
Ink trap - mxfh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap
======
bajsejohannes
I remember learning about ink traps when Opera changed logo [1]. It was quite
controversial among font nerds that the font used to write "software" had ink
traps, since it was mainly to be used for screen and not print. Nobody else
cared, of course.

[1]
[http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/423/33204/vers...](http://www.operasoftware.com/content/download/423/33204/version/1/file/Opera-
logo-PNG.png)

~~~
gamegoblin
Those are much more subtle than the ones in the wiki article. As a non-font
nerd, had I not been looking for them, I wouldn't have seen them. The W looks
a tiny bit funny.

~~~
StavrosK
They're noticeable in the "f" and the "t", on the left side.

------
mdip
When I was younger, I always wondered what the big deal is with creating fonts
and stupidly thought I could throw together something on my own without any
training.

These sorts of things fascinate me in that the average non-designer has little
knowledge over the intricacies involved in producing a beautiful typeface that
scales to many dimensions accurately and produces a printout that works around
the physical limitations of ink. My attempt to create a typeface resulted in a
font that looked very good at 10pt and started to fall apart a few points
larger or smaller. I gave up and decided to leave that to the professionals.
Of course, back then, there weren't large collections of high quality and free
fonts sponsored by large players like Google and Microsoft, so the novelty of
having a monospaced programming/terminal font with just the right size dot in
the zero, slash in the 7 and serifed 1 was worth the few days of nerding
around to make a janked up version I could enjoy at precisely the size I
wanted to see it.

------
jongala
NBC used a face with insanely big ink traps in their titles for Sochi
coverage. It looked like a modified version of Stratum. They looked really
strange to me on screen. I'll see if I can find some samples.

EDIT: OK, check these out:
[http://i.imgur.com/0ovnO49.png](http://i.imgur.com/0ovnO49.png)

~~~
mxfh
if you browse the tag "ink traps" at _MyFonts_ [1] quite[2] a[3] number[4]
of[5] them[6] are using them solely as an artistic element and clearly not for
their originally intended use case.

[1]
[http://www.myfonts.com/search/tag%3A%22ink+traps%22/fonts/](http://www.myfonts.com/search/tag%3A%22ink+traps%22/fonts/)

[2] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/capearcona/ca-
uruguay/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/capearcona/ca-uruguay/)

[3]
[http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typeco/trapper/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/typeco/trapper/)

[4]
[http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/madtype/hydrochlorica/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/madtype/hydrochlorica/)

[5] [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mugur-
mihai/indento/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/mugur-mihai/indento/)

[6]
[http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/yess/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/paratype/yess/)

[edit] Here's your NBC Sochi font: _Register_ in Bold or Condensed Bold by
_Device_ [http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/device/register/bold-
condensed/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/device/register/bold-condensed/)

~~~
jongala
Very interesting, thanks! I've seen some apparently decorative ink traps
before but hadn't really seen fonts really built around them.

And good find on _Register_ \-- I think part of my confusion or displeasure
with that face is that I was already familiar with _Stratum_ , and in all-caps
they are pretty similar (lowercase characters are pretty distinct between the
two), so I thought someone had added traps to _Stratum_ just to be different
or cool. I now see that _Register_ predates _Stratum_ by a few years, which is
interesting also.

I still prefer _Stratum_ …

~~~
mxfh
_Register_ (2000) still has bragging rights other _Stratum_ (2004) for being 4
years it's senior and being designed by Rian Hughes, who has one of the most
unique job interview experiences retold on his Wikipedia page:

 _He arrived late at his very first job interview at an advertising agency
with a lump of dog excrement stuck to the bottom of his portfolio, managed to
transfer some of it on to the white shirt he was wearing and the rest onto the
meeting-room table. Directors had to open windows to let the stench out.
Despite this, he got the job._

Yet they all owe a lot to Morris Fuller Benton's 1932 _ATF Agency Gothic_ ,
which was extended in 1995 by David Berlow as _FB Agency_ [1] which is
similiar to the influential _Bank Gothic_ [2] which he designed two years
earlier in 1930.

From there you can venture into that Star Trek TOS typeface (now called
_Horizon_ [3]) and into adjacing _Microgramma_ / _Eurostile_ [4][5] territory.
It's the future we used to know.

[1][http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontbureau/fb-
agency/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontbureau/fb-agency/)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Gothic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Gothic)

[3][http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/horizon/](http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/horizon/)

[4][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_\(typeface\))

[5][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile)

------
halflings
This really reminds me of the way you cut a metal sheet (with lasers) that
you're going to fold afterwards : You leave a small "circle" at the corner
where the sheet will be folded because otherwise you'll have excess metal that
will damage your sheet.

------
praptak
Nice. This means a true WYSIWYG application should simulate ink flow! Does any
existing app have such feature?

~~~
err4nt
inDesign has a variety of previewing modes, including a 'printed' simulation
as well.

Consider when you're designing for print you aren't limited to CMYK channels,
you can have 6 inks (hexachrome), or any number of custom palettes (1 spot
colour, 2 spot colours, 3 spot colours, etc) or any combination of a colour
process plus additional spot colours. Since you're printing things on all
channels it's important to be able to predict (before printing) how different
ink layers and transparencies will eventually flatten down on the page.

I do most of my work for screen, but inDesign is truly the most advanced
software for taking a print piece to press (in PDF format). Even to designers
trying to use Adobe Illustrator for print work I STILL steer them toward
inDesign because of the print-related extras and better opentype support.

FWIW, inDesign is the only Adobe product I'll 'miss' now that I've stopped
upgrading. I'm not going to Creative Cloud and I can do all of my work using
nonAdobe software EXCEPT for inDesign.

~~~
troymc
It's not optimal, but Adobe does have a single-app plan, so you could get
InDesign CC for $20 per month, every month, for the rest of your life…

I wonder if you've tried TeX and family. XeTeX has full OpenType support.

~~~
stan_rogers
Unfortunately, TeX and sons pretty much begins and ends with typesetting;
graphical nuance is not its strong suit. It's easy enough to illustrate a
text-oriented document, but it's a real bear to create magazine-style or
brochure layouts, spreads, gatefolds and so on. For that sort of thing, you
really need something that is tied much closer to output than to content in
the working space, and TeX is pretty heavily biased the other way around.

~~~
troymc
I'm told that QuarkXPress was once the leader in page layout for magazines
etc. I wonder if it's still a viable alternative. Apparently you can get it
for $850.

------
ygra
[http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-
the-...](http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/calculated-errors-the-ink-
trap.html) is probably a better article on the topic.

~~~
mxfh
You're right. Just submitted the _Wikipedia_ link not to spam the new
submissions page.

Here is my original comment under the ink-saving story of the day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7488218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7488218)

------
michaeljkchoi
Reminds me a lot of OPC to improve feature resolution in photolithography.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_proximity_correction)

------
dfrey
I thought this wiki page was going to describe selling ink jet printers as a
loss leader while charging exorbitant amounts for ink cartridges.

~~~
acheron
You'll find that one under
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades)
.

------
afandian
I have always wondered what those were. Always thought they were ugly. Surely
these only apply to certain types of printing. Why are they still shipped with
fonts?

~~~
TheZenPsycho
It's post modernism. One of the principle elements of post modernism is that
the structure becomes the decoration. The internal becomes external. The
scaffold becomes external. The walls are stripped back and the plumbing is
visible, and you might even add some extra scaffolding and pipes that serve no
real purpose anymore.

Serifs themselves are another example of this phenomenon. When the first "Sans
Serifs" were produced, as part of the modernism movement (unlike post
modernism, modernism is about stripping back decoration and reducing things to
their pure functional nature) they were called "Grotesk", and the hacker news
of the day widely panned them for being useless and illegible and stupid.

Now it's just boring and normal.

In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used only
for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it is and
what its attributes are.

It's a cheeky rebellion against art history. It's embracing the absurdity of
our technological ignorance.

It's the teenager saying the word "LOL" out loud like it has no history or
context.

~~~
cousin_it
> _In a post modernist web page, every element has border 1px, normally used
> only for debugging purposes, and a label explaining what type of HTML tag it
> is and what its attributes are._

Wow, that really highlights the ugliness of the "scaffolding" we use. Maybe we
should design something better than HTML, so we can have scaffolding that
we're not ashamed to show.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
Or make better designs that don't assume the scaffolding will be hidden.

------
devilshaircut
[http://designarchives.aiga.org/#/entries/%2Bid%3A440/_/detai...](http://designarchives.aiga.org/#/entries/%2Bid%3A440/_/detail/relevance/asc/0/7/440/retina-
typeface-family/1)

Here is a very interesting example of this.

------
logfromblammo
This looks like version 1 of using interference to produce feature sizes
smaller than the wavelength of the light used for the lithography.

A physical process distorts the "clean" image in the final product, so the
distortion is mapped and doubly reversed, so that a "clean" final product is
generated from an intentionally distorted original. As long as the physical
distortion is consistent and predictable, you could do this with anything.

I'm thinking the same technique could be applied to improve volume printers.
Instead of ink traps you have thermoplastic traps.

~~~
jeffdavis
Why can't the printer detect areas likely to be distorted, and apply the
transformation itself?

Then, you send the printer what you actually want it to look like, which makes
more sense to me.

------
josh-wrale
It seems at first that this would have little application in a digital format.
On the other hand, maybe there is some anti-aliasing benefit.

~~~
ygra
A digital format is never going to be printed with fluid inks? ;-)

~~~
afandian
Very rarely hot-lead printing (and analogues), which I assume is the exclusive
use for ink traps.

~~~
cschmidt
I will certainly give you "very rarely", but you can also make photopolymer
plates of a digital file, and then print it using letterpress printing. That's
how I did my wedding invitations. Unfortunately, the font I used didn't have
ink traps.

