeface, Adelle (by Veronika Burian & José Scaglione of TypeTogether), and modified it quite heavily—with their permission, of course! But I used the knowledge of what my internal client and I liked about other typefaces to guide what I did to the pre-​existing typeface. The logo is wider, a tiny bit lighter than the Thin weight of Adelle, and 5 of the 8 letters have significant design tweaks. But it did start with Adelle.

    What is the typeface a vehicle for? What is to be communicated with it? In what way should it flavor the message? Is it intended for a particular project or product?

    Extensis: We wanted it to feel modern and somewhat techno, yet warm and approachable. We had a very playful graphic for the logo—it was almost wacky. We needed the font to be playful enough to not clash with the graphic, but still be serious, to ground it all. It was a balancing act.

    Is there a specific target usage? 

    E.g. “advertising headlines” or “body text in all publications and online.” Even if not…. What sizes will it be used at? In what media? How will the type be reproduced (imaged, rasterized)? On screen? For web pages? In print?

    Extensis: The logo needed to function at pretty small sizes, as logos often do. Some of the typefaces we had considered were dropped because their weight got too spindly at small sizes on screen… they were not holding up well enough across all use cases.

    Hypatia Sans: Originally I intended it for display usage. I imagined it being used for product packaging, maybe some logos. Then I found it worked surprisingly well even at larger text sizes. So I revised my plan and spaced it so it was OK in larger text sizes (like 12-​14 pt in print). So, moderate amounts of body text, through to larger display sizes. Should look good on screen, but with details that will be interesting in print.

    What else is known about the desired design category?

    Extensis: We had decided we wanted something in the line of a slab serif typeface, something in a realm defined by typefaces such as Archer, Donnerstag, Vista Slab, and Adelle.

    How many styles (individual fonts) are desired? 

    Regular, italic, bold and bold italic are four fonts right there (and no, you can’t get reasonable quality results by just using algorithmic slanting and bolding.) More weights, more widths, or other variants (eg different optical sizes) can all add up. Families of 8–20 fonts are common. The largest family I know of is Kepler, comprising 168 fonts!

    Hypatia Sans: I wanted a wide dynamic range of weight, and ended up with six weights and their matching italics, from extra light to black.

    What kind of language coverage is required? 

    Any other particular character set needs (e.g. particular symbols, math capability, whatever). There are a variety of semi-​standard character sets and language groupings, but the whole matter is a bit fuzzy around the edges. A basic but complete western European character set might include over 200 glyphs. With central/​eastern European accented letters (“extended Latin”), you would end up over 300. 

    Each of these choices involves either choosing to adopt somebody else’s pre-​packaged language coverage definitions, or extensive research of your own. And some choices are more complex than they first appear: if you do Greek, do you also do polytonic Greek? If you do Cyrillic, which languages do you cover? (Cyrillic character sets are almost as complex as Latin.)

    For Hypatia Sans I was completely out of control. Latin, extended Latin, and even more obscure. Cyrillic, extended Cyrillic… I ended up further formalizing and extending Adobe’s character set standards for Latin and Cyrillic because of it! My manager stopped me when I was considering Norse runes (I am not making this up, I swear). Still, it was too much and I regretted it later, when what seemed fun for one style became a ton of work, for the full range of weights and italics too. Plus, the project became so big and slow that I advanced massively in skill before I was done, and found myself redesigning some things, or just seeing things at the end that I wished I had done differently. In retrospect, I could have advanced my skills more efficiently/​effectively by doing multiple smaller projects.

    What kind of typographic extras (characters/​glyphs) are required, or might be desirable? 

    Arbitrary fractions, both lining and oldstyle figures in both tabular and proportional widths and the five f-​ligatures – fi fl ffi ffl ff – are now “basic” for me. But others might think of them as extras. I think of small caps as extras, especially if there is a large language support requirement. Superscript and subscript numbers? A full set of letters for ordinals? So many possibilities!

    Create a glyph set definition 

    Now that you know what you want, consider documenting the glyph complement /​ character set fully, perhaps with a spreadsheet. If there are common characters not covered,  that too should be mentioned or highlighted some way, either by the spreadsheet or in accompanying text.

    Hypatia Sans ended up with something like 2700 glyphs per font ( 3000 after it was updated to match later character set standards). That is why it took for-​bloody-​ever to complete. I hope everyone learns from my errors! Not that you shouldn’t ever do a huge project, but just perhaps not as a first (or second or third) typeface.

    Many of these things essentially multiply together. For example, if you need ‘real’ small caps, you should probably have them for all the supported languages, and in all the fonts in the family. This kind of extension of features to the full font is often assumed, but it is best to be explicit about it, so it can be part of a delivery checklist. It is even more important to be explicit if there are inconsistencies either within a font (small caps only for un-​accented Latin?) or between fonts in the family (small caps only for the upright styles but not the italics?).

    For reference

    Adobe character sets: Latin (5 levels), Greek (2 levels), Cyrillic (3 levels). These do not include “typographic” extras such as small caps, oldstyle figures, or additional ligatures beyond the most basic (fi and fl). But they are fairly comprehensive for language and basic symbol coverage.
    Thomas’ page of type design resources!

    Note

    This is a much edited version of what was once a Quora anwer. Special thanks to Dave Crossland for edits and input when we used this in our Crafting Type classes! Any errors or omissions entirely my fault. Also see discussion about typeface design briefs on Typedrawers.

  • More of my fonts/​typography answers coming here!

    Because Quora turned to junk

    Back around 2013–2021, I really liked Quora. I could go through questions people asked, find interesting questions that I was especially qualified to answer (mostly about fonts and typography), and write up an informative answer that people would read and upvote. Comments and further questions in the discussion to each of my Quora answers would help me refine and improve them.

    I could similarly find and read interesting thoughts and analysis on darn near any topic of interest. I accumulated favorite writers and would often read Quora as a leisure activity, just for intellectual interest. It was a social network focused on ideas. 

    Quora has since mostly turned to junk. At this point, I don’t even have any confidence as to how long the site will even continue to be up. Or if it is still up, will the content be freely available? Findable? (EDIT: see below for a scary update about that.) So I have been revising and saving my best answers here, to trickle out over time.

    This is the process Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. Why does it happen? They were getting participation and views, but without making money. The site needed to figure out how it would make money. So they experimented in a bunch of different ways to try to increase “reader engagement” and reduce costs… and in the process lost everything I liked about it.

    In the case of Quora, some particular things included: 

    • Making it harder to find the answers to a question. The default when you click on a question is now to show “all related” answers instead of the answers to the current question… which means you have to read more and click more to get the info you actually want.
    • Rewarding people for asking questions (through the “Quora Partner Program”) instead of focusing on getting good answers. Worse, specifically rewarding questions that upset people as long as they got responses. Responses pointing out problems in the question itself are still responses, so… you can see where that path leads.
    • Allowing anonymous questions. Yes, there are totally legitimate reasons for question-​askers to want to be anonymous. But the proportion of junk and trolling skyrocketed after this change.
    • Doing all the above while reducing their staff of moderators.
    • Most of the above factors contributed to spam, misinformation, and low-​quality content
    • At first, it was just more bad content. BUT, the spam, low-​quality content and user-​hostile interface decisions drove away many of the best contributors (myself included, obviously). So now the fraction of “good content” is much worse, not only because the denominator grew out of control, but the numerator also shrank.
    • ADD: Speaking of low-​quality content, Quora adds egregious garbage “AI” bot answers to questions. They are often outright lies, so bizarre and hilarious that I made a separate post about how bad they are.
    • ADD: Also, you can no longer read Quora answers without being logged in to a Quora account.

    Quora’s “Top Writers” program lasted from 2013–18, coinciding with peak Quora. There weren’t any huge perks, just a little recognition, a badge on your Quora profile. But still, it was nice. It was not a big enough deal that it made it onto my c.v.—but I did link to my Quora answers. I recently deleted that link on my c.v., because being associated at all with Quora seems like a negative.

    But now Quora has been overrun with spam and fake questions plus hate speech and bullying. And AI garbage answers. I won’t yank my existing answers (already often revised and polished over time), but I am polishing and further revising the best ones, and posting them here. I have already copied a couple dozen of my best answers to draft posts here, edited and posted the first couple, and done some light editing on most of the others (with more to come). I may set them to auto-​post periodically.

    That all makes me sad, but at least I was able to slurp up a whole bunch of my existing content and start editing/​re-​posting!

  • What is the relationship between fonts and Unicode characters?

    “It is my understanding that not all fonts contain the Unicode character set. Are they contained in certain fonts or are they independent? If a code does not exist in a font then what is used?”

    Older version of this originally published at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-Fonts-and-Unicode-characters/answer/Thomas-Phinney

    Unicode is the standard for characters in computing. It assigns a unique code to each character. So for example the capital A is a character. Some things that look the same are different characters, so for example the cap Alpha and cap A usually look the same, but get different Unicode numbers.

    A font can contain zero or more glyphs—a glyph is a single slot in the font that usually contains a representation of … something, a letter or symbol. In most cases, one glyph represents one character, although sometimes more than one glyph can be used for one character (for example, an accented character can be composed from a base character plus a combining accent), or more than one character can be represented by a single glyph (for example, a ligature, such as the o-​f-​f-​i ligature in Caflisch Script). 

    Aside from such complications, usually most (often nearly all) of the glyphs in a font have Unicode codepoints (numbers) assigned to them. If a glyph does not have a Unicode codepoint, it might be related to a Unicode value via an OpenType feature. So for example, the ‘liga’ ligature feature in Caflisch Script would have code that says, if you have the sequence o-​f-​f-​i then replace it with the ligature glyph named “o_​f_​f_​i”. So while that ligature glyph does not have a single or direct Unicode codepoint, it is related to a group of characters that do have Unicode codepoints.

    When it comes to combining accents (more technically called “diacritics” by font geeks), the Unicode standard itself has info about some characters that can be assembled from other characters. For common western European languages this is all pretty straightforward: Unicode has codepoints assigned to combinations such as é and ü, as well as separate ideas of special “combining accent” characters that can go with the base letter to make the combo. But Unicode does not have all the possible combinations as predefined characters, so even for characters such as a–z plus diacritics needed by some African languages, there is not precombined character, in the computer it is only represented as base-letter-plus-combining-diacritic.

    For many languages, including Indic languages, Arabic, and others, the processing is even more complex. Let’s just say that the further we are from the simple confines of English the less often it is true that one character equals exactly one glyph. 

    An average western-​language font has about 200 to 400 glyphs. A more extensive one might have 500 to 700, and a really extensive one thousands (2000–5000). Fonts for other writing systems such as Chinese or Japanese routinely have 5,000, 10,000 or even 20,000 glyphs, but because of that, and the complexity of the individual glyphs, there are fewer such fonts designed.

    “Not all fonts contain the Unicode character set” is an understatement. No single font on earth contains the entire Unicode character set, and perhaps no single font ever will. Unicode currently defines about 150,000 characters, is updated (and expanded) annually, and currently there is a 64K limit on the number of encoded glyphs in a font (in any major format, anyway).

    The Unicode character set is completely independent of specific fonts, although specific fonts may attempt to be thorough in covering particular sections of Unicode. (And the origins of Unicode include trying to be a superset of all preexisting font encoding standards.)

    “If a code does not exist in a font then what is used?” Aside from cases where the character might be assembled from others (like with the combining accents mentioned previously), if a called-​for Unicode character is not supported in any way in the currently selected font, then the behavior still depends on the application and the operating system. In some cases a “notdef” glyph may be shown to indicate a missing glyph in the current font—more common with high-​end graphics apps such as Adobe Creative Cloud. Many apps and environments will at least attempt to do font fallback, substituting some other font that does support the desired character. In such cases the right letter or symbol will appear, but in a different font! This is why sometimes you will see a document where most of the characters are in one font, but perhaps an accented character or something else less common is in a clearly non-​matching font.

    In extreme cases (more common for especially rare or newly-​defined characters), even environments that do attempt such fallback may fail to find a match because they have no font that supports the character in question! In such situations, one may still see a notdef, or get fallback to a special Last Resort font. (I have a whole separate article about the notdef, pending!)

    See also: Fallback font – Wikipedia

  • “What does it cost to have a custom typeface designed?”

    “For example, how much would it cost (roughly) for someone like Hoefler to design a new font family for Mastercard?”
    (Originally a Quora question, and my Quora answer. But given Quora’s increasingly anti-​user choices, I migrated the question here and updated my answer for current pricing.)

    For a typeface of four styles, from a famous name type designer, with temporary exclusivity, you are probably looking at $100,000–250,000 and up as a rough ballpark. It might take them a year or more, although that won’t necessarily be full time on your typeface. This assumes no horribly extensive OpenType features, just basic ligatures and oldstyle figures, maybe small caps. I’m also assuming a western + CE character set (which is pretty common these days).

    For ~ the same thing from a decently established but not famous type designer, you might expect to pay $30,000–75,000, roughly.

    One rare public sharing of info about what a designer/​foundry “should” charge was from Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, a fairly prestigious type designer /​ foundry. He wrote “IMO, I think that a price of around US$ 20-​25k per weight is appropriate for a Western European glyph set (ANSII), giving the client three years exclusivity. If they want to own the rights, double the price.” (December 2013 price quotation for a new custom font on typedrawers.com.) Add about 65% for inflation to 2024, then reduce that to only 50% because of heavy competition in type design, and that would make it about $30–38k per style.

    So with permanent exclusivity, maybe double the price to USD $60–76K per style. Add CE coverage as well as exclusivity, but no small caps, and that “suggested price” perhaps goes to $70–88K per style. (Bruno says “weight” but presumably means style, so a regular four-​member family is four styles—although only two literal weights, plus their matching italics.)

    From a designer early in their career, or based in a developing country, or if the customer has lower quality expectations than mine and is willing to go with somebody who does lower quality and faster work, or some combination of such factors, you could end up with considerably lower prices, as low as $8,000–25,000 per font style.

    Now, all this gets kind of weird and warped once one gets into variable fonts. Those might be prices per master, and then add somewhere between a quarter and half again at the end, depending on how extreme the masters are.

    Some designers (e.g. John Hudson at Tiro Typeworks) try to figure out how complex the typeface design is in general, and then charge a price-​per-​glyph for that typeface. They figure that easier and harder glyphs will average out over the whole set. This seems reasonable to me, and I gather he is happy with it. (I have tried to estimate work by actually assessing a difficulty multiplier individually on different glyphs, and that was an absurd amount of work. I do not generally recommend it unless you have a specific reason, such as needing to assess relative work done by different people on the same project.)

    These are pretty rough guidelines, based on my own experience in soliciting fonts for development from a variety of type designers, what I have been paid, my discussions with other type designers, plus discussions among type designers in a couple of fora.

  • “Do companies get sued for using fonts illegally?”

    Originally posted on Quora, in response to a user question. Due to Quora’s increasingly desperate and user-​hostile changes, I revised and reposted it here.
    Last update 29 May 2024.

    Yes, companies often get threatened with legal action, and (less often) if they do not pay for their font use, get sued. Many companies have been: (1) threatened with legal action, (2) pretty much forced to pay what they already should have, and/​or (3) sued for using fonts in unlicensed ways.

    Sometimes (but rarely) these cases are dismissed. Usually they are settled, outside the courtroom. The only case I can think of that was even partially decided by the court was Adobe vs SSI, way back in 1998, wherein Adobe won a partial summary judgment on a number of key points. But even this was more a corporate piracy case involving people selling ripped-​off fonts rather than a normal business-​use case. In general, the business and personal use cases never get as far as being decided by a court.

    Software and services have spring up around this. There are apps for managing fonts both for individuals and across organizations (Connect Fonts, FontBase, and others), and legal compliance concerns are part of their appeal. Some font management apps have been renamed (Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server are now Extensis Connect Fonts) or discontinued (so many, notably FontXplorer). There are entire businesses set up around font license compliance consulting, and services that help font foundries find unlicensed font use on the web (and optionally collect money for them).

    Here are over 20 lawsuits around unlicensed font use. I have excluded cases where a type designer, font foundry or distributor has sued another type designer, foundry or distributor, although that happens occasionally as well.

    Sometimes these things stop short of a lawsuit, but can still be pretty unpleasant. I don’t actually buy the old saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity”:

    There exist multiple online scanners that look for fonts posted online or used in web sites. Some are owned by major retailers/​distributors, but at least one is available to any type designer or foundry that wants to pay for it (license infringement monitoring/​DMCA service aka Fontdata aka TypeSnitch) which might or might not be the same thing as Font Radar.

    Heck, I won’t name the offending party, but in one of my day jobs, we once got a nasty cease-​and-​desist email from a lawyer from a well-​known font company—I knew the owners and had been to their offices! The lawyer claimed we were using two different fonts, in different ways, illegally. He was wrong, of course, but we still got the letter. (And never heard back from the lawyer when we explained how he was mistaken.)

    Cases such as the one Sergey Yakunin cites of Sberbank with Fedra Sans and Fedra Serif are not unusual, it is just that one usually doesn’t hear about them. Often they are pursued without major public attention. Lots of negotiations behind the scenes, the foundry usually gets paid what they should have in the first place, and maybe not everyone is happy, but at least things are resolved in some vaguely reasonable way.

    Here are a couple more high-​profile unlicensed use cases that are well-​known in the industry (discussed in public forums, etc.) but did not get major media attention:

    For more like that, see also:

    And finally, a general piece on font piracy, from Wired Magazine.

    ADDENDUM

    The original question I was answering on Quora featured these details in a comment (one of the things the “new Quora” unhelpfully suppresses!): “I am starting a new company. I have found a font that I want to use on my website (est. traffic 10 000/​month). I have purchased desktop license, though if I understand correctly, I am not allowed to use it on my website. Do companies actually get sued for using fonts illegally?”

    For their particular case, I’ll point out that the licensing required, at that volume level, tends to be pretty cheap. They would waste more money-​as-​time reading the links in this post than just getting legal, either for a one-​time fee, or something like $25/​year (low-​end rate for Adobe Typekit). Or even free if one uses Google Fonts, though that would not get them the commercial fonts you are talking about.

    Also, illegal use of a font on a web site is something you are doing in public, and accessible to web crawlers and the like—as previously mentioned above. I know of at least one general-​purpose service for scanning for illegal font use, and I know of at least one foundry that runs their own bots to scan for their fonts being used illegally. So if I was going to use a font illegally, the one way I definitely would not try to do so would be on a web site as a web font!

  • Why Did Adobe Discontinue Font Chameleon in the 90s?

    Back in the mid to late 90s, Adobe acquired a company called Ares Software. Ares made font-​related software products, including doing the programming (but not owning or distributing) of Letraset FontStudio, which in its day was one of the best font editors. They are best known for a remarkable application and technology called Font Chameleon.

    There is a popular myth that Adobe bought Font Chameleon to kill a threatening technology. Actually, no, removing it from the market was not a motivation for the acquisition. The team that made fonts and would have cared one way or another had nothing to do with those decisions, and were simply not interested in Font Chameleon.

    Adobe’s purchase of Ares was done to acquire Font Chameleon technology, and was entirely driven by the PostScript group at Adobe, to use the technology for font compression purposes to fit more, cheaper, in the ROM of PostScript 3 printers. All Ares retail products (not just Font Chameleon) were discontinued as Adobe put the two Ares principals to work on adapting the Chameleon tech for Adobe’s use.

    (Also, Font Chameleon was in some respects massively more powerful than MM, but also had huge limitations. It could only handle the axes it knew about, and could only handle the characters it knew about.)

    I joined Adobe in mid-​1997, shortly after the acquisition, and thought it was an interesting tech. I ended up deeply involved in helping make the whole system work together (chameleon fonts in ROM including CE fonts, printer drivers, and supposedly matching fonts on end user computers). All the systems were optimized to make an individual piece work in a static environment, according to known schema. Real end-​to-​end testing of these things hadn’t really been needed in years. But because there were numerous technical changes being made at the same time to all these pieces, suddenly end-​to-​end testing was critical. I got involved in pointing that out and pushing everyone to make sure their pieces played together instead of them all trying to point at specs that had been made before any of the pieces actually existed. 

    Through some internal asking around at Adobe, I was able to get my hands on Ares’ Font Chameleon editor: the company’s internal tool used to make a Chameleon “font descriptor” that could be blended with others. These font descriptors as individual files were also super compact, which is why the PostScript team wanted the tech. They relied on a (large) mutatable “master” font , plus the descriptors; the master + descriptors for 136 PostScript 3 fonts were a LOT smaller than the set of fonts themselves, and allowed support for central European accented characters with hardly any size impact.

    What was super interesting to me was how insanely fast it was to create such a font descriptor—which could also be exported as a stand-​alone font if one wished, not to mention instantly manipulated in weight, width, x-​height, etcetera. At the time I thought it could have been an incredible rapid prototyping tool. With it I could do in a day what would otherwise take me weeks. But the limitations of the tech, and tendency to encourage some degree of blandification meant… nobody in a position of power and influence within the type group was interested. They had looked at it, and decided it had inferior results and wasn’t worth pursuing.

    It is also worth noting that the lead programmers from Ares were freakin’ brilliant, but the code was not entirely stable/​reliable. I certainly had quite a few crashes using the Chameleon editor—although to be fair, it was only intended as an internal app, not a retail/​external app.

    So, Font Chameleon died because the Adobe hardware team that bought it wanted it for underlying tech, and didn’t do retail software products. Whereas the team that did retail fonts had no interest in it, thought there were quality issues, and there was a general perception that maintaining/​developing any of the Ares products as retail software would have been painful.