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Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

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

Making a font family can easily be a lifelong project.

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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

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