Phinney on Fonts

Author: Thomas Phinney

  • About .notdef: the symbol (not emoji!) that is often an “X” inside a tall rectangle

    I have fielded many versions of this question: “What does the emoji with an X in a large rectangle mean?” or “When texting, what is the meaning of the symbol with an “X” inside a tall rectangle?”

    That it is an X-​in-​a-​tall-​rectangle is just the most common rendition, although not the only possible one, for the “.notdef”. A variety of font-​specific notdefs are shown above.

    It is not an emoji, but you can get it instead of an emoji or other unusual character. A notdef (undefined glyph) is what gets displayed when a character is specified in text, but your current font does not support that character. Most commonly it happens with a newer emoji, but it could be in an unusual language or a new currency symbol, or… well, something unusual.

    This problem is not unique to texting, but applies to all kinds of displays of text on all devices, whenever the needed character is not available in the available font(s).It is an indicator for a “missing character,” which stands in for an emoji or any other character that your device or current font doesn’t have a glyph to display it with. This makes it a very special symbol.

    (A particularly hefty notdef, that I designed for one of my typefaces. The font is quite bold, so I made the outer box of the notdef quite bold to match. How font-​specific should a notdef be? As I get older and hopefully wiser, I gravitate towards what seems to be a near-​concensus view that it should contrast with the font, so users realize something is wrong. That means matching weight is actually a bad idea. Oops.)

    This is more common when you are receiving rather than sending a text, since you are unlikely to enter a character that you don’t see correctly. But it can happen when you try to view a web page, or copy text from a source and paste it somewhere that it comes out in a different font.

    Often there is some kind of font fallback available; your phone (or computer) tries to display unusual characters and emoji in some other font, that supports those characters. That is why in some situations you can see a name and some unusual character in the name is displayed in a different font than the rest of the name. But phones have limited storage space, and whether it is a phone or computer, there are over 150,000 characters defined in Unicode, with more added every year.

    So when your phone (or web browser or computer) runs out of ideas on how to display a character? You get a notdef.

    If you copy and paste a notdef on your computer or into a text or email you are sending, you will probably be copying some specific emoji or obscure character. That means that some other person who receives that (or later views the same file on their computer) may well see something else entirely!

    Even if they do see a notdef, it may look different, depending on the font they see it in. Here are the most common/​standard approaches to the notdef, as defined in the OpenType specification.

    The thinner box creates a very different appearance compared to the X-​in-​a-​box approach, doesn’t it? Note that these are general approaches, not precise glyph outlines that a font maker would use directly.

    The plain rectangular box is the style of notdef that was common in PostScript Type 1 fonts, back in the 1980s–90s. But it has fallen out of favor. I believe the main reason for this is that as a shape it is not as distinctive, and hence more easily missed by someone looking over some text.

    That plain box is the origin of the slang term “tofu” for the notdef, over some notional idea that it resembled a piece of tofu. I originally thought Google staff invented this slang, as the first time I remembered seeing it was in publicity for Google’s “Noto” universal font set (“Noto” being short for “no tofu”!). But my font colleague Denis Moyogo Jacquerye pointed to this thread on the Unicode mailing list in spring 2009, and says it was one of a number of references around that time. John Hudson seconds encountering the “tofu” term in Unicode circles, so I may have been hasty in assuming it was a Google invention. 

    The question-​mark-​in-​a-​box is used in many of Microsoft’s fonts, such as Calibri. Note how the question mark inside the notdef is in the style of the font—it isn’t just a generic one. This style was invented by John Hudson during the development of Calibri and the other so-​called “ClearType fonts,” that shipped in January 2007.

    “The ART [Advanced Reading Technologies] group had used a spiral .notdef in Palatino Linotype, but it had caused confusion because it wasn’t recognised by users as a missing glyph indicator. For the C* fonts, I suggested that a) a box of some kind was necessary, and b) a question mark would indicate uncertainty: there’s a character here, but we don’t know how to display it.”

    John Hudson on Mastodon, 17 Dec 2024

    A plain rectangular box was the style of notdef that was common in PostScript Type 1 fonts, back in the 1980s–90s. But it has fallen out of favor. I believe the main reason for this is that as a shape it is not as distinctive, and hence more easily missed by someone looking over some text and trying to spot errors and glitches. When I was at Adobe, we went from the empty box to the X-​in-​a-​box style as part of our transition from PostScript Type 1 to OpenType, from 1999–2003.

    HOW DO I GET THE RIGHT CHARACTER INSTEAD?

    Updating to the latest OS for your phone (or computer) usually also updates your Unicode and emoji support and system fonts. If the problem is in an app that has its own Unicode/​emoji/​fonts, then updating that app may help.

    Many apps and OSes will use “fallback fonts” when the current font does not support a needed character. In that case, the above advice is good: you need better support from some core system font.

    (This was originally written for Quora, but as Quora continues to turn to garbage, one of my answers on this, despite having the most upvotes, was made invisible by the system for unclear reasons. So I have merged my answers to two similar questions into one, and posted it here.)

  • “What does a design brief for a new typeface (font) look like?”

    Many of the same questions could reasonably be in play, whether one is choosing an existing typeface, commissioning a typeface, customizing an existing typeface, or designing a new typeface oneself. There may not even be a “typical design brief” for a new typeface—but there are certainly elements one should include and things to consider.

    A design brief is sometimes neither written down, nor clearly developed. I encourage both aspiring type designers and clients of custom type design projects to go through the same process: write it all down. It will be helpful, often immensely, to articulate questions and goals clearly. It sets everyone’s expectations and creates reasonable limits.

    Even in a solo project, sometimes there is a temptation to allow “goal creep” and more gets added to the project in small pieces, with a final scope that is considerably more than originally intended. Writing out a design brief can help prevent this.

    Many clients don’t know what questions to ask, so the design brief is something that usually gets developed in collaboration between the type designer and the client. Or, when there is no specific client, it means asking the questions of yourself, to better focus the design process. Being specific is restrictive, but this is likely to result in a more successful design outcome—even if the final fonts are used in ways beyond what was originally intended (consider Bell Centennial, originally designed for telephone books).

    A design brief may be a living document, revised over time during the early stages of the project as it unfolds. There may be a first round brief written in the early exploratory stages, and a later “final” brief to guide the full execution.

    In any case, when taking on a new typeface design project, some good questions to ask might be:

    Who is the client, or target customer?

    Hypatia Sans: Myself/​graphic designers. But I also wanted something Robert Slimbach would say was good, original, and versatile enough to be an “Adobe Original.” In case you are wondering what it looks like… this entire blog is set in Hypatia Sans, both body text and headlines.

    Extensis logo redesign: Software company Extensis (my employer at the time)—makes font management & digital asset management apps.

    Is it replacing a current typeface? If so, what does the client like and dislike about the current typeface? What is motivating the change?

    Neither project was approached as a font replacement. For Extensis, I was specifically trying to ignore the previous logotype (which I disliked very much), just starting over. But along the way, I made a full basic-​character-​set font.

    If they considered off-​the-​shelf options, what did they consider and what did they like about each of them? What did they dislike about each of them? Why did they not go with any of them?

    Hypatia Sans: Although not replacing a single existing typeface, I was trying to differentiate it from other geometric sans. Futura was too cold, but the classic proportions of the caps were good. Instead of imitating them directly, I instead looked to the same source, classical roman caps (e.g. Trajan) for proportions. The Futura lowercase was too cold, but Avenir lowercase was too bland.

    Extensis: I found this part incredibly helpful in the process of creating a new logotype recently for a font software company, Extensis. We looked at a bunch of specific typefaces and rejected them for a variety of reasons. In the end I took an existing typeface, Adelle (by Veronika Burian & José Scaglione of TypeTogether), and modified it quite heavily—with their permission, of course! But I used the knowledge of what my internal client and I liked about other typefaces to guide what I did to the pre-​existing typeface. The logo is wider, a tiny bit lighter than the Thin weight of Adelle, and 5 of the 8 letters have significant design tweaks. But it did start with Adelle.

    What is the typeface a vehicle for? What is to be communicated with it? In what way should it flavor the message? Is it intended for a particular project or product?

    Extensis: We wanted it to feel modern and somewhat techno, yet warm and approachable. We had a very playful graphic for the logo—it was almost wacky. We needed the font to be playful enough to not clash with the graphic, but still be serious, to ground it all. It was a balancing act.

    Is there a specific target usage? 

    E.g. “advertising headlines” or “body text in all publications and online.” Even if not…. What sizes will it be used at? In what media? How will the type be reproduced (imaged, rasterized)? On screen? For web pages? In print?

    Extensis: The logo needed to function at pretty small sizes, as logos often do. Some of the typefaces we had considered were dropped because their weight got too spindly at small sizes on screen… they were not holding up well enough across all use cases.

    Hypatia Sans: Originally I intended it for display usage. I imagined it being used for product packaging, maybe some logos. Then I found it worked surprisingly well even at larger text sizes. So I revised my plan and spaced it so it was OK in larger text sizes (like 12-​14 pt in print). So, moderate amounts of body text, through to larger display sizes. Should look good on screen, but with details that will be interesting in print.

    What else is known about the desired design category?

    Extensis: We had decided we wanted something in the line of a slab serif typeface, something in a realm defined by typefaces such as Archer, Donnerstag, Vista Slab, and Adelle.

    How many styles (individual fonts) are desired? 

    Regular, italic, bold and bold italic are four fonts right there (and no, you can’t get reasonable quality results by just using algorithmic slanting and bolding.) More weights, more widths, or other variants (eg different optical sizes) can all add up. Families of 8–20 fonts are common. The largest family I know of is Kepler, comprising 168 fonts!

    Hypatia Sans: I wanted a wide dynamic range of weight, and ended up with six weights and their matching italics, from extra light to black.

    What kind of language coverage is required? 

    Any other particular character set needs (e.g. particular symbols, math capability, whatever). There are a variety of semi-​standard character sets and language groupings, but the whole matter is a bit fuzzy around the edges. A basic but complete western European character set might include over 200 glyphs. With central/​eastern European accented letters (“extended Latin”), you would end up over 300. 

    Each of these choices involves either choosing to adopt somebody else’s pre-​packaged language coverage definitions, or extensive research of your own. And some choices are more complex than they first appear: if you do Greek, do you also do polytonic Greek? If you do Cyrillic, which languages do you cover? (Cyrillic character sets are almost as complex as Latin.)

    For Hypatia Sans I was completely out of control. Latin, extended Latin, and even more obscure. Cyrillic, extended Cyrillic… I ended up further formalizing and extending Adobe’s character set standards for Latin and Cyrillic because of it! My manager stopped me when I was considering Norse runes (I am not making this up, I swear). Still, it was too much and I regretted it later, when what seemed fun for one style became a ton of work, for the full range of weights and italics too. Plus, the project became so big and slow that I advanced massively in skill before I was done, and found myself redesigning some things, or just seeing things at the end that I wished I had done differently. In retrospect, I could have advanced my skills more efficiently/​effectively by doing multiple smaller projects.

    What kind of typographic extras (characters/​glyphs) are required, or might be desirable? 

    Arbitrary fractions, both lining and oldstyle figures in both tabular and proportional widths and the five f-​ligatures – fi fl ffi ffl ff – are now “basic” for me. But others might think of them as extras. I think of small caps as extras, especially if there is a large language support requirement. Superscript and subscript numbers? A full set of letters for ordinals? So many possibilities!

    Create a glyph set definition 

    Now that you know what you want, consider documenting the glyph complement /​ character set fully, perhaps with a spreadsheet. If there are common characters not covered,  that too should be mentioned or highlighted some way, either by the spreadsheet or in accompanying text.

    Hypatia Sans ended up with something like 2700 glyphs per font ( 3000 after it was updated to match later character set standards). That is why it took for-​bloody-​ever to complete. I hope everyone learns from my errors! Not that you shouldn’t ever do a huge project, but just perhaps not as a first (or second or third) typeface.

    Many of these things essentially multiply together. For example, if you need ‘real’ small caps, you should probably have them for all the supported languages, and in all the fonts in the family. This kind of extension of features to the full font is often assumed, but it is best to be explicit about it, so it can be part of a delivery checklist. It is even more important to be explicit if there are inconsistencies either within a font (small caps only for un-​accented Latin?) or between fonts in the family (small caps only for the upright styles but not the italics?).

    For reference

    Adobe character sets: Latin (5 levels), Greek (2 levels), Cyrillic (3 levels). These do not include “typographic” extras such as small caps, oldstyle figures, or additional ligatures beyond the most basic (fi and fl). But they are fairly comprehensive for language and basic symbol coverage.
    Thomas’ page of type design resources!

    Note

    This is a much edited version of what was once a Quora anwer. Special thanks to Dave Crossland for edits and input when we used this in our Crafting Type classes! Any errors or omissions entirely my fault. Also see discussion about typeface design briefs on Typedrawers.

  • More of my fonts/​typography answers coming here!

    Back around 2013–2021, I really liked Quora. I could go through questions people asked, find interesting questions that I was especially qualified to answer (mostly about fonts and typography), and write up an informative answer that people would read and upvote. Comments and further questions in the discussion to each of my Quora answers would help me refine and improve them.

    I could similarly find and read interesting thoughts and analysis on darn near any topic of interest. I accumulated favorite writers and would often read Quora as a leisure activity, just for intellectual interest. It was a social network focused on ideas. 

    Quora has since mostly turned to junk. At this point, I don’t even have any confidence as to how long the site will even continue to be up. Or if it is still up, will the content be freely available? Findable? So I have been revising and saving my best answers here, to trickle out over time.

    Why did Quora turn to crap? This is the process Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. They were getting participation and views, but without making money. The site needed to figure out how it would make money. So they experimented in a bunch of different ways to try to increase “reader engagement” and reduce costs… and in the process lost everything I liked about it.

    In the case of Quora, some particular things included: 

    • Making it harder to find the answers to a question. The default when you click on a question is now to show “all related” answers instead of the answers to the current question… which means you have to read more and click more to get the info you actually want.
    • Rewarding people for asking questions (through the “Quora Partner Program”) instead of focusing on getting good answers. Worse, specifically rewarding questions that upset people as long as they got responses. Responses pointing out problems in the question itself are still responses, so… you can see where that path leads.
    • Allowing anonymous questions. Yes, there are totally legitimate reasons for question-​askers to want to be anonymous. But the proportion of junk and trolling skyrocketed after this change.
    • Doing all the above while reducing their staff of moderators.
    • Most of the above factors contributed to spam, misinformation, and low-​quality content
    • At first, it was just more bad content. BUT, the spam, low-​quality content and user-​hostile interface decisions drove away many of the best contributors (myself included, obviously). So now the fraction of “good content” is much worse, not only because the denominator grew out of control, but the numerator also shrank.

    Quora’s “Top Writers” program lasted from 2013–18, coinciding with peak Quora. There weren’t any huge perks, just a little recognition, a badge on your Quora profile. But still, it was nice. It was not a big enough deal that it made it onto my c.v.—but I did link to my Quora answers. I just deleted that link on my c.v., because being associated at all with Quora seems like a negative.

    But now Quora has been overrun with spam and fake questions plus hate speech and bullying. I won’t yank my existing answers (already often revised and polished over time), but I am polishing and further revising the best ones, and will post them here. I have already copied a couple dozen of my best answers to draft posts here, edited and posted the first couple, and done some light editing on most of the others (with more to come). I may set them to auto-​post periodically.

    That all makes me sad, but at least I was able to slurp up a whole bunch of my existing content and plan to re-post.

  • What is the relationship between fonts and Unicode characters?

    “It is my understanding that not all fonts contain the Unicode character set. Are they contained in certain fonts or are they independent? If a code does not exist in a font then what is used?”

    Older version of this originally published at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-relationship-between-Fonts-and-Unicode-characters/answer/Thomas-Phinney

    Unicode is the standard for characters in computing. It assigns a unique code to each character. So for example the capital A is a character. Some things that look the same are different characters, so for example the cap Alpha and cap A usually look the same, but get different Unicode numbers.

    A font can contain zero or more glyphs—a glyph is a single slot in the font that usually contains a representation of … something, a letter or symbol. In most cases, one glyph represents one character, although sometimes more than one glyph can be used for one character (for example, an accented character can be composed from a base character plus a combining accent), or more than one character can be represented by a single glyph (for example, a ligature, such as the o-​f-​f-​i ligature in Caflisch Script). 

    Aside from such complications, usually most (often nearly all) of the glyphs in a font have Unicode codepoints (numbers) assigned to them. If a glyph does not have a Unicode codepoint, it might be related to a Unicode value via an OpenType feature. So for example, the ‘liga’ ligature feature in Caflisch Script would have code that says, if you have the sequence o-​f-​f-​i then replace it with the ligature glyph named “o_​f_​f_​i”. So while that ligature glyph does not have a single or direct Unicode codepoint, it is related to a group of characters that do have Unicode codepoints.

    When it comes to combining accents (more technically called “diacritics” by font geeks), the Unicode standard itself has info about some characters that can be assembled from other characters. For common western European languages this is all pretty straightforward: Unicode has codepoints assigned to combinations such as é and ü, as well as separate ideas of special “combining accent” characters that can go with the base letter to make the combo. But Unicode does not have all the possible combinations as predefined characters, so even for characters such as a–z plus diacritics needed by some African languages, there is not precombined character, in the computer it is only represented as base-letter-plus-combining-diacritic.

    For many languages, including Indic languages, Arabic, and others, the processing is even more complex. Let’s just say that the further we are from the simple confines of English the less often it is true that one character equals exactly one glyph. 

    An average western-​language font has about 200 to 400 glyphs. A more extensive one might have 500 to 700, and a really extensive one thousands (2000–5000). Fonts for other writing systems such as Chinese or Japanese routinely have 5,000, 10,000 or even 20,000 glyphs, but because of that, and the complexity of the individual glyphs, there are fewer such fonts designed.

    “Not all fonts contain the Unicode character set” is an understatement. No single font on earth contains the entire Unicode character set, and perhaps no single font ever will. Unicode currently defines about 150,000 characters, is updated (and expanded) annually, and currently there is a 64K limit on the number of encoded glyphs in a font (in any major format, anyway).

    The Unicode character set is completely independent of specific fonts, although specific fonts may attempt to be thorough in covering particular sections of Unicode. (And the origins of Unicode include trying to be a superset of all preexisting font encoding standards.)

    “If a code does not exist in a font then what is used?” Aside from cases where the character might be assembled from others (like with the combining accents mentioned previously), if a called-​for Unicode character is not supported in any way in the currently selected font, then the behavior still depends on the application and the operating system. In some cases a “notdef” glyph may be shown to indicate a missing glyph in the current font—more common with high-​end graphics apps such as Adobe Creative Cloud. Many apps and environments will at least attempt to do font fallback, substituting some other font that does support the desired character. In such cases the right letter or symbol will appear, but in a different font! This is why sometimes you will see a document where most of the characters are in one font, but perhaps an accented character or something else less common is in a clearly non-​matching font.

    In extreme cases (more common for especially rare or newly-​defined characters), even environments that do attempt such fallback may fail to find a match because they have no font that supports the character in question! In such situations, one may still see a notdef, or get fallback to a special Last Resort font. (I have a whole separate article about the notdef, pending!)

    See also: Fallback font – Wikipedia

  • “What does it cost to have a custom typeface designed?”

    “For example, how much would it cost (roughly) for someone like Hoefler to design a new font family for Mastercard?”
    (Originally a Quora question, and my Quora answer. But given Quora’s increasingly anti-​user choices, I migrated the question here and updated my answer for current pricing.)

    For a typeface of four styles, from a famous name type designer, with temporary exclusivity, you are probably looking at $100,000–250,000 and up as a rough ballpark. It might take them a year or more, although that won’t necessarily be full time on your typeface. This assumes no horribly extensive OpenType features, just basic ligatures and oldstyle figures, maybe small caps. I’m also assuming a western + CE character set (which is pretty common these days).

    For ~ the same thing from a decently established but not famous type designer, you might expect to pay $30,000–75,000, roughly.

    One rare public sharing of info about what a designer/​foundry “should” charge was from Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, a fairly prestigious type designer /​ foundry. He wrote “IMO, I think that a price of around US$ 20-​25k per weight is appropriate for a Western European glyph set (ANSII), giving the client three years exclusivity. If they want to own the rights, double the price.” (December 2013 price quotation for a new custom font on typedrawers.com.) Add about 65% for inflation to 2024, then reduce that to only 50% because of heavy competition in type design, and that would make it about $30–38k per style.

    So with permanent exclusivity, maybe double the price to USD $60–76K per style. Add CE coverage as well as exclusivity, but no small caps, and that “suggested price” perhaps goes to $70–88K per style. (Bruno says “weight” but presumably means style, so a regular four-​member family is four styles—although only two literal weights, plus their matching italics.)

    From a designer early in their career, or based in a developing country, or if the customer has lower quality expectations than mine and is willing to go with somebody who does lower quality and faster work, or some combination of such factors, you could end up with considerably lower prices, as low as $8,000–25,000 per font style.

    Now, all this gets kind of weird and warped once one gets into variable fonts. Those might be prices per master, and then add somewhere between a quarter and half again at the end, depending on how extreme the masters are.

    Some designers (e.g. John Hudson at Tiro Typeworks) try to figure out how complex the typeface design is in general, and then charge a price-​per-​glyph for that typeface. They figure that easier and harder glyphs will average out over the whole set. This seems reasonable to me, and I gather he is happy with it. (I have tried to estimate work by actually assessing a difficulty multiplier individually on different glyphs, and that was an absurd amount of work. I do not generally recommend it unless you have a specific reason, such as needing to assess relative work done by different people on the same project.)

    These are pretty rough guidelines, based on my own experience in soliciting fonts for development from a variety of type designers, what I have been paid, my discussions with other type designers, plus discussions among type designers in a couple of fora.

  • “Do companies get sued for using fonts illegally?”

    Originally posted on Quora, in response to a user question. Due to Quora’s increasingly desperate and user-​hostile changes, I revised and reposted it here.
    Last update 29 May 2024.

    Yes, companies often get threatened with legal action, and (less often) if they do not pay for their font use, get sued. Many companies have been: (1) threatened with legal action, (2) pretty much forced to pay what they already should have, and/​or (3) sued for using fonts in unlicensed ways.

    Sometimes (but rarely) these cases are dismissed. Usually they are settled, outside the courtroom. The only case I can think of that was even partially decided by the court was Adobe vs SSI, way back in 1998, wherein Adobe won a partial summary judgment on a number of key points. But even this was more a corporate piracy case involving people selling ripped-​off fonts rather than a normal business-​use case. In general, the business and personal use cases never get as far as being decided by a court.

    Software and services have spring up around this. There are apps for managing fonts both for individuals and across organizations (Connect Fonts, FontBase, and others), and legal compliance concerns are part of their appeal. Some font management apps have been renamed (Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server are now Extensis Connect Fonts) or discontinued (so many, notably FontXplorer). There are entire businesses set up around font license compliance consulting, and services that help font foundries find unlicensed font use on the web (and optionally collect money for them).

    Here are over 20 lawsuits around unlicensed font use. I have excluded cases where a type designer, font foundry or distributor has sued another type designer, foundry or distributor, although that happens occasionally as well.

    Sometimes these things stop short of a lawsuit, but can still be pretty unpleasant. I don’t actually buy the old saying “there is no such thing as bad publicity”:

    There exist multiple online scanners that look for fonts posted online or used in web sites. Some are owned by major retailers/​distributors, but at least one is available to any type designer or foundry that wants to pay for it (license infringement monitoring/​DMCA service aka Fontdata aka TypeSnitch) which might or might not be the same thing as Font Radar.

    Heck, I won’t name the offending party, but in one of my day jobs, we once got a nasty cease-​and-​desist email from a lawyer from a well-​known font company—I knew the owners and had been to their offices! The lawyer claimed we were using two different fonts, in different ways, illegally. He was wrong, of course, but we still got the letter. (And never heard back from the lawyer when we explained how he was mistaken.)

    Cases such as the one Sergey Yakunin cites of Sberbank with Fedra Sans and Fedra Serif are not unusual, it is just that one usually doesn’t hear about them. Often they are pursued without major public attention. Lots of negotiations behind the scenes, the foundry usually gets paid what they should have in the first place, and maybe not everyone is happy, but at least things are resolved in some vaguely reasonable way.

    Here are a couple more high-​profile unlicensed use cases that are well-​known in the industry (discussed in public forums, etc.) but did not get major media attention:

    For more like that, see also:

    And finally, a general piece on font piracy, from Wired Magazine.

    ADDENDUM

    The original question I was answering on Quora featured these details in a comment (one of the things the “new Quora” unhelpfully suppresses!): “I am starting a new company. I have found a font that I want to use on my website (est. traffic 10 000/​month). I have purchased desktop license, though if I understand correctly, I am not allowed to use it on my website. Do companies actually get sued for using fonts illegally?”

    For their particular case, I’ll point out that the licensing required, at that volume level, tends to be pretty cheap. They would waste more money-​as-​time reading the links in this post than just getting legal, either for a one-​time fee, or something like $25/​year (low-​end rate for Adobe Typekit). Or even free if one uses Google Fonts, though that would not get them the commercial fonts you are talking about.

    Also, illegal use of a font on a web site is something you are doing in public, and accessible to web crawlers and the like—as previously mentioned above. I know of at least one general-​purpose service for scanning for illegal font use, and I know of at least one foundry that runs their own bots to scan for their fonts being used illegally. So if I was going to use a font illegally, the one way I definitely would not try to do so would be on a web site as a web font!

  • Why Did Adobe Discontinue Font Chameleon in the 90s?

    Back in the mid to late 90s, Adobe acquired a company called Ares Software. Ares made font-​related software products, including doing the programming (but not owning or distributing) of Letraset FontStudio, which in its day was one of the best font editors. They are best known for a remarkable application and technology called Font Chameleon.

    There is a popular myth that Adobe bought Font Chameleon to kill a threatening technology. Actually, no, removing it from the market was not a motivation for the acquisition. The team that made fonts and would have cared one way or another had nothing to do with those decisions, and were simply not interested in Font Chameleon.

    Adobe’s purchase of Ares was done to acquire Font Chameleon technology, and was entirely driven by the PostScript group at Adobe, to use the technology for font compression purposes to fit more, cheaper, in the ROM of PostScript 3 printers. All Ares retail products (not just Font Chameleon) were discontinued as Adobe put the two Ares principals to work on adapting the Chameleon tech for Adobe’s use.

    (Also, Font Chameleon was in some respects massively more powerful than MM, but also had huge limitations. It could only handle the axes it knew about, and could only handle the characters it knew about.)

    I joined Adobe in mid-​1997, shortly after the acquisition, and thought it was an interesting tech. I ended up deeply involved in helping make the whole system work together (chameleon fonts in ROM including CE fonts, printer drivers, and supposedly matching fonts on end user computers). All the systems were optimized to make an individual piece work in a static environment, according to known schema. Real end-​to-​end testing of these things hadn’t really been needed in years. But because there were numerous technical changes being made at the same time to all these pieces, suddenly end-​to-​end testing was critical. I got involved in pointing that out and pushing everyone to make sure their pieces played together instead of them all trying to point at specs that had been made before any of the pieces actually existed. 

    Through some internal asking around at Adobe, I was able to get my hands on Ares’ Font Chameleon editor: the company’s internal tool used to make a Chameleon “font descriptor” that could be blended with others. These font descriptors as individual files were also super compact, which is why the PostScript team wanted the tech. They relied on a (large) mutatable “master” font , plus the descriptors; the master + descriptors for 136 PostScript 3 fonts were a LOT smaller than the set of fonts themselves, and allowed support for central European accented characters with hardly any size impact.

    What was super interesting to me was how insanely fast it was to create such a font descriptor—which could also be exported as a stand-​alone font if one wished, not to mention instantly manipulated in weight, width, x-​height, etcetera. At the time I thought it could have been an incredible rapid prototyping tool. With it I could do in a day what would otherwise take me weeks. But the limitations of the tech, and tendency to encourage some degree of blandification meant… nobody in a position of power and influence within the type group was interested. They had looked at it, and decided it had inferior results and wasn’t worth pursuing.

    It is also worth noting that the lead programmers from Ares were freakin’ brilliant, but the code was not entirely stable/​reliable. I certainly had quite a few crashes using the Chameleon editor—although to be fair, it was only intended as an internal app, not a retail/​external app.

    So, Font Chameleon died because the Adobe hardware team that bought it wanted it for underlying tech, and didn’t do retail software products. Whereas the team that did retail fonts had no interest in it, thought there were quality issues, and there was a general perception that maintaining/​developing any of the Ares products as retail software would have been painful.

  • Font Detective forensic typography assistant needed

    Hello, Watson!

    UPDATE 25 DEC: Just thought I should say that yes I picked someone (out of many highly qualified—or even overqualified—applicants). They are choosing to stay anonymous for now, but have been doing a lovely job so far!

    UPDATE 23 NOV: (1) Good lord, I have a lot of applicants. Application deadline will be Nov 24 at 8 am US Pacific time, and yes that is Thanksgiving for us. (2) By “very occasional, part-​time work” I mean maybe 3 hours, or 6, or 16, all in a week or two… and then maybe nothing for weeks or even months. This is just an occasional brief gig. Over time it might become more. Or perhaps not. The task of sample clipping is the main thing I have come up with, and will be an ongoing one. It is pretty darn tedious, sorry. (3) Added a couple more details in the body.

    This is currently very occasional, part-​time work. Many of my cases from my detective work involve things like time consuming fiddly data collection, which I don’t have time to continue doing all by myself. A particular case at hand involves about a dozen documents. To demonstrate what the font is, part of my method involves taking samples of some specific letters (defined by me) from the documents. This amounts to clipping graphic images (from a PDF or image file, via Acrobat or Photoshop) and pasting them into a table (in Word or possibly InDesign). It is pretty rote work. In this case, like most of them, we already know what the typeface is when we go to do this clipping: the problem is to demonstrate that to the court. So, we take these laborious samples and make a pretty chart. And for a particular case at hand, instead of the usual one document and just maybe two, there are many. And a deadline in December.

    I have more than a bit too much total work for the rest of this year, so I am looking for somebody to do this task, on this and future cases. Currently I define which characters are worth collecting samples of, but that is something I could potentially hand off in the future. Or perhaps we both pick some.

    This could quite possibly lead to other work; it depends on your skills and what you bring to the table. There are times when I could use somebody to research some issue… I would give an example from a current case, but I definitely shouldn’t say it. Sigh.

    The work pays well, and I am happy to share some of that. 

    Email me if you have my email, or just use the comment function to give me your email address and a link to your resume or a description of your background. (I won’t publish these comments!) Obviously some design and typography background is a bonus, but then again, this is also pretty basic, for now. Brains are the most important resource. No promise of growth and advancement, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out!

    This will require signing a non-​disclosure agreement. I will let you know what you can say about any given case at hand, but it is often nothing, or pretty minimal. Even afterwards, most cases remain largely confidential. The ones we can talk about are a distinct minority.

  • Font Detective talk in Dublin, 16 Nov 2022

    This Wednesday night at 6 pm, I will be doing a presentation about my font detective work in Dublin! Come on by—it’s free and no advance registration is needed. (Note however there is no on-​campus parking: transit or bicycle recommended, else park on the street nearby.) 

    Location: TU Dublin, East Quad (I am told there will be a sign-​in desk at the entrance)
    Time: 6 pm! will run maybe an hour to an hour and a half, with Q&A
    Cost: Free!

    I am in Dublin to do a Crafting Type workshop (Thurs–Sat) at TU Dublin, before a visit to London for one of my current cases! The good folks with Typography Ireland at the Uni asked me to do a wee talk about my forensic font work….

    I shall discuss and show evidence from four forensic cases, including The Case of the Concealed Credits (featuring Justin Timberlake and will.i.am), the Respected Rabbi, the Canadian Caper, and the Secret of the Certificate. I am the world’s only ongoing “font detective”; as a global expert on fonts, typography and printing, I do font-​related document forensics in legal cases around the world. The stakes can be fortune, fame, careers, imprisonment, the family house, or the provenance of one of the world’s most valuable artworks.

    Blackletter glyphs from The Secret of the Certificate
    a different certificate, the s’micha from The Respected Rabbi

    About me: I have been doing font forensics since I testified about a forged will back in 1999. My list of expert witness clients includes a “big three” auto maker and a major California city. I have been consulted on questioned documents by BBC News, The Washington Post, PBS television’s “History Detectives,” NPR, the US Treasury, and many others. I am also a type designer who has created fonts for Adobe and Google. I am the former CEO of FontLab, and previously had strategic/​technical font product management roles at Adobe and Extensis. I was on the board of ATypI, the international typography association, from 2004–20. I have four patents and a medal, as well as an MS in printing & typography from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

  • Font Production Person Needed, first half 2021

    NOTE: The position has been filled! 

    Qualifications:

    • Font production experience (which might be mostly type design)
    • Variable font development experience, preferably with multiple axes
      • Bonus if you have worked with design space that did not have axes in the corners.
    • Already qualified as a supplier with Google (and hence under non-​disclosure agreement)
    • FontLab 6/​7 experience highly desirable, but not required
    • Technical skills including Python scripting are a plus
    • Happy doing unusual font production that is possibly even more fiddly and repetitive than the usual

    Features

    • Remote work, any location possible!
    • Flexible work hours. (I am on US Pacific time, however.)
    • early January through May 2021
    • Expected hours/​month dependent on experience and productivity
    • Working with me (Thomas Phinney) and Vassil Kateliev on project, with Google as our client

    Details

    WHAT? I have been commissioned to continue a variable font project I started this year with Google. In 2020, I did a first version with a weight axis, but now I need to do a big expansion in 2021—with two more axes. The work is primarily adding further masters to an existing typeface, not original design work. Given the desired timeline, there is too much work and not enough time for me to do it solo. 

    WHEN? This would start at or near the beginning of January and run through May.

    WHO? So I am looking for one more person to help work on it in FontLab 7; currently it is me plus some help from Vassil Kateliev. This will be work for hire, and the resulting typeface will be owned by Google (not open source). Vassil is our scripting guru, and can do some amazing things with automation—his contributions in that regard were invaluable in the version 1 project. This time he will likely also have some hands-​on production role. I will do considerable production work myself.

    PUBLIC? Unlike some of my/​our recent projects, this isn’t open source, and I can’t yet talk about it publicly. For candidates who seem plausible, I will get you to sign an NDA with Google, and then I can tell you the details, and we can talk more!

    MONEY. This involves a fixed amount of money, with the hours dependent on your experience/​productivity. Although I am doing the primary screening and will be supervising the work, you will negotiate pay with Google, and be paid by Google (monthly after the end of each month).

    COMMENTARY. This is not artistically interesting work, but it is somewhat technically interesting, and you are working with some arguably nice people. Pay is OK, and it may lead directly or indirectly to future work. It will be a high-​profile project, but I am sorry to say it is not yet known if we will be able to talk about our contributions afterward.

    DIVERSITY. Diverse applicants are especially welcome. 

    Process:

    Contact me with the form below. If you seem like a plausible candidate, I will have Google share a non-​disclosure agreement (NDA) with you; you signing the NDA will allow me to explain the job in more detail.

    Note that getting the NDA requires your postal address, and company name if any.