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Comment by uncoder0 | Hacker News Reader

Why do people still insist on doing this? I prefer to remap all fonts to two (a serif and a sans) that are much easier for me to read. When people use these silly font+glyph combos I never use their software. The one rare exception is GitHub. I still wish people would just use SVG.

Edit: Why was this down-voted? Is this not a legitimate concern? It is worth mentioning that I remap my fonts to help my dyslexic brain keep track of the baseline.

Edit2: It is also worth noting that this font does degrade quite gracefully and my problem lies more with the paradigm than this particular font.

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"Insist"? Because it's fun, and useful. "When people use these silly font+glyph combos I never use their software." That's fine. Don't.

I was just thinking, " Hacker News".

When did we lose our interest in and support for hacking ?

It doesn't have to be "practical" nor "broadly applicable" to remain interesting and perhaps even a bit inspiring. And, as often as not, it's the thought of "What happens when I mash these things together?" that produces some real innovation.

As a community, we should continue to support such exploration.

People here do startups and businesses, but the community was never solely, nor perhaps even primarily, about that. Which comes first, the hack or the business?

You are aware it breaks accessibility, right?

I'd argue it's one of the better options from an accessibility viewpoint - from a screen reader perspective, you'll get the raw numbers. If the chart was an image, you'd get nothing.

That is a good point. This font does degrade gracefully.

It doesn't. If you remap your fonts, you get numbers.

How is it worse than SVG?

When I remap my fonts for accessibility reasons I can still see an SVG. However I'm left with tons of little boxes on Github's website where the buttons belong. SVG could be used for those buttons and they would get the same result.

I imagine this is primarily meant for creating static content such as print posters.

(I see that they are working on a web version, and regarding that I have to say I agree.)

This. What a silly thread. You probably couldn't lawfully use this on a web page even if you wanted to.

Yeah I saw this Asa tool for those interested in doing infographic type art.

Should we stop using green because some people are color blind?

That is a false analogy. There are no other ways to represent green that works for color blind people and is still green for everyone else. Using SVG for a button and using a Font for that button are completely interchangeable, visually.

I totally agree. It's a cool proof-of-concept but shouldn't be used beyond that IMHO. I think that just as CSS should only be used for presentation, fonts should only be used to render text.

Not only does it create accessibility and cross-platform issues but there are already dozens of other and cheaper ways to create nice looking graphs.

    >Why do people still insist on doing this?

HTTP requests. 'silly font+glyph combo' is the vector version of sprites.

And it's also nice to be able to change the colour of your monochrome vector graphics.

Except that this font doesn't appear to work on the web, it's only for use in software that supports higher typography features, such as Adobe applications.

Even browsers support have supported alternate font styles for years now. http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-supp...

In the part i was replying to the parent was not referring to this font specifically, but the font-graphics concept.

    >my problem lies more with the paradigm than this particular font

I'm using it in MOAI with harfbuzz. Its a brilliant font and makes adding simple HUD-style GUI's to my app very fun, indeed (hint: using a "printf" to get -> a graph == fun!!)

Yes, the main use of this will probably be to create graphs in adobe applications.

Also, being able to add css shadows. You can make shadows in SVG, but they will be different than the css shadows on the rest off the page, and generally a PITA

I see this as a designer-friendly graphing library. In the video he demonstrates how to use the font using InDesign. And last I checked InDesign doesn't have graphing tools that are this simple.

R -> C -> P -- this isn't for publishing but as a way to avoid drawing graphs in InDesign/Photoshop/Illustrator.

Art.

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