Out of curiosity, what would you say is the most accurate/comprehensive resource for learning about these?
47 karma · joined August 11, 2024
I agree that it would be overall more valuable to have the whole thing open source online, but sometimes I want to share how I solved problems without open sourcing all my code directly, for various personal reasons. But from the many comments I'm getting across the internet on the article it seems like people are getting a lot of value and motivation out of it, which was the intent, so that makes me happy.
It’s something that I could definitely go through and patch into all the fonts, but I was waiting to see if there was enough demand for the effort. I think supporting two more languages would be very cool though.
That kind of thing is another level of polish that I could definitely do, or even just providing more spaced variations.
After that wave, they get used in various projects here and there, and those projects eventually release or post screenshots. Because it's indie, lots of people also attribute the fonts directly when they post screenshots of their games, posters, videos, and stream overlays where they use them. I am very supportive of people using them, and repost their work, and so it's very casually symbiotic.
They're not lucrative on the scale that you might expect from a company or a popular vector font, but as supplementary income for a solo developer what they bring in helps put food on my table and also helps indie games get made which I think is great.
Usually the way I do things is I start by doing work manually. If I find that there's a common pattern in something I'm doing that could be automated, then I am able to transcribe it into the algorithm because I just follow the same steps I've been using in my head.
This wasn't a thing that actually came up a huge amount, as these glaring pairs aren't tremendously common. But they're just common enough that if I sat down and examined them, I could probably say something like "hey if 1.5 vertical lines worth of pixels are between two letters, kern this extra" or something like that.
I added this parameter because I fouund that for a lot of fonts, squeezing letters together over a certain distance would just look bad, so I would set -1 or -2 as a cap.
It looks like that's just one that snuck past my notice. The word "Fjord" would look strange because of this. This is a good example of how even with the quality testing, things can get through, because I still have to visually glance over hundreds of kerning tests.
One thing that might be a nice adjustment is to have an algorithm that detects the "area" between two letters, so basically how many pixels can volumetrically fit between them, and flag ones that go over a certain threshold. I could then color those tuples as red in the sample text, basically the system marking them as "potential problems" that required an author's look.
Truly a rabbit hole, but when it's done well it's very worthwhile. I have a lot of respect for font makers.
It's easy to forget how fast on-the-ground languages like Rust and C++ and Go are, not to mention when you use their multi-threading primitives and worker queues/etc.