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Comment by Daub | Hacker News Reader

Impressive indeed. Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year. The tasks include to go from 'A' to 'Z', upper and lower case, plus all the glyphs (brackets, ampersand, exclamation marks etc). Optionally the variations (bold, italic etc) without which a font is of limited use. The thing that separates the men from the boys is the kerning (spacing between the characters) which can absorb as much obsessive compulsion as you can throw at it. From TFA:

> My new fonts were going to support 176 characters, meaning I might have to enter as many as 176² = 37,976 kerning pairs... yeah not going to happen. So this time, since I was (spoiler alert) writing my own tool to generate the fonts, I decided to semi-automate this process to take care of a huge majority of the kerning, and do manual entry when algorithm didn't suffice.

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> Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year. The tasks include to go from 'A' to 'Z', upper and lower case, plus all the glyphs (brackets, ampersand, exclamation marks etc).

That's when you're limiting the font to purely English usage. If you want to support any other language you have to add more characters, even for languages that also use the latin alphabet (e.g., French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc). Then you may want to support Greek and Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, …

For example, “Noto fonts cover over 77,000 characters, which is around half of the 149,186 characters defined in Unicode 15.0” according to the font's Wikipedia entry.

  Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year.

Making a font family can easily be a lifelong project.

It makes me very happy to see people talking about how much work can go into a typeface. Like, these pixel fonts are very quick to make, but fully contoured vector fonts can be tweaked to perfection infinitely, there's always more languages and more diacritics and more weights and styles you could do.

Truly a rabbit hole, but when it's done well it's very worthwhile. I have a lot of respect for font makers.

Has anyone tried training a DL model to handwrite things? That seems like a fascinating rabbit hole as well. In addition to all the context sensitive letter differences, you could even label training pieces with the mood of the writer and the flexiness of the nib/quill. If I type an angry emoji after a sentence it gets scribbled harder when drawn.

> Making a font family can easily be a lifelong project.

Donald Knuth made https://www.1001fonts.com/cmu-font.html __and__ designed and implemented an entire typesetting system __and__ did a bunch of other not-so-small things that makes designing a font family seem like a side project.

Tex was the side project. Knuth went on a years long yak shave to write book-making software instead of writing the book because he was unhappy with the fonts in the printer proof.

Is there a write up about this anywhere? Sounds like the journey would be a fun read

>Making a complete font set can easily take as long as a year.

I'm sorry I just don't buy this. Its possible to endlessly obsess over anything. I've noticed things like language/writing/music/calligraphy tend to have high draw to people that are prone to obsessing.

It sounds like gatekeeping to me is my point. Discouraging people from entering a field always makes me a bit triggered.

I am not sure that anyone is trying to discourage people from entering the field of type and design. A child's handwriting (or indeed mine, which is very child-like) can be read but that does not mean that it is readable. In order for the consumption of type to be a pleasurable experience, its design must be considered. Design involves the consideration of the space between foreground elements, the contrast of foreground and background elements, the grouping of foreground elements into familial sets (e.g. beginning, middle and end) etc. People have been concerned with this subject for millennia...

Western fonts derive from Roman lettering which were carved in stone. The dedication inscription at the bottom of Trajan's Column is arguably the most sophisticated example of this. The text at the top of the inscription is larger than that at the bottom so as to appear perceptually uniform from the point of view of the viewer (who is located significantly below the inscription).

Letter forms are weighted towards the bottom. The designers of Bauhaus (who were very reductive in their thinking) tried to do away with this and produced super-regular typefaces based on squares and circles. They quickly realized that this produced a result that humans find unappealing and unreadable.

The digital age saw the adoption of characters that were dimensionally uniform (i.e. monospaced fonts), such as employed in the comment widget of HN. Of course such fonts are easy to digitally express, but as I am sure you will agree for a printed document the effect is clunky and lacks flow.

It is this ongoing dedication to form, structure and readability that is at the heart of effective typography.

I am not a typographer, but have worked with many in my job. I often mock-up page layouts and show it to my designer for their approval. Of course, I think I have done a marvelous job, but their response is always the same: 'yeh, really nice. However, maybe you change this space, this color, this font etc etc'. The result is always 100 times better.

I agree with parent. To create a font family from scratch, also to create many others things from scratch, does not take that much time, at least it does not have to take that much time.

You can create a font quickly, sure. To do a good job will take quite a bit longer.

Helvetica took a year. For the semi-bold variant in one size. The thin, bold, and italic variants took about a year each. Helvetica Neue has fifty-one variants, that's not something you're going to do quickly.

  It sounds like gatekeeping to me is my point.

Nobody's gatekeeping, we're just acknowledging the huge amount of work that goes into creating a font. It's easy to forget sometimes as both Apple and Microsoft include very high quality fonts with their products for free.

There are plenty of open source tools to generate fonts. So go ahead. Make your own font. I spent some time trying to make a font based on the writing of some youtuber. It's a fun exercise. And while drawing (tracing) the characters was actually quite a lot of work, that's about the easiest part of making a font.

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