emily_b

Thank you very much.

A Kickstarter campaign to raise funding for full Unicode support, code refactoring and other new features.

Font Combiner is an application that allows easy drag-and-drop font supplements, with a lot of other features.

https://fontcombiner.com/

A successful campaign will bring about a new evolution of this application and some exposure on HN could be decisive in gaining some momentum. If it's not a cheek, a few up votes and perhaps a few social shares would be hugely valued.

Any pointers for further promotion or suggestions for adjustments to the pitch would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks to all.

Big changes made since first shown to HN about a year ago in an early beta stage. Hopefully ready for some proper promotion (one of the biggest hurdles).

Features include browser-side resizing, which makes it fast to upload pics straight from phones, and a fully-responsive layout (as standard as that sounds in 2016). Trying to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile.

Feedback from HN users, particularly on the UI, but also on the general direction, would be valuable, as would advice on effective (and cheap) promotion.

A few social shares would be excellent, and if we can gather a few more early users, even while there may still be a bug or two to work out, that'd be even better.

Thanks for taking a look.

Imgur isn't a problem, and this shouldn't be a problem for Imgur. There are similarities, but that's mostly due to necessity in good UI. If people prefer Imgur, they should certainly use Imgur.

I can't comment on what might be right or wrong with other sites, not in the capacity of someone promoting a competing product.

Itsosticky is fast (server hardware permitting), modern, has no advertising at all at the moment, and no third-party sharing widgets.

I can't discuss plans for monetisation - there are none as yet.

Finding a way to provide viable (fast and high quality) image resizing on phones was one of the biggest challenges.

Forgive the delay in responding.

Itsosticky was designed from the outset to be an image sharing service with community potential, contrasted with image hosting, it's a service that facilitates quick sharing of an image or screenshot with a friend or group.

When used for its intended purpose, direct sharing, as opposed to free hosting for hotlinking, there are features that make it worthwhile sharing an Itsosticky resource URI rather than a direct link to an image file. For example, zoom capabilities, that some people may find superior to those available natively in a web browser, albums and easy social sharing links, and not least, fast uploads from phones without the need for a dedicated app.

All users are invited to publish their images to the gallery for greater social participation or exhibition.

You can drag and drop from other web pages or copy and paste via Ctrl-v. Might be a useful one-step alternative.

A new image sharing service

Itsosticky is a brand new image sharing service with some ambition, just launched after a year of development.

More info is available here https://itsosticky.com/about

There are several things that make this different to other image sharing services. Itsosticky will quickly and automatically rescale images that are above a certain size threshold, with auto-orientation of JPEGs uploaded from phones. The layout is fully responsive, allowing for consistent URIs when shared across devices. It's light weight, with no advertising technologies.

Many of the images currently displayed in the gallery are simply placeholders dropped onto the site by helpful beta users, and there are surely bugs to address here or there, but by and large, Itsosticky is ready for use.

Thanks for taking a look. Feedback from mobile devices would be particularly valuable.

Please upvote if you think this service is worthwhile and deserves to go somewhere.

#web

Working to demonstrate the advantages in scaling down oversized fonts to offset transitions from local fonts to web fonts. A cap on the transfer speed offers some interesting insight.

View statistics for Font Combiner following some exposure on HN show upwards of 70% Linux and Mac. This probably isn't representative of the audience most fonts in use would be presented to. If you're interested in the differences, do try a test in Windows on a browser without DirectWrite.

This is a screenshot showing Windows 7 and Chrome 30: http://i.imgur.com/WBbUIFi.png

It seemed right to try to offer transparent comparisons for screenshots rather than cherry pick. Linux font rendering can vary a lot depending on how things are set up.

Forgive the slow response to some of the comments. Font Combiner's utility is intended to be as much in the facility to combine glyphs from more than one font and to adjust spacing characteristics and hinting to taste, along with scaling fonts to size for greater consistency.

Hinting and vertical metrics are quite the rabbit hole across platforms. This is a good article http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-...

Font kerning is very new to web browsers. So far as I'm aware neither of the fonts demonstrated at the top of the post contain kerning information. The heavy fonts lower down do.

Font Combiner itself is still very new. Tracking or character spacing (as opposed to kerning) may benefit from some additional tweaks for OSX. This is outside of the scope of the current UI.

I don't know if Google strip hinting, but that sounds broadly accurate. Font Combiner makes use of ttfautohint as part of hinting types B and C, with slight modifications where a subset omits character 'o'. Hinting and truetype instructions make little difference to OSX and others.