
Signato – A new font inspired by the Independence of Lithuania - bobinux
http://signato.lt/en/
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rekado
Unfortunately, the license permits the use of the font only for "non-
commercial" purposes, which means that it cannot be included in Free Software
distributions.

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ghaff
Non-commercial licenses are IMO seriously wrongheaded. It's hardly a unique
problem here. See also Creative Commons which spent something like a decade
trying to define what the term meant and then ended up pretty much punting
when it came time for 4.0.

Even leaving aside philosophical free software issues, the practicalities are
considerable. A term (as in this license) such as "not aimed at direct or
indirect financial gain" could be read as ruling out pretty much any non-
trivial public use given how many things are indirectly monetized in various
ways today.

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sp332
Doesn't this just mean you have to contact the author to work out terms for a
commercial license?

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ghaff
"Just" that. But the reality is that if I'm looking for a commercially
licensed photograph, font, or whatever, there are already plenty of sites that
I can go to and pay for. And, if I'm looking for something free in a situation
that clearly doesn't fall under non-commercial (e.g. marketing materials), I'm
just going to skip over anything with a "non-commercial" only license and pick
something else.

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flixic
In 2 days Lithuania will celebrate 100 years of independence (apart from a 50
year intermission of Soviet occupation).

The release of this font is connected to the celebration.

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edent
I'm curious about this -

> While typing, you will notice that it is a much more sophisticated
> handwritten font than others. Spaces between words will not be perfectly
> identical, and the same two words when typed next to each will not look the
> same either, thus giving an impression that the text is actually written by
> hand.

How is this accomplished? I assume there's a ligature for spaces depending on
the preceding character - but how does one randomise the ligatures between
pairs of characters?

~~~
Normal_gaussian
However they do it, it repeats deterministically. Every third character in a
repeated string is the same. If you paste "EEE| |EoEoEoEo| |EoiEoiEoi|" into
the box and note the changes to the 'E' you should observe the way the E is
dependent on the previous characters, but only for a certain distance. I
assume this is a ligature-like feature but I don't know enough about fonts to
say any more.

~~~
edent
Ahhh! I see. It becomes more obvious if you type a lower-case t repeatedly.
Thanks :-)

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boffinism
Minor niggle: The 'Download' section has a header that reads 'For IOS users'
that should read 'For macOS users'

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nik61
As a writer of English I find a font without the letter Q to be distinctly
lacking...

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egeozcan
I was trying the Turkish characters and it surprised me by having İ. Very
interestingly, it didn't have ı. Does anyone know an alphabet which has İ but
not ı?

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jake-low
I don't think any languages make use of İ but not ı; perhaps when you press
the İ key on your keyboard the actual character sequence that gets entered is
the decomposition "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I (U+0049) COMBINING DOT ABOVE
(U+0307)"? OpenType has tags that allow you to describe where arbitrary
combining diacritics go relative to a glyph, so maybe the font knows how to
assemble those two code points into an İ, even though the font designer didn't
explicitly design for Turkish. Just speculating here.

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reaperducer
Love stuff like this.

The demonstration text on the web site omits Q, but it exists in the actual
font file. Maybe there's no Q in Lithuanian?

Too bad about the license, or I'd use it for lots of things. Though I think
Millennials who weren't taught cursive writing may have trouble with capital i
and both z's.

~~~
jutaz
Yes - Lithuanian language doesn't include Q, as well as X (not sure why X made
it into the font, though).

~~~
friendzis
Wild guess - Lithuanian does not have W, Q and X, but those are on de-facto
"standard" qwerty keyboard

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db123
Su vasario 16, Lietuva

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zydeco
I was immediately disappointed by not being able to write my name (with ú and
Á). It can work for Lithuanian, German, English, but not other languages that
use different diacritics, as it doesn't have any others (accute, grave,
circumflex, tilde, etc).

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yuchi
This font is pure digital poetry.

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ClintEhrlich
It would be interesting to automate the creation of fonts from historical
documents by training CNNs to extract suitable sample letters and transform
them.

That wouldn't be a replacement for serious projects like this, where an actual
typographer was paid to work for 160 hours. But it could be fun to try lots of
documents and see how the fonts they yield vary.

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JorgeGT
For all the beautiful ligatures that it has, the í (accented i) is very crude
:(

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fredley
> All signatures by specially programmed robot-arm will be written and
> published in the unitary book.

Cool

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reilly3000
What a treat. Made my Wednesday : }

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ChicagoDave
Beautiful font.

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sexydefinesher
Signed, Pilsudski.

