The 'N' in particular is very worth watching. There are really no good answers, but at least an intentional answer is better than an accidental answer.
Troika text (a font-to-signed-distance-functions tool) can do a lot of the heavy lifting of using fonts in WebGL apps. It can also do the process of converting from font data to SDFs in glsl, so it's fast. No idea if it supports variable fonts these days though. https://github.com/protectwise/troika/tree/main/packages/tro...
I'm even more outside the loop, what happens if on my personal blog I don't have any analytics and don't do any metering so I have no idea how many visitors I get?
The way these kinds of fonts work is that you don't host the font, they do. You link the font licence you purchased through your HTML code (or CSS, depending on how the foundry recommends you to apply the font) with a specific font URL that they provide you, which will contain unique identifiers. Then they can track how often the font gets loaded.
If your site really kicks off and you max out those visits per month (that they track on their end), they either start charging you the higher tier, cut off loading your font, or send you stern emails.
There is no expectation that you share your analytics with a type foundry.
No, "honor system" is very frequently used and understood to refer to a system where there are explicit rules but where the rules are not enforced via active surveillance.
It sounds like you want to make a judgement call: "they're too small to enforce this license agreement," so you get to pretend it's an honor system and not a license agreement.
Not to take away from your fantastic explanation but I should note that’s not universal. There are foundries that operate on an honor basis and let you self host the font too.
What you describe is how Google Fonts handles this if you choose to use the fonts directly from Google's servers. This is a violation of GDPR. You can also download them and host them yourself, to comply with data protection laws.
This is a good thing to point people at when they claim that GDPR is simple to implement. This legal interpretation is totally reasonable but it’s probably not what most developers would expect.
The law itself is very clear and concise so it is straightforward to find that this is not only a reasonable interpretation but right there in the law.
Regardless, my point is just that there are implications of the GDPR that a lot of engineers are probably not aware of. It makes sense that sending your traffic to Google for fonts violates GDPR. But as an engineer, this is just a CDN. I would not have considered this a violation of GDPR without seeing someone else point it out.
On the contrary, I would say this is increasingly unusual nowadays. There are print restrictions on e.g. iStock content, but there's no attempt to "ration" the number of visitors that see a stock photo at a specific price point.
It's something that's generally put me off from licensing paid fonts - despite the work that has gone into them, because you're almost signing a blank cheque and it's not easy to know how many visitors are scraping content for LLMs.
Create text in higher resolution, rasterize it, warp it would be my process, if I needed to curve the characters themselves too. In case I didn't, because the shape is not that small compared to the text, simply wrapping around the shape works. Usually there's a tool to create a path, and then text can go along that path, as if the path were its baseline.
is this for someone that doesn't have access to proper typesetting software? i guess that could be cool if along side the font size you have a radius entry for programs that do not have a type-on-path tool. i'm just spoiled and have the proper tools so this causes me to tilt my head and ask why
It's not just about curving the baseline, the glyphs themselves curve according to the user-specified curve radius. Check out the second image/gif with curve optimizations on/off.
From what I can tell, it's a variable font, where the font developer can declare an axis (in this case "curve," or more likely "CURV") and the font user can control the value of that axis (e.g. via CSS) which controls how the font renders itself.
This is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.
FWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.
A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.
I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.
I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.
Because it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.
Not sure what you mean, and I'm not that versed in typography but as a graphic designer I'd bet people who actually know typography would appreciate something like this: laying out normal typefaces along a curve distort the space between letters and the top and bottom edges of letters won't follow the curvature they're being traced to until you do "manual" work (unless there's some auto-warping solution for fonts in something like Illustrator I am not aware of).
Of course this is not meant for prose texts or something, but for logo design this is a great thing to have.
https://incremental-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/slid...
Very cool
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