Routed Gothic Font | Hacker News Reader

Routed Gothic Font

webonastick.com

255 pointspabs363 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399161 2 years ago, 57 comments

Anyway, I wanted to ask: Why is it ugly? What about it is? I found it beautiful and much better looking than most fonts I see on the web nowadays.

Letter shapes usually have curves a bit more complicated (in the sense of "how many parameters do I have to write down to reproduce it?") than this typeface. It feels like it's made of straight segments and ellipses, and all the strokes are uniform width and have round ends.

Also, the 'a' and 't' look like the kindergarten versions instead of the more usual two-story 'a' and 't' with some sort of curve at the bottom.

Most of this is almost certainly driven by the context this typeface was designed for. The simple shapes probably come from usability considerations for the lettering machine: the user had to trace each stroke in the template by hand. The uniform stroke weight and rounded ends come from how the engraving tool worked: basically a drill bit you drag sideways.

The curves are probably that way because there was a fashion for "modern" shapes a while back, which meant roughly "describable with a simple formula and few parameters"

We're accustomed to typefaces that were designed for use in movable type, where variable stroke weights and end shapes are basically free.

Interesting, that might be it. I already dislike serif fonts because I find they have too much complexity. So the simplicity of this font might be what draws me to it and is disliked by others.

I also do enjoy the rounded ends.

Some people dislike anything that vaguely reminds them of Comic Sans fonts I guess.

Personally I think it resembles VAG Round a lot, which is a font fairly common in Germany (possibly because it was designed for Volkswagen)

Many people don't know this font and yet it turns out spent some part of 16 years pressing their fingertips on it:

https://jalopnik.com/see-if-you-can-spot-the-vw-connection-i...

Oh I didn't even connect it to comic sans. It's very nice, but nothing overwhelmingly different from another grotesque font with rounded ends. CS is a script font and not a grotesque so thats annoying if that is really the reason to call it ugly.

You realize that "grotesque" is often considered an English synonym for "ugly"? The entire style of font has been considered "ugly" for a lot longer than Comic Sans has existed. It's a form that's not often symmetrical or exact so it is an "odd" form and a lot of people historically have found "odd" to be "ugly".

(Also, Comic Sans fits the definitions of both script fonts and grotesque fonts, so it is probably extremely subjective which bucket you prefer to define it.)

I dont understand why you think you little language lesson is relevant. As you write yourself the true (german) meaning of the term is strange. Laymen thought they were bizarre and maybe ugly. But for most other they were seen as very aesthetic from the onset. Which is why these new fonts absolutely dominated the fraktur fonts. The reaction to them was more about a culture shock than an aesthetic disapproval.

It is a historic term and any interpretation were you call CS grotesk would be suspect.

The etymology of the term is from Latin (for "hidden grotto"), and English inherited denotations (Dictionary meanings) both from German font usage and from French. I was pointing out the connotation (colloquial meaning) in English of "ugly" simply that it shows evidence for a long standing cultural bias. Enough of a long standing cultural bias that people may call them "ugly" simply out of "cultural habit" without examining where that bias came from or why they feel that way.

I also subjectively think many of the grotesque fonts are quite pretty, and I like Comic Sans too, but if you are asking why people think they are "ugly", one of the reasons is "subconscious cultural bias" and the "language lesson" was pointing out deep evidence of that (at least in English speaking cultures).

"grotesque" is also a term of art in font circles for a certain kind of sans serif, which leads to endless confusion.

"Look at that gorgeous grotesque" is a perfectly decent sentence for a designer to say.

I thought that it's meant look imprecise which communicates that it's not final.

similar idea and discussion from RoughViz: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648968

It doesn't look imprecise per se. These are just the letterforms you can get out of wood with a router.

I'm curious why it's associated with blueprints, but I have no insight into the history of applying type to blueprints.

EDIT: to answer my own question, it has to do with the scribing device used for Leroy letters. One of which was used to source this font. Nice description of how it was used here https://kleinletters.com/Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-mar...

I couldn't think of a better word than "ugly". Maybe "weird" or "quirky"? Honestly I'm not sure of that whole sentence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It makes me think of a 1970s carpeted office. Also of computers running Windows 95 in a local library that are infuriatingly slow and where right click is disabled in Internet Explorer.

Those who remember old Borland’s graphics.h, remember it came with an interesting set of fonts. Those were born in the 50’s and are known as “Hershey fonts”.

There is a modern implementation compatible with the old Borland fonts: http://libxbgi.sourceforge.net/

Disclaimer: I implemented it.

Watching bgidemo.c running correctly on a modern machine is indescribably cool.

Inkscape supports converting text to a variety of stroke fonts: Extensions → Text → Hershey Text.

The fonts are SVG, stored in /usr/share/inkscape/extensions/svg_fonts/ under Linux.

I recently took EMS Readability from there and adopted it into a code base that is generating reMarkable documents with strokes and all (rather than PDFs) in support of reverse-engineering actually good rendering, as I wanted text in my generated documents.

I’ve seen some references to Hersey fonts in OpenCV’s text rendering. I wonder if those are from the same lineage.

Very likely. For some background on the Hershey fonts, the tech stack where they were born, and mr. Hershey himself, there is this presentation by Frank Griesshammer: https://vimeo.com/178015110 .

Nice work! If I recall correctly, I used these when I was studying C in high school.

I’m sad to see graphics.h is still used in Pakistan, India and Brazil.

That's sad because its antiquated and means folks are still using DOS?

That's sad because it means there was no evolution in the last 20 years. People learn something, teach it and it gets frozen. Nothing new is learnt for decades.

It's weird there is someone still teaching using Borland C ... that is early 1990 stuff... and using DOS! That's closer to 30 years! It must be a cost thing.

I don't think it is a matter of cost. I think it is a matter of what the teacher knows.

Just to be clear: I didn't say Borland C is still used in Brazil. But you still can find CS courses teaching graphics.h just the same way. Actually, if it is used just for demo purposes I'd see no problem, it is still somewhat adequate for the purpose. I doubt that, though.

Still using DOS is not sad. Writing this on my Windows 11.

The old drafting font templates. When I started engineering they still did some of the plans by hand, using these templates to write out the lettering with a pin that would convert it to pen.

They used it on some comics too.

https://kleinletters.com/Blog/leroy-lettering-by-jim-and-mar...

Very sweet, I was wondering how it was implemented. The scriber image really makes the letters more into the artwork of the era.

In those times (and yes I am old enough to have actually used them) we used plainer normographs or lettering guides[0] where the ink pen was used directly inside the template.

Before the advent of so-called isograph/rapidograph pens, we used those weird looking pens as depicted in the wikipedia article and you had to be very, very careful as it was very easy to inadvertedly ruin a drawing with ink coming out of the (open top) reservoir.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettering_guide

Everything about this web page is awesome. The rest of the site is pretty sweet, too (there is a “proof” that π is rational that I enjoyed).

I especially like the links to related work. Too many people write about what they made, or put up a page explaining something, giving the impression that they are the only ones who ever wrote about the thing or did any work on it in the history of human thought. The web thrives on linkage.

>> The web thrives on linkage.

It does, but a business never wants you to leave their site so outbound links are considered bad. Oddly, they love inbound links which would be outbound for someone else. Some people extend this to their blogs, as it is definitely important for SEO using the original page-rank algorithm.

Now that I think of it, having no outbound links is a great way to rank a page as less useful in some sense.

It does make it less useful, in an objective sense. Before the web, the practice of linking to other work, through footnotes, references, or just mentioning it in the text, was essential for anything to be taken seriously, and an absolute requirement for any scholarly publication. The web is, potentially, a wonderful evolution of this custom. You’re right about some commercial sites avoiding outbound links, but none of the ones I write for; all my editors encourage it. And there is no excuse to find this tendency to isolation on a personal site. I tend to avoid reading, and especially linking, to resources without good outbound links.

Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts might notice that Routed Gothic is a fairly good match for the “Gorton Modified” legends on Signature Plastics keycaps. Last year I put together an HHKB-like homage to the BBC Micro keyboard, which required custom keycaps to get the ECMA-23 bit-paired layout. I mostly used Routed Gothic to design the keycaps: https://github.com/fanf2/kbd#gorton-like-fonts

The page does mention two Gorton variants.

If you're interested in other keyboard typography, you might be interested in an open source clone of the font used on Cherry keycaps: https://github.com/dakotafelder/open-cherry

I read a lot of papers about space travel, nuclear energy, and other technology from the 1960s and 1970s and love the use of typefaces similar to this.

A truly ugly and yet beautiful typeface is the original Art Nouveau Paris Metro font Metropolitaines from 1901:

http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-43924.html

I think it would be easier to evaluate this font if the page were not using

  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

which IMO really should be a last resort, and with this particular colour combination triggers halos that detract from readability.

I don't see that anywhere in the page source. And when I try to manually inject that css it says it's an invalid property name.

For context, I'm using Firefox on Linux. Also I haven't done any real front-end work in 10 years, so forgive me if I am missing something obvious here.

It's an invalid property in Firefox, yes, so you're not seeing its effects.

Firefox may simply not display it in the inspector, I'm not sure!

Anyway it's in app.css on line 185; it's applied as a body style. Looks like it comes from Zurb Foundation (ugh).

Thanks for the response. I see it is not standard CSS, and that Firefox has a different property name to set this.

https://caniuse.com/?search=-webkit-font-smoothing

The fact that I haven't done any serious work involving hinting with this font may have something to do with this issue as well. I'll have to look at this later.

My word, that is so much nicer. I wish people would stop doing this.

Totally off-track, but seeing this font made me wonder: we have steam-punk, which is nostalgia for the times of the steam engine. Isn't it time we have a similar genre for the technology of the mid-twentieth-century?

Sounds like you're describing Dieselpunk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk

Ahh, thanks!

Also check out atompunk, which is a jetsons-esque atomic powered future. The Fallout video game series is a great presentation of cool atompunk tech/aesthetic

Also all these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_derivatives#Retrofut...

A side question, does anyone know of a good source of some high-quality, old-looking drawing templates (say, DIN A4 frame+information in the bottom right), or a way to make a new template look "old"? I'm absolutely loving the blueprint aesthetics but I struggle to find good quality scans of the stuff to use in my own projects.

This post reminds me: every time I order any product from China, the labels always use this "ugly" font that an hour of Googling I couldn't find the name of. Does anyone know what font this is? Somehow every factory in China seems to use it. It's actually quite legible - not a bad design for making unambiguous labels

SimSun? Basically there's only one or two Simplified Chinese fonts in Windows, so everyone uses the default Chinese font for everything. That's why it's so popular, and they just use the same font since it also includes its infamous Latin characters. In addition to being overused and Latin characters not being the focus of the font, part of the reason its ugly on top of that is that since Chinese is generally monospaced, the Latin characters are also monospaced at half width and just generally sized weird to fit in better with Chinese.

Thanks for the font name and the explanation!

"A clean implementation of a common lettering style found on technical drawings, engraved office signs, computer and typewriter keyboards, and some comic books and avionics from the mid-20th century."

Thanks to the authors/designers.

I remember orange-red ink on cream paper on the circuit diagrams (schematics) glued in the lids of war-surplus electronics. Also the fold out circuit diagrams in Iliffe press books. I shall use is as the font for maths revision posters this year.

I suspect that the letter forms that I remember were drawn in pen with stencils on the drawing board.

The author says he copied the font from a Leroy Lettering set. I don't get how he can copy a font from that set and then distribute it with an open license?

This delves into the details: https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/font-law-licensing/

> Among other ways, you can lawfully print every glyph on a printer, scan the image and then trace each image on your computer (none of this would involve copying the software or program representing the fonts).

I don't know… maybe it's just not ugly?

I suggest opening the dev console and adding "text-transform: uppercase" to the body element which makes it more obvious that it is in fact the same font as in the 1970s drawing. It also makes it look less ugly, in my opinion.

Another variation, inspired by nautical signage: https://simplebits.com/products/ships-whistle-font

Someone make a monospaced version so I can use it in a terminal. :)

For years I used Staedtler's alphabet rulers to make annotations in my notebooks. This font brings back such good memories! thanks!

I don’t like this font at all. When you make a font for technical writing use a font that allows to differentiate between l1I and 0Oo.

It does have a certain charm but the I and 1, O and 0 not being distinct enough prevents me from actually using it.

I rent a home and wanted to map the circuits and fuses to lightswitches and outlets. I documented it in Excel and used the "National Park" font to make it look like an old school schematic.

I used that font for the reason you described.

It looks like old guy Comic Sans, although there's something more charming about it.

Another font for my collection :)

these are beautiful

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