
Typography Spacing Research - jashmenn
http://aldusleaf.org/rhea.php
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aston
The tl;dr of this article is that the author summarizes some really
interesting leads on automated letter spacing, but so far hasn't come up with
a winner. There are a number of loose ends in there that might be interesting
for others to pick up and run with since he's made much of his code available.

Most promising to me is the concept of bubble kerning, which not only appears
to work in the limited testing the author does here, but also meshes with my
intuition about how to space letters.

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crazygringo
Wow, what a beautiful site, and beautiful typeface (reminds me a great deal of
Minion, which was chosen to set _The Elements of Typographic Style_ ).

And an absolutely fascinating investigation. It's almost like the famous quote
of not being able to define something (pornography), but knowing it when you
see it. [1]

Typography, with its rhythms, is almost the purest example of this. It's so
easy for a good designer to kern, set linespacing, etc. until it "looks right"
to your eye. But I wouldn't even know where to begin to try to translate this
into an algorithm -- because it's not just about spacing between letters, but
having that spacing be harmonious as well with the structures within letters
(like the horizontal rhythm of an "m").

I personally suspect it's something close to trying to equalize the "area"
between adjacent letterforms, but the problem is that depending on angles,
case, etc. that "area" is a "blob" we feel, not an easy calculation. I
wouldn't be suprised if the best approximation involves some kind of fuzzy-
bitmap blobs, rather than any hard of hard exact calculations.

I look forward to reading more research results!

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it>

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dfc
The "famous quote" is about obscenity, not pornography.

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CrankyPants
_The most famous opinion from Jacobellis, however, was Justice Potter
Stewart's concurrence, holding that the Constitution protected all obscenity
except "hard-core pornography." Stewart wrote, "I shall not today attempt
further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within
that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly
doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this
case is not that."_

~~~
dfc
Pasting a wikipedia article does not end an argument.

Have you read Jacobellis? When you do, please respond using your own words. In
case you do not have WestLaw open in front of you:

[https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/US/378/378.US.184.11....](https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/US/378/378.US.184.11.html)

~~~
CrankyPants
And here I thought my appeal to the anonymous, crowd-sourced authority of
Wikipedia would totally work.

Thanks for the link. I've read it, and all I can say is that, in my highly
unqualified opinion, the two things seem to be treated with enough overlap
that we'd be, at best, quibbling, at least relative to how much I care about
the distinction, if nothing else. That said, for someone with extensive formal
training in the subject, I can also see how the distinction would make all the
difference. The devil being in the details, and all.

So my response, then, is this:

You originally took issue with it being about obscenity, and not hard-core
pornography (which seems to be the more common view, correct or not). Stating
that it's about obscenity, not pornography, does not end an argument. And,
when you cite the decision, please offer your own words supporting your own
interpretation.

You started out with an unreasoned, unsupported correction to his comment. I
accept that you're trying to support it by citing Jacobellis, which may be
sufficient in a room full of lawyers, but I don't think it is here.

I'm completely open to being convinced on this, but you're probably going to
have to do some actual convincing for that to happen.

And while you're at it, if you think Wikipedia's wrong and can so demonstrate,
please go correct it, and add your reasoning to the Talk page.

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lucb1e
Am I the only one where the typeface on the site bugs? Or perhaps it's
supposed to look like this, but it's really hard to read. Windows 7 with
Chrome, no uncommon setup.

Is's really ironic how most typography blogs have this problem. Same problem
occurs on Linux too by the way, which I run on my desktop (this is a laptop).
No localized issue.

~~~
anonymouz
I also find it hard to read (on Firefox in Linux). For example in "snugly
should" in the first paragraph the space between "s" and "n"/"h" seems way too
big. In general, the spacing varies wildly and the text looks very uneven. Not
sure what causes this and if it's supposed to look like this though.

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dfc
His _Crimson Text_ font is very attraactive:

<http://aldusleaf.org/crimson.php#download>

~~~
_fn
Google WebFonts serves his font here:
<http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Crimson+Text>

I've been using it on my blog for a while.

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emanuer
Considering that humans are the judge of what constitutes as a well spaced
font, one should look at the workings of the human brain. It turnes out we
already know the algorithm employed by the visual cortex for edge detection,
the _Gabor filter_ <http://authors.library.caltech.edu/2653/1/MALjosaa90.pdf>

Also Wikipedia has a fantastic overview for the Gabor filter:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_filter>

Of the approaches mentioned in the original article, "wavelet" masks, are the
ones closest to the calculation done in the V1. A quick search on
<http://scholar.google.com> for "Gabor space visual cortex" uncovers that much
research was dedicated to this topic.

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evoxed
Interesting. I haven't attended TypeCon in a couple of years but last time I
went algorithmic kerning was a fairly hot topic amongst event-goers and some
of the people giving talks. Machine kerning is still sort of looked down upon
as far as I can tell (in the design world) but as a practical tool it's great
that people are working on it and it has certainly improved many times over.

It looks like a great article and I'm looking forward to going over it fully
to see if there's anything really new but overall it looks quite clear and
covers at least a few things that I've tried (maybe less than successfully) to
describe to others.

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exolxe
Wow, this is pretty intense. I'm a designer, but even for me it's almost too
dense. Would be really if there was a cheat sheet with the main takeaways.

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idan
A fantastic deep-dive. If you want to know just how deep you can take the
craft of presenting beautiful type, this is a great example.

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Crake
This was really interesting! It's great to see someone taking a quantitative
approach to design. Art schools would never teach an algorithmic approach to
kerning, but for the programmers/artists who are smart enough to learn it, a
breakthrough permitting effective use of this approach would be invaluable.

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hayksaakian
Sidebar renders poorly on my nexus 7.

<http://www.imgur.com/1z5Vv.png>

The math was quite interesting though.

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tambourine_man
Fixed positioning + allowing zoom is not a good idea.

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mh-
Misspelled _letters_ within the first twenty words of an otherwise-excellent
article about letterfitting. :)

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verroq
Am I the only that thinks "Wow people actually give a shit about this?". It
seems comical how much people are willing tolerate this typographical circle
jerk disguised as "designing".

I for one, cannot take this guy seriously when the title of his post isn't
even antialiased (funnily enough with no kerning present). Or when he commits
binary and swapfiles into his git repository.

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dfc
_"Am I the only that thinks "Wow people actually give a shit about this?". It
seems comical how much people are willing tolerate this typographical circle
jerk disguised as "designing"."_

A lot of people care about the finer points of typography. If you really want
to see some "circle jerking disguised as designing" take a look at a book by
this nutjob named Donald Knuth:

Digital Typography by Donald E. Knuth (Stanford, California: Center for the
Study of Language and Information, 1999)

 _"Or when he commits binary and swapfiles into his git repository."_

Committing binary files is such an atrocious act. I for one am glad that
github does not condone such immoral acts by showing the difference between
images.

