I came across the fol­low­ing quote the other day on the subject of iden­tity in a section that focused on a post­mod­ern re-​evaluation of the concept that needs to accom­mo­date for flu­id­ity in and evo­lu­tion thereof rather than con­sid­er­ing it a a fixed form that is created purely through social­i­sa­tion. The concern was that this new def­i­n­i­tion looses its polit­i­cal power by a wider spread of com­mon­al­i­ties in dif­fer­ing iden­ti­ties. It was addressed thus:

If iden­tity is seen as fluid, rather than fixed, but as capable of points of (tem­po­rary or con­di­tional) stasis, then its polit­i­cal force is not lost but enhanced. So, for example, a working-​class Anglo gay man might be able to form a tem­po­rary or con­di­tional iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with a middle-​class Asian gay man on the grounds of shared sexual iden­tity (and despite dif­fer­ences of class and eth­nic­ity) for the purpose of shared social, cul­tural and/or polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and activ­ity. The iden­tity here is con­di­tional, in that both indi­vid­u­als will be aware of their dif­fer­ences (of class and eth­nic­ity), yet it enables kinds of sharing and activ­ity which less flex­i­ble notions of iden­tity would tend to devalue. In the post­mod­ern sce­nario, iden­tity is not an essen­tial­ist attribute of an indi­vid­ual but a strat­egy which indi­vid­ual (complex, mul­ti­ple) sub­jects can use to create new and varied alliances.

Although the author prob­a­bly in no way intended to make a spe­cific case for pro­gres­sive soci­eties I think this alone bril­liantly illustrates—although not in great detail; you may need to let your mind run a bit—the poten­tial of new inter­re­la­tion­ships between people who have shared com­mon­al­i­ties that stem from a more open and fluid view of per­sonal iden­tity. A society who prac­tice this view would help remove bar­ri­ers of neg­a­tive stereo­typ­ing and rejec­tion by cre­at­ing new links between people that could well foster pos­i­tive rela­tion­ships.

We see this played out par­tic­u­larly in online communities—early in news­nets and IRC and now in forums, blog comment dis­course et al—which got its foot in the door early because the inter­ac­tion is held in non-​physical terms (at least to some degree) whereby issues of phys­i­cal prox­im­ity (e.g. body lan­guage, stresses and alter­ations in verbal com­mu­ni­ca­tion) don’t (or to a lesser degree) come into play. It could be said the Inter­net has helped teach us that earlier judg­ments based on sex, gender, race, eth­nic­ity and so on—really iden­tity—are largely biased and unfounded as neti­zens engage in online dis­cus­sions where these details may not be revealed.

What also caught my eye was a line in a later piece of reading that noted the link between move­ments to rein­state and protect con­ser­v­a­tive values and the inher­ent insta­bil­ity of these values:

There are whole social move­ments ded­i­cated to re-​establishing ‘the tra­di­tional family’, ‘true femininity’ or ‘real masculinity’. These move­ments are them­selves clear evi­dence that the bound­aries they defend are none too stable. But the effort to sustain the gender cat­e­gories also sustain the rela­tions between them — and there­fore sus­tains the inequal­i­ties they produce, and the harm they do.

I love the further links that can be created between this and other strug­gles induced by con­ser­v­a­tive move­ments that in a stub­born response to newer pro­gres­sive ideas aim to retain their values and control. From the top of my head: States and the human rights activists; media stake­hold­ers, mil­lions of teenagers, and the free culture move­ment; pro­pri­etary soft­ware pro­duc­ers and the free (libre) soft­ware com­mu­nity; and so on.

I think it is inevitable that there will always be forces that will want to protect their values against change, often in destruc­tive responses that hinder devel­op­ment, but I think we’ve made sizable leaps in over­com­ing some of the most destruc­tive responses in the last few hundred years, and as we develop in soci­eties that are only more inter­con­nected, our iden­ti­ties will only further help the cause of over­com­ing prej­u­dices and mis­un­der­stand­ing whilst fos­ter­ing a vast range of pos­si­ble and prob­a­ble pro­duc­tive rela­tion­ships. As such it is vital that efforts to demo­nize through iden­tity, par­tic­u­larly as illus­trated polit­i­cally in the last eight years are rejected and harmful acts made in accor­dance are con­demned.

My philo­sophic 0.2¢. Now hor­i­zon­tal inac­tion fol­lowed (too shortly) by Social Media Club break­fast at 08:00 at Cream Café Bar, Civic. Toodles.

“Letters and fonts have two char­ac­ter­is­tics: On the one hand they are basic ele­ments of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and fun­da­men­tal to our culture, on the other hand they are cul­tural goods and an artis­tic work. You are able to see just the first aspect, but when it comes to soft­ware you’ll see copy­rights and patents even on the most ele­men­tary fonts. There­fore we want to give you a free alter­na­tive: This is why we founded the Lib­er­tine Open Fonts Project.”

The written word is a fun­da­men­tal com­po­nent of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and it is type and typog­ra­phy that are vital to pro­vid­ing aes­thetic harmony and leg­i­bil­ity to textual works. Type and typog­ra­phy have come a long way since their incep­tion; however, while there are thou­sands of fonts avail­able only a small number are useful for setting vast quan­ti­ties of text. An even smaller number are avail­able to be freely dis­trib­uted and built upon. That sucks.

Free… as in?

Free… what sort of free? It’s worth dis­tin­guish­ing between getting some­thing for zero charge (gratis) and the free­doms asso­ci­ated with what you’re getting (libre). I’m talking about the com­bin­ing both sorts of ‘free’. So aside from getting some­thing for no cost (which we all love), why would anyone want to have the freedom to edit a font?—isn’t the ability to down­load it without paying enough? I guess the most appro­pri­ate answer really is “it depends”, and it does.

If you’re a type designer having access to good free fonts is quite handy. For one, it gives you the chance to correct prob­lems in the font, such as edits to the kerning tables and sec­ondly, having the ability to look at the finer work­ings of a font can be very educational—just think about how auto-​mechanics learn about the guts of a car).

However truth be told, chances are you won’t be a type designer (type designer or not, please do keep reading!), so having the freedom to edit the font is quite useless? Well, prob­a­bly, but there will be those afore­men­tioned type design­ers who are bound to make cor­rec­tions to the font that travel back ‘upstream’ for you to benefit from. Pro­vided there’s a some form of organ­i­sa­tion (e.g. a project) edits can be coor­di­nated and new ver­sions of the font can be made—a process not all too dis­sim­i­lar to what foundries undergo when they release updated ver­sions of their fonts.

The status of free fonts

A common ques­tion I get when giving pre­sen­ta­tions on typog­ra­phy is what fonts I use. It’s a mix between Free fonts (gratis & libre), free-​of-​charge fonts, and the ones that I pur­chased as part of the soft­ware I use (at least for my presentations—Mac OS X). So before going on, cov­er­ing what’s already avail­able and passing well-​deserved kudos to those that have made their work avail­able is in order.

Linux Libertine

Linux Lib­er­tine is a a project started by Philipp Poll to create a com­pre­hen­sive serif and sanserif family com­plete with various styles aes­thet­i­cally falling into the tran­si­tional group of type­faces. It is an apt and beau­ti­ful replace­ment for the ubiq­ui­tous font of our age: Times/Times New Roman. The family is dual-​licensed under the licensed under the GNU GPL and the SIL OFL and avail­able in OpenType-​goodness and FontForge’s native SFD file.

Bitstream Vera/DejaVu families

Bit­stream Vera family was designed by Jim Lyles from Bit­stream and licensed in a way that per­mit­ted edits. DejaVu is a deriv­a­tive of Vera pro­vid­ing more styles and very exten­sive Unicode cov­er­age. The serif is a slab serif and the family has become the general “super” family, ‘shipping’ with most free desk­tops. With Vera under Bit­stream copy­right, DejaVu is licensed under numer­ous terms though most of the addi­tions since are in the public domain and avail­able in True­Type.

DejaVu sans ultra­light

Liberation family

The Lib­er­a­tion family is com­posed of a serif, sanserif and mono­space by Steve Mat­te­son of Ascen­der Corp. licensed by Redhat. The metrics are com­pat­i­ble with Monotype’s Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New respec­tively (and could be con­sid­ered freely licensed replace­ments thereof) yet the Lib­er­a­tion serif is a beau­ti­ful slab serif and quite dis­tinct from Times New Roman. The Lib­er­a­tion fonts are licensed under the GNU GPL with a font embed­ding excep­tion (embed­ded, the fonts don’t auto­mat­i­cally fall under the GPL) and avail­able in True­Type.

Lib­er­a­tion serif regular roman

Gentium

Gentium is an exten­sive serif type­face by Victor Gault­ney cov­er­ing almost all of Latin as well as monot­o­nic and poly­tonic Greek (which look just lovely). Cyril­lic and the bold weight are under devel­op­ment. The font is licensed under the SIL OFL and avail­able in a variety of opti­mised formats and and FontForge’s native SFD file.

Gentium serif regular roman

Gentium serif regular italic

Iconsolata et al

Raph Levien has created a number of beau­ti­ful type­faces, of which most com­plete and popular would be his human­ist sanserif mono­space by the name of Icon­so­lata. Check out the others on his fonts in progress page.

Others

There are others too, includ­ing Caslon Roman (a Caslon revival by George Williams released under the BSD license and SIL OFL), Beteckna (a geo­met­ric sanserif inspired by Paul Renner’s Futura by Johan Matts­son), Juni­code (a medieval-​inspired Unicode font by Peter S. Baker of the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia), the many Greek poly­tonic revivals by the Greek Font Society and more.

Open Baskerville

I’d like to add another to the above list. Some of you may already know about this idea and where it sprung from but I don’t want to go into detail here, because there’s an entire page ded­i­cated just for that. So, briefly in a nut­shell: a fellow typophile released a Baskervil­lian revival he had been working on into the public domain which a bunch of us thought might be a great start­ing point for an open font project.

I’ll leave the above-​linked page to fill in the rest for I want to cover how things have pro­gressed since. I’ve set up a page for the project on light​house​app.com to provide issue track­ing and grouped mes­sag­ing, and have com­mit­ted the UFO font ‘source’ files and best spec­i­mens to a git repos­i­tory on github.com. Why UFO? It’s XML-based, works like a charm with revi­sion control systems and each glyph has its own file which makes both edits and merging much simpler.

The main project page is going to feature a quick guide on using git to branch the files and for those inter­ested in making edits—should be up some­time late tomor­row. I’m also inter­ested on making the mes­sag­ing threads on light­house­app open for every­one to read; it doesn’t cur­rently seem pos­si­ble with their system but have lodged a ques­tion on their support dis­cus­sions.

Either way: if you’re inter­ested, zip to the Open Baskerville page, grab an account on light​house​app.com to get involved in the dis­cus­sions and issue our first ticket and/or branch the current UFO font files and spec­i­mens to start con­tribut­ing.

If you have any ques­tions just add them in the com­ments below or shoot me an email. Happy weekend oth­er­wise.

Q: What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
A: Left the country and moved over­seas for half a year back to Germany to touch up my German, started free­lanc­ing prop­erly, co-(un)organised Canberra’s very first BarCamp.

Q: Did you keep your new year’s res­o­lu­tions, and will you make more for next year?
A: Much like Nat, I can’t remem­ber any of my new year’s res­o­lu­tions from last year.

Q: Did anyone close to you give birth?
 No.

Q: Did anyone close to you die?
During this past year not, but Blacky passing away on Christ­mas Day last year is still fresh in our mem­o­ries. We all miss the furry, barking bugger.

Q: What countries/states did you visit?
A: In Aus­tralia: Vic­to­ria for LCA, NSW a number of times for work; abroad: Germany (Frank­furt am Main, Mainz and Berlin), Turkey (Istan­bul for GUADEC) and the UK for LugRa­dio Live.

Q: What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
A: To have have attended a number of more con­fer­ences, or rather, not missed the ones with par­tic­u­lar speak­ers, notably WDS.

Q: What was your biggest achieve­ment of the year?
A: Becom­ing more inde­pen­dent as a result of my time in Europe and sum­mon­ing the courage to get my most recent two pierc­ings.

Q: What was your biggest failure?
A: Not man­ag­ing to organ­ise a more thor­ough trip through­out Europe alone through youth hostels and the like, partly due to money, partly due to time and partly due to my own neg­a­tive mis­con­cep­tions.

Q: Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing serious thank­fully.

Q: What was the best thing you bought?
A: The AUD $1,800 return air ticket to Germany includ­ing health insur­ance, closely fol­lowed by my beloved black MacBook, Leno.

Q: Whose behav­iour merited cel­e­bra­tion?
A: Both Mum and Andy for over­com­ing more per­sonal crap than any one person should put up with.

Q: Whose behav­iour made you appalled and depressed?
A: Appalled and depressed are strong words, and I’m pretty laid back, so nothing really gets on my nerves much—and more impor­tantly I try not to let some­thing bother me for more than half a year. So, with this in mind, the name that rises to the top of the bad people cesspool in recent memory prob­a­bly include Senator Stephen Conroy for his pathetic Aus­tralian manda­tory clean feed idea.

Q: Where did most of your money go?
A: Travel costs and design books, most of which were typog­ra­phy books, nat­u­rally.

Q: What did you get really, really, really excited about?
A: My Europe trip, conferences—notably Canberra’s first BarCamp—and attend­ing Kitty in Berlin. Oh, and cur­rently still inter­nally raving about the pos­si­bil­ity of landing an excit­ing job (and thus stop­ping free­lanc­ing).

Q: What song will always remind you of 2008?
A: Kri­latie Kacheli by Evgeniy Kri­la­tov, this amazing Russian tune that was over­laid on video on a ModBlog (NSFW) video of the Russian Pain Theatre gang doing some awesome multi-​tiered suicide sus­pen­sions.

Q: Com­pared to this time last year, are you:

• happier or sadder?—happy as a clam at the time of writing;
• thinner or fatter?—went up a kilo or two but still thin as usual;
• richer or poorer?—my bank state­ments would indi­cate little change, but I’ve accu­mu­lated new assets (books mostly).

Q: What do you wish you’d done more of?
A: Parkour, rock climb­ing, and trav­el­ing.

Q: What do you wish you’d done less of?
A: Nothing really… maybe sleep a little less?

Q: How did you spend Christ­mas?
A: With my Opa in Buden­heim, near Mainz (Germany).

Q: Did you fall in love in 2008?
A: Big fat nega­tory.

Q: How many one-​night stands?
A: Two.

Q: What was your favourite TV program?
A: The West Wing.

Q: Did you make a friend with anyone that you didn’t know this time last year?
A: Yes, after entirely coin­ci­den­tally meeting both Söda and his girl­friend, Eugenie from Can­berra all the way in Frank­furt. And to think in all the time I had known Söda he never men­tioned his girl­friend!

Q: What was the best book you read?
A: The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style by Robert Bringhurst.

Q: What was your great­est musical dis­cov­ery?
A: Vibra­s­phere, an amazing pro­gres­sive psy­trance group from Sweden.

Q: What did you want and get?
A: To improve my German and a MacBook.

Q: What did you want and not get?
A: An iPhone that wouldn’t become a paper weight when I were to take it home to Oz, and pos­si­bly a roman­tic rela­tion­ship. The iPhone is being taken care of hope­fully this week.

Q: What was your favourite film of this year?
A: Death Proof, part of the Grind­house double set by Quentin Taran­tino.

Q: What did you do on your birth­day, and how old were you?
A: Cel­e­brated it in Buden­heim with my Mum, Opa, and German friends. Age: undis­closed.

Q: What one thing would have made your year immea­sur­ably more sat­is­fy­ing?
A: To be with the many friends I left behind in Oz during my time in Europe.

Q: How would you describe your per­sonal fashion concept in 2008?
A: Alter­na­tive whilst approach­able and friendly? Just some­thing dif­fer­ent I guess.

Q: What kept you sane?
A: Mum and sleep.

Q: Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
A: I don’t really roman­ti­cally fancy any celebri­ties, but was quite hot for seeing Obama get into the White House.

Q: What polit­i­cal issue stirred you the most?
A: The thought that even still in my life­time the bol­locks that’s going on in the Middle East prob­a­bly won’t be solved. That, and the afore­men­tioned pro­posed Aus­tralian Inter­net filter bol­locks.

Q: Who did you miss?
A: Chewie our aging, barking furball of a lady, close friends from Can­berra and Mum.

Q: Who was the best new person you met?
A: Eugenie Edquist, Mr. Söda’s lovely girl­friend.

Q: Tell us a valu­able life lesson you learned in 2008.
A: It goes like this:

Find your obses­sion;
Every day, explain it to one person you respect;
Edit every­thing, skip short­cuts;
And try not to be a dick.
Get better at the above.

I’ve decided to skip the last ques­tion of which song lyric most sums up my year (I don’t know nor have the time right now to figure it out).

That’s it for ’08. What about you?

Unicode character support

• Lan­guage support: how broad and faith­ful is it? (e.g. the correct glyphs for the right char­ac­ters and avail­abil­ity of the type­face in other lan­guages, such as Arabic or Cyril­lic);
• Alter­nate char­ac­ters: lig­a­tures and styl­is­tic vari­ants (e.g. italic swash ver­sions of z aren’t uncom­mon);
• Small cap­i­tals includ­ing small-​cap figures (rare);
• Figures: hanging or “old-style” figures (for use in running text), lining figures, mono­spaced figures (for tabular work), supe­rior and infe­rior figures, frac­tion figures;
• Math­e­mat­i­cal oper­a­tors and Greek letters (latter is also com­monly used in applied sci­ences);
• And more, such as the Inter­na­tional Pho­netic Alphabet….

Format

The format the type­face is made avail­able in should also be put up to con­sid­er­a­tion. It’s a subject I’m not as famil­iar with, but general advice reads opting for Open­Type over other formats like
True­Type. As I under­stand it, many advanced fea­tures like auto­matic inser­tion of lig­a­tures (e.g. fi to fi), styl­is­tic vari­ants of char­ac­ters and more are only acces­si­ble in Open­Type (pro­vided of course the program you’re using sup­ports the advanced Open­Type typog­ra­phy fea­tures).

Kerning table

Kerning is the hor­i­zon­tal adjust­ment of glyphs in a com­bi­na­tion of glyphs (e.g. words) to ensure an opti­cally correct fit, elim­i­nat­ing large gaps or tight col­li­sions that occur with some com­po­si­tions. Notably, f is fre­quently kerned to the right, as is W and V to remove unde­sired spaces that would appear on the bottom half of the glyph between common char­ac­ters that follow it, such as the vowels.

Kerning tables are con­tained within font files and vary from non-​existent to exten­sive. It’s impor­tant to note that good kerning tables should ideally accom­mo­date for glyph com­po­si­tions that occur in other lan­guages.

Besides the drool­ing over the aes­thet­ics, kerning is usually the other aspect I pay the next most atten­tion to and if pos­si­ble test. Most sea­soned type design­ers and foundries will supply spec­i­men sheets for their typefaces—often down­load­able PDF files—with texts of various lan­guages set in the fonts of the face, at various sizes, styles and so forth. As boring as it might be, it’s impor­tant to have a look over these, native speaker or not—you don’t have to under­stand the gob­bledy­gook: just look out for large gaps between glyphs or ones that lie too close to one another. You might never write actively in more than one or two of the sup­ported lan­guages but nouns like places and people will almost cer­tainly require setting.

If there aren’t various lan­guage spec­i­mens to check over or a spec­i­men is lacking to begin with, ask to the sup­plier to throw the font(s) at a kerning test sheet and see how they do. A fun and handy exer­cise is to go through the fonts in your col­lec­tion and see how they stack up; here are some of the blatant short­com­ings of Lino­type AG’s Times and Monotype’s Times New Roman, widely dis­trib­uted on Mac OS X and Windows respec­tively:

Times kerning prob­lems (view full size).

Times New Roman kerning prob­lems (view full size).

As you can see Linotype’s Times has fewer kerning issues which is why I prefer listing it before and in addi­tion to Times New Roman in my CSS font-family stacks.

That’s it. I’d be inter­ested in seeing any kerning issues you find, par­tic­u­larly on wide­spread fonts, such as the web core fonts. Other than that, wish you a smash­ing Sunday.

I’ve kept the imple­men­ta­tion example to a minimum because it’s well covered by Jon, other web­sites, and the W3C. Instead, I wanted to voice my thoughts on the strug­gle between type foundries and design­ers. Feel free to skip the tech­ni­cal summary.

Implementation summary

‘Web fonts’ is cur­rently a W3C CSS3 working draft. It allows for the direct linking to font files that are then used by the browser to set text in, broad­en­ing the rel­a­tively limited palette of ‘web-safe’ type­faces. Many design­ers have been longing for direct font linking since the ear­li­est days of CSS. This is achieved with the @font-face element (fig. 1).

@font-face {
font-family: 'Desired-Font';
src: url('Desired-Font.otf') format('opentype');
}

Fig. 1. After defin­ing the @font-face element, you can directly refer to the linked font with the font-family prop­erty:

body {
font-family: 'Desired-Font', …;
}


Embedded OpenType

We’re all used to the major browsers not behav­ing in cohe­sion and web fonts is another victim of this. Presently @font-face is sup­ported in WebKit (and con­se­quently browsers that use it), Mozilla Firefox 3.1 beta and the devel­op­ment version of Opera. Inter­net Explorer (IE)—again, not surprisingly—does it’s own thing. Enter Microsoft’s pro­pri­etary Embed­ded Open­Type (EOT). EOT was an endeavor by Microsoft to allow for font file linking on the web while safe­guard­ing the type­face from being ille­gally copied by embed­ding the font, doc­u­ment to font and font to doc­u­ment. Linked fonts only are linked in one-​way, doc­u­ment to font, allow­ing users to obtain the font with little dif­fi­culty. With Microsoft firmly opposed to sup­port­ing native Open­Type linking as long as vendors object to it, EOT is set to be the only method avail­able in IE for use with @font-face.

Tech­no­log­i­cally it’s not the great­est solution—see Jon’s frus­tra­tions with Microsoft’s ‘WEFT’ con­verter that pro­duces EOT files from Open­Type files (1, 2, 3) and web secu­rity analyst Chris Shiftlett’s thoughts on web fonts. There are a range of other and related issues that were dis­cussed at a W3C meeting on EOT and font embed­ding. These prob­lems will impact its chances of adop­tion as a stan­dard. In 2007 Microsoft tried to push EOT to be part of CSS but this move was rejected, and they have since resub­mit­ted it as a stand­alone sub­mis­sion. If EOT is accepted Microsoft would have to ‘open’ the tech­nol­ogy to allow for the cross-​platform cre­ation of EOT files. This will greatly hinder the adop­tion of EOT by the W3C, and for good reasons. For EOT to truly catch on it would effec­tively have to be open sourced… …leaving that thought to die lonely at the bottom of a well. Perhaps I’m being some­what too cynical; it would be a pleas­ant sur­prise if Microsoft were to open EOT.

Existing alternatives

Besides image replace­ment, there are a few other options that bring addi­tional type­faces to the web which aim to retain text acces­si­bil­ity and degrade grace­fully when viewed in unsup­ported user agents. One is sIFR and the second and more recent, typeface.js. However neither is suit­able for setting any­thing more than head­ings or a few lines; sIFR uses Flash, which isn’t a stan­dard and quickly begins to affect page load times as well as resources; typeface.js mean­while doesn’t allow the selec­tion of the ren­dered text. These alter­na­tives don’t compete with font linking if were to become a sup­ported stan­dard.

Finding opportunity in change

The tech­nol­ogy imple­men­ta­tion aside, direct font linking has raised licens­ing and copy­right issues. Most type foundries that sell fonts, or rather sell licenses for fonts, nat­u­rally pro­hibit direct linking on the web. Foundries are afraid users will make copies of the linked fonts, putting an end to the foundry as the dis­trib­u­tor. In the case of font linking, it would be simple for a user to extract the font of a web page: open the CSS, locate the @font-face def­i­n­i­tion and save the font file ref­er­enced in the src: prop­erty.

Type foundries are the product of a change in tech­nol­ogy, specif­i­cally the inven­tion of the movable type and the print­ing press. Foundries have for the past four and a half cen­turies thrived through further advances, such as lith­o­g­ra­phy in the 19^th century, the inven­tion of the type­writer and again adapted with the rising pop­u­lar­ity of the per­sonal com­puter in the 1980s. Grad­u­ally the entry barrier to print­ing was lowered. To print what­ever you desired in 15^th–19^th cen­turies you either had to own a print­ing press or have some awesome friends; today anyone with a $1,000 com­puter and a $100 printer can print what­ever they like and if you have access to public print­ing ser­vices (your public library for instance) you could even do it for free.

Type foundries (like other indus­tries) were forced to adjust their busi­ness models with the inven­tion of each new print­ing tech­nol­ogy. Indus­tries that don’t adapt gen­er­ally whither, giving way to those that do. It’s silly to assume you can end­lessly make money selling licenses to the same thing while every­thing about you changes. This is exactly what is hap­pen­ing here.

In the fear that their revenue streams will be under­cut type foundries are react­ing adversely to the topic of font linking and even font embed­ding. Instead of seeking new oppor­tu­ni­ties in the advent of these tech­nolo­gies, type foundries are reluc­tant to support web fonts. Illegal copying and sharing of type­faces is of course a bad thing for foundries and I empathise with them on that level, but I fail to empathise with them in regards to font embed­ding. Foundries need to realise that as typog­ra­phy becomes lib­er­alised through the advance­ment of tech­nol­ogy (namely the per­sonal com­puter and the Inter­net), they must adapt and change with the rest of us. Respected typog­ra­pher and web devel­oper Richard Rutter wrote in July on the subject of font embed­ding with his article, The future of font embed­ding:

“…[I]t’s high time that font foundries and type design­ers stopped waving their hands in the air pro­claim­ing the death of their indus­try, insist­ing that every­one will be pirat­ing their fonts and installing them for free. Instead they should see this as an oppor­tu­nity to be grabbed with both hands.”

Hosting & licensing service

Font embed­ding if imple­mented cor­rectly as an open stan­dard should be seen a new oppor­tu­nity for foundries to sell fonts to a whole new market. One sug­ges­tion also advo­cated by Richard is for foundries to host embed­ded font files and sell them for use on web­sites. This would be in addi­tion to the con­ven­tional model of selling licenses to weights and styles of a type­face indi­vid­u­ally or as a com­plete family based on the number of proces­sors you intend to use them on (thank­fully most foundries have realised the mistake in this and are now selling licenses per com­puter).

This web licens­ing and hosting service would be one dandy (and prof­itable) solu­tion. I don’t have a clear-​cut answer to this debate but ulti­mately in my expe­ri­ence the force of change is greater than any single pro­pri­etary inter­est and con­se­quently always wins. Some­times it takes a while and depend­ing how involved parties react, things can get ugly which sucks for every­one. What excites me are those who find new oppor­tu­ni­ties that flour­ish with the new devel­op­ments. I hope foundries see this as one of those oppor­tu­ni­ties and not the extinc­tion of their industry—I look forward to ditch­ing hacks in favour of stan­dard­ised and open font embed­ding, because there are bigger fish to fry.

For anyone inter­ested reading more, check out the W3C report on for and against stan­dar­d­is­ing font embed­ding.

Prelude: the birth of French printing

The Euro­pean inven­tion of let­ter­press print­ing with movable type by Johannes Guten­berg c. 1450 sys­tem­atized the Latin alpha­bet into indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters that could be phys­i­cally com­posed and reused. Because Latin letters amal­ga­mate into an alphabet—distinct from logogra­phies and syl­labaries—they are par­tic­u­larly well suited to be divided, cut, and finally cast into pieces of metal type that reside in wooden cases (fig. 1.). Majus­cules (capital letters) lived in the “upper case” whilst the minus­cules (small letters) inhab­ited the “lower case”. This is where we draw the syn­onyms for upper- and low­er­case from.This was the basis for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary adop­tion in place of the metic­u­lous copying of books by hand word-​for-​word and saw the estab­lish­ment of an inte­gral part of the print­ing trade: typog­ra­phy.

A reprint of a page of one of the Guten­berg Bibles, from Mainz, Germany. Gutenberg’s type­faces epit­o­mize the strong gothic ele­ments that we now clas­sify as black­let­ter. The face in par­tic­u­lar is a textura black­let­ter.

A sort is a single piece of metal type, a letter of one spe­cific type­face and size. In digital typog­ra­phy it has been replaced by the term glyph as digital type does not phys­i­cally exist until printed. Thus a sort of Bembo italic at 12 points is dis­tinct from another of Bembo italic 10 points. Con­versely those that seman­ti­cally share the same letter but are styl­is­ti­cally different—even if of the same family and point size—are also clas­si­fied as dif­fer­ent sorts.Fig. 1. Metal sorts being set on a com­po­si­tion stick with many more organ­ised in a job case under­neath. Photo by Willi Hei­del­bach.

The trade of print­ing quickly spread through­out Europe. It was intro­duced to France in 1470 by Johann Heynlin and Guil­laume Fichet—two pro­fes­sors of the Sor­bonne, the his­toric uni­ver­sity of Paris—who enlisted the aid of German print­ers to estab­lish the first print­ing house. Three print­ers from Mainz helped them con­struct the presses, equip­ment and began cutting type. Still in the same year they printed France’s very first book, Gas­parini Epis­to­lae (“Letters”), written by the Italian gram­mar­ian Gas­parino da Bariz­izza.

Traditional preferences

Gas­parini Epis­to­lae was set in a human­ist black­let­ter (fig. 2). The face was a hybrid from a merging of roman and gothic ele­ments. The style was rebuffed in favour of the tra­di­tional gothic prop­er­ties of black­let­ter which French readers had grown accus­tomed to; unlike the human­ist faces that were cut during the Italian Renais­sance, human­ist type­faces weren’t met as can­didly in France as else­where in Europe. French typog­ra­phy remained mod­er­ately con­ser­v­a­tive, uti­liz­ing heavy black­let­ter faces of one style or another to set most printed mate­r­ial until the turn of the century.

Fig. 2. A sample of the human­ist black­let­ter hybrid from Gas­parini Epis­to­lae, Har­alam­bous, Y., 2007, Fonts & Encod­ings (p. 375), English edition, O’Reilly Media Inc., Cal­i­for­nia, USA.

There are two note­wor­thy inter­ludes between the end of the 15^th century and the cutting of garalde faces in the early 16^th century. In 1477 came the first book printed in French, an unusual and con­tro­ver­sial venture as French was con­sid­ered too vulgar to be set in print. Typ­i­cally Latin was used for the written word, even in Germany at the time. It was set in cute bas­tarda (or Schwabacher) by Pasquier Bon­homme. Then in 1529 Geofrey de Troy, the per­sonal printer to King François I, took the next steps that led to the broader adop­tion of roman with the print­ing of his book, Le Champ Fleury in which he put forth his theory that letter forms and human anatomy are closely linked.

The Garalades and Garamond

By the mid 16^thcentury print­ing was a solid indus­try. Cer­tainly print­ing was still expen­sive, however it had become more eco­nom­i­cally viable and less time-​consuming than the the pre­vi­ous option of employ­ing scribes. Fol­low­ing the clas­si­cal human­ist type­faces, typo­graph­i­cally in the 16^th century came the garalde (or old-​style) faces, paying homage to Claude Garamond and Aldus Manu­tius. These fea­tured a heavier weight and stronger empha­sis on the down­wards strokes than their antecedents (fig. 3). The weight can be attrib­uted to a more oblique axis of the pen; garalde faces in no way loose their human­ist ele­ments. Today the best known gar­aldes faces are Gara­mond and Bembo, the former of which there are many ver­sions of. Other notable digital ren­di­tions include Adobe Gara­mond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Gara­mond.

Fig. 3. Top: 72 point Centaur, cut by Bruce Rogers in 1912–1914 and based on cuts by Nicholas Jenson made in the height of the Venet­ian Renais­sance, 1469; bottom: 72 point Stempel Gara­mond, a true Gara­mon­dian revival by the Stempel Foundry, 1924. It was later dig­i­tized by Lino­type.

The other Garamond

A century after Claude Gara­mond came Jean Jannon (1580–1658). Jannon was a French Protes­tant printer who began cutting type in the Protes­tant Academy in Sedan, France. He cut his type during the French Renais­sance but did so ille­gally under the Catholic regime and con­se­quently had his casts seized in 1641 by agents of the French crown, under orders of Car­di­nal Riche­lieu (who iron­i­cally used Jannon’s work to later to set his own memoirs, Prin­ci­paux Points de la Foi). Jannon’s work sat locked-​away for two cen­turies before seeing the light of day again. When they were uncov­ered they were misiden­ti­fied as cuts by Claude Gara­mond, and hence named there­after Gara­mond. Many digital revivals still carry on this error: ATF ‘Garamond’, Lanston ‘Garamond’, numer­ous ver­sions of Mono­type ‘Garamond’ and Simoncini ‘Garamond’. Jannon’s work is baroque in nature; it is easily dis­tin­guished from Claude Garmond’s; sharper serifs and an almost wild vari­a­tion of axis and slope (fig. 4, 5).

Fig. 4. Top: 72 pt Mono­type Gara­mond, digital revival based on Jean Jannon’s cuts; bottom: 72 pt Adobe Gara­mond, dig­i­tally revived by Robert Slim­bach and based on Claude Garamond’s cuts.

Fig. 5. Top: 72 pt Simonici Gara­mond, another digital revival based on Jean Jannon’s cuts; bottom: 72 pt Stempel Gara­mond again, based on Claude Garamond’s cuts.

Historically befitting

So if you’re writing a piece on the intro­duc­tion of French print­ing and want to set it in an appro­pri­ate type­face, a Gara­mond revival is most apt—of course you could pick a heavy gothic with which Johann Heynlin and Guil­laume Fichet began France’s print­ing ven­tures but no one would com­fort­ably read it today (and ulti­mately the black­let­ters are more Ger­manic than French). Con­versely if you’re writing a piece set three cen­turies later, cov­er­ing the French Renai­sance, select one of Jannon’s revivals and pay tribute to a man almost for­got­ten by history.

Have a won­der­ful weekend every­one!

If you flick through various foundry cat­a­logs for a Gara­mond revival or adap­tion, you’re prob­a­bly bound to dis­cover more than garalde type­faces. Inter­spersed amongst the many Gara­monds by Claude Gara­mond (or Gara­mont) you’ll find baroque faces works by another type designer, Jean Jannon…

I wanted to cover this little typo­graphic affair but quickly found the article gaining length and arguably bloat. It’s cur­rently in limbo—I can’t decide whether to trim or polish it. Should I go ahead with a large but more inter­est­ing article (includ­ing a brief history French printing—which is inter­est­ing in my opinion) or go for the concise shorter version? Bah.

I also found that I’m short in garalde type­faces. Accom­pa­ny­ing the article I’d prefer to offer garalde (and baroque) samples other than Gara­mond Premier Pro that’s on my Mac. Anyone with Bembo or another “Garamond” revival—either one by Gara­mond or Jean Jannon?

A List Apart

The Survery, 2008

ALA is again running their annual survey calling all those who work in the process of cre­at­ing web­sites. The survey closes on Tuesday the 26^th of August—have you taken part?

Putting Our Hot Heads Together

“If more of us are think­ing ‘What can I contribute?’ instead of ‘Did I like this article?’ the entire con­ver­sa­tion is transformed.”

Punc­tu­a­tion changes made to retain sequen­tial quoting.

I also wanted to rec­om­mend article No. 265 Putting Our Hot Heads Together by Carolyn Wood. She offers a number of prac­ti­cal sug­ges­tions in nur­tur­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion in dis­cus­sion and comment threads that appear obvious, but only after reading. Her writing style makes the piece a plea­sure to read. Make sure to check that out.

Vivien’s review

In closing I also should pass on my thanks to Vivien from inspi​ra​tionbit.com who kindly cri­tiqued KLEPAS.ORG for me. Her thoughts and those that arose in the com­ments are going to help shape version 3 of this site; I’ve removed the clash­ing purple a:visited styling. Thanks again Vivien!

LugRadio Live

LugRa­dio was the premier open source/free soft­ware podcast fea­tur­ing the Internet’s Jono Bacon, famous web devel­oper Stuart ‘Aq’ Lan­gridge, and sysad­mins Adam Sweet and Chris Proctor. The second season ended with a weekend live record­ing and con­fer­ence, ‘LugRadio Live’, in Wolver­hamp­ton, UK.

Fol­low­ing the initial announce­ment that LugRa­dio were to con­clude their show at the end of season five (to the dismay of the many lis­ten­ers includ­ing myself), this year’s LugRa­dio Live (LRL) in the UK was to be the last ever given the podcast had come to an end. It was there­fore a must attend.

LugRa­dio Live was lit­er­ally a rocking event—rock music blared from the speak­ers half the time and there was a true “Chinny Raccoon” (LugRadio’s mascot), a custom made raccoon outfit as worn by Ben Thorp. Both the exhi­bi­tions and talks were all of a high calibre of which Bruno Bord’s talk “Baguette on Snails” prob­a­bly being the top high­light. The show—the final episode of LugRadio—was of course also a good laugh, and for those who were by chance bored Bytemark’s portably gaming center ensured there was some­thing to kill time with.

Of course the news is that due to the strong per­sua­sion of fans LRL will con­tinue to run annu­ally despite the con­clu­sion of the podcast. Given it’s the premier open source/free soft­ware event in the UK, it would have been a great loss to the com­mu­nity if this just past LRL was indeed the final one. To get a feel for what the event is like check out Flickr photos and make sure you try to make it next year.

Record­ings of the talks should make their way online within the next few weeks. I pre­sented on the Tango Desktop Project—particularly on the re-​licensing into the public domain. I was orig­i­nally going to demon­strate the cre­ation of Tango-​styled icons but decided in the last minute to alter the focus of the pre­sen­ta­tion. I think I dis­ap­pointed some people with the move—if I make it to next year’s LRL I’ll submit another paper.

Silverback

I suspect that the word would have trav­eled far across the Inter­tubes that Sil­ver­back is now out and avail­able (it was even men­tioned by Leisa Reichelt at GUADEC), so I won’t mention it for long here. Sil­ver­back is a USD $49.95 program by Clear­left that turns a Mac into a mini portable usabil­ity testing lab—for the price it’s a must-​have for anyone working in the fields of usabil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity in the soft­ware & web pro­duc­tion indus­try. Although it doesn’t give you the amount of data that a spe­cialised usabil­ity testing lab might provide, Sil­ver­back doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, it’s as portable as your Mac and suits every use case I’ve ever needed.

I did run into a small issue regard­ing licens­ing after my pur­chase: I used a friend’s credit card and with no option to pur­chase the license for another, my friend whose name was the credit card holder was the sub­se­quent recip­i­ent licensee—not myself. For tax­a­tion pur­poses and simply for the sake of cor­rect­ness I started a dis­cus­sion on Clearleft’s Get​Sat​is​fac​tion.com pages regard­ing the issue. I received an email response within thirty-​six hours of the post and had the issue sorted out in no time. Thanks to Sophie over at Clear­left for the help.

There are a number of reviews of Silverback—by Jonathan Christo­pher, .net mag­a­zine, and graph­iceyedea—check them out if you’re uncon­vinced and oth­er­wise have a great weekend.

“The Aus­tralian Federal Gov­ern­ment is pow­er­ing full steam ahead on a $125.8 million dollar plan to enact a manda­tory content-​filter every single Aus­tralian Inter­net con­nec­tion. Subtly dif­fer­ent from the Great Fire­wall of China, the Aus­tralian version is to be imple­mented at ISP level, and will target not only illegal content, but also “inappropriate” content unsuit­able for chil­dren.

The ACMA has sub­mit­ted a report on the current state of the tech to Senator Stephen Conroy — so called ‘Min­is­ter for Broad­band, Comm­unications and the Digital Economy’ — who’s hailing it as a modern miracle, despite what can only be seen as a star­tling lack of com­pre­hen­sion of the real world implications.”

Punc­tu­a­tion changes made to retain sequen­tial quoting.

So, I got off my butt and wrote an email to Stephen Conroy. Because I doubt it will ever get past his sec­re­tary and meet Mr. Conroy’s own eyes due to his likely busy sched­ule I am pub­lish­ing this here in the hopes that any Australians—or even Aus­tralian per­ma­nent res­i­dents (I am one)—who see this might con­sider voicing their con­cerns to the Gov­ern­ment. The letter:

Dear Min­is­ter Stephen Conroy,

As an employed Aus­tralian per­ma­nent resident—and web & Inter­net professional—I have serious reser­va­tions about your new manda­tory “clean feed” filter ini­tia­tive.

Pur­su­ing an expen­sive $125.8 billion million dollar venture that entirely fails to address the secu­rity, speed, quality of any such a fil­ter­ing system, as well as the rights of both website owners in and outside of Aus­tralia and finally the civil rights of the cit­i­zens of Aus­tralia is a waste of tax payers’ money and of serious concern to every Inter­net user in Aus­tralia.

Con­cern­ing secu­rity, I am shocked that the report claims six of the seven solu­tions tested filter the HTTPS pro­to­col (Hyper­Text Trans­fer Pro­to­col over Secure Socket Layer)—the pro­to­col over which Aus­tralians make secure Inter­net banking and e-commerce trans­ac­tions. This com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col was inher­ently designed specif­i­cally to promise a set level of secu­rity and privacy for its users. Fur­ther­more, as this is a secure pro­to­col, any filter—by logical conclusion—must use a simple keyword, or “blacklist” method which has been proven both inef­fec­tive, slow, incred­i­bly arduous to keep updated and also prone to black­list (block) legit­i­mate content.

In regards to speed, the July 2008 study clearly indi­cates that a high-​speed, accu­rate fil­ter­ing solu­tion is not pos­si­ble. There­fore imple­ment­ing any such fil­ter­ing at the ISP (Inter­net Service Provider) level will only hamper and slow down the current infrastructure—which greatly needs speed improve­ments, not declines.

As noted above a black­list filter is of serious concern to secu­rity and speed, both of which are impor­tant ele­ments of any such a system’s quality level. The higher the block­ing accu­racy of such a system, the more it well hamper the speed of the network infra­struc­ture.

If such a system is imple­mented I believe the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment will anger and frus­trate many website owners both over­seas and locally. Pro­cess­ing black­list removal requests will be a major under­tak­ing that will incur con­tin­u­ous mon­e­tary, time and imple­men­ta­tion costs. I believe many web content owners will con­sider their legal options in regards any such a move by the Gov­ern­ment. At the very least a one-​size-​fits-​all fil­ter­ing approach as the one pro­posed will cast the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment in a very neg­a­tive light, abroad and at home.

Finally—any most importantly—I believe the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment has absolutely no role in mon­i­tor­ing and decid­ing what is appro­pri­ate for myself, our children—a fact that many Aus­tralians will undoubt­edly agree with.

I believe the Inter­net is a tech­nol­ogy that will test society and its legal systems—common issues that have arisen include content cen­sor­ship (as on the table cur­rently), copy­right, licens­ing and patent­ing, uni­ver­sal access avail­abil­ity, and more. Many of our legal systems are out­dated in respect to the advances of the digital age, and this current issue is just another hurdle to be over­come as we realise we must shift our atti­tudes; no body will be suc­cess­fully able to control and filter the expanse of infor­ma­tion present and growing on the Inter­net. Any such a venture is futile, expen­sive and will only cause dis­tress.

The expan­sive resources—125.8 billion million dollars for example—available to the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment instead be focused on pro­vid­ing up-​to-​date edu­ca­tion on Inter­net tech­nolo­gies both to stu­dents and parents to ensure we can make well-​educated judge­ments about how we spend our time on-​line.

Our digital infra­struc­ture has been the hot-​topic before, during and now as it seems even after the election—I sin­cerely hope the Gov­ern­ment will recon­sider this ini­tia­tive and make an informed deci­sion that takes the needs of Aus­tralians at heart.

Your sin­cerely,

Simon Pascal Klein
Can­berra, Aus­tralia