Back to topic: inability to distinguish O and 0 seems pretty terrifying for avionics. Related, I love SF Mono, but it's so hard to read 0000080 in small fonts (try it).
Well, you are partially right, because most of "DIN" standards already replaced by "ISO".
But there are still many "DIN" standards that now replaced by "DIN EN ISO", e.g. German (local) version of «ISO 3098» (which replace «DIN 6776») is «DIN EN ISO 3098».[0]
Thank you for posting this! I've been looking off and on for this for ages and ages.
Trivial factoid: my understanding is that the Gorton pantograph fonts came first, and that the Leroy lettering sets were manufactured using the Gorton fonts. But I don't have a good source for that, so I could be completely wrong.
This font was also used by EC Comics (their comics included Tales From the Crypt). Here is another font based on that which is more fuzzy: https://caseyburns.com/artwork/font-design/
At the risk of sounding "out of touch with reality" and "retro nostalgic", I strongly believe that a lot of clean, sterile work took place in the 1965-1985 era. From UNIX to SR-71, everything mankind did in the technical space was minimal, purposeful, clean, legible, durable, maintainable, modular and many other adjectives that would compound on the idea of creating a truly better product or service. Marketing took a backseat, science and data mattered and advertisement was truthful.
Today's world seems broken, fragile, noisy and unmaintained. May be that humanity needs to unwind, rewind back a couple of decades and try again. If you play the scenario of human evolution multiple times, I am sure a large scale system such as global society would end up in a different state... every time.
Reminds me of the story that Kyoto, Japan didn't get ruined because one of the military commanders in charge of the nuclear bomb drop locations, had a soft spot for Kyoto... and instead chose Nagasaki and Hiroshima. [1]
If we were to replay human progress, I want us to go back to that era and relive the engineering life. Must have been amazing to work in a technical field in the 70's and 80's. Now we have AI and Quantum and all these fucking buzzwords, largely perpetuated by people who have no clue - marketing and PR folks.
I keep going back to the old AT&T phone book fonts like Bell Gothic[0] and Bell Centennial[1] largely because it was designed to be legible at small sizes when using rather primitive printing methods. In a more modern context I find it works really well on charts and whatnot, even scaled down and compressed a bit more[2].
Unix was a reaction against failed complex designs. So was the F-16, maybe a better example in military aviation because the SR-71 had such a unique purpose.
Popular and complex things from that era have been forgotten: PL/1, the VAX instruction set, overuse of manifold vacuum to power car accessories.
One can hope that simplicity comes in waves. Complexity is popular right now.
> Now we have AI and Quantum and all these fucking buzzwords
“Quantum” is from the 1920s. It’s not really a buzzword but more an adjective describing our most accurate model of reality yet that physics can provide.
Yeah, the modernist ethos. Today those would sound featureless, single-minded, featureless (yea, again), oversimplified, lasting beyond its usefulness, unoptimised, repetitive.
As any engineer, I also like the modernist thinking better, but it's not realistic, life is messy and complicated.
It may be the size on the page, or glyph rendering artefact but this font doesnt look... consistent. Dont get me wrong the font is brilliant, however atleast for me there are some points at which the rendered glyphs are over cut. Another way id describe this is the antialiasing is not consistent. Its like layering the same text on top of the other multiple times.
Wow, this is triggering some kind of memory cascade in the back of my brain that I simply cannot place. I know this font, but I really can't say from where.
The closest guesses I can come up with is the Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Guide, or maybe an old terminal or computer magazine. But I could easily be wrong.
This kind of writing seems to be the equivalent of Normschrift in the US; it's all over schematics from the 60s and 70s (sometimes even the 80s). Just like Normschrift written by craftsmen it looks super-regular, almost like computer set type, except it has tiny variations between draftsmen, making it clear it is actually written by hand. (Some people use templates to write Normschrift; a looked down upon practice, generally not permissible in exams).
> "I created this font by purchasing a Leroy Lettering set, using Inkscape to trace the scanned letterforms of one of its templates, and some FontForge Python scripting."
How does this work from a copyright/legal perspective?
So, a given "specification" (how a font looks to the human eye) can have many different "implementations" (ie. TTF files). The specific "implementations" themselves can be copyrighted, but somehow not the "specifications"?
If so... assume one TTF file which is copyrighted, pay-per-use license. Assume another TTF file, which is open-source, free to use and redistribute. The files both implement the "Helvetica" specification, rendering the same letters to the human eye. How "different" must the free implementation be from the paid one, for it to not be considered an infringement?
Since the shapes afaik can't be copyrighted: Your selfdrawn font has totally the right to look the same.
They probably won't however, since you might be able to copy the shape, but for being displayed on screen you need a process called "hinting". That is the term for making pixels out of the shapes. Professional fonts are hinted by hand, making it look neat even in small sizes. There is auto-hinting, but it only gets you so far.
An OpenType tabular numbers feature would be a nice addition, for numbers in tables. I think it would mostly be a matter of adding a hook to the 1 like other similarly-proportioned industrial fonts.
