http://talleming.com Tal's Blog Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:56:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A while back I described an idea for a different approach to implementing a fraction feature. Since then, I have gotten feedback from Karsten Luecke and others, the algorithm has been improved and a large number of fonts have been released that use this implementation. The revised code is below. ... http://talleming.com/2009/10/01/fraction-fever-2/ A quick note about web font progress: Erik van Blokland and I have been working on a new web font format. You can read all about it on the W3C WWW-Font mailing list. Update: Lots of foundries are liking it. http://talleming.com/2009/07/15/webfont-proposal/ There has been a lot of recent discussion about the possibility of web pages containing embedded fonts. The professional type design world has been relatively silent on this issue. That's probably because there are significantly fewer of us than there are web designers. As a type designer who understands type ... http://talleming.com/2009/04/21/web-fonts/ Yesterday I had to dive into a large number of fonts to fix a tiny bug. It sounds easy enough, but font mastering these days is a process of educated guessing, pure guessing, crashing software, MacGyver like problem solving and finger crossing. As a result of this chaos, I've gotten ... http://talleming.com/2008/10/09/comparing-font-binaries/ At long last, Ken Barber's Studio Lettering is available to the public. I wrote the OpenType features for these fonts, so I thought that I'd give a quick behind the scenes tour. If you are interested, Ken and I will be explaining more of the overall logic in detail at ... http://talleming.com/2008/07/08/studio-lettering/ I've never liked the way fraction feature is usually implemented in OpenType fonts. I thought I was the only person until Kent Lew wrote to me with the same frustration. We talked about it a bit and I worked up a possible solution. Here goes... The Current Situation The standard fraction feature ... http://talleming.com/2008/04/16/fraction-fever/ As a child, I was fascinated by this sign. It was located along the route my family would take into Baton Rouge and I remember sitting in the backseat of our car with my face pressed against the window eagerly waiting to see it. I think this was the first ... http://talleming.com/2008/04/15/ten-flags-inn/ My friend Dave Hotstream has been posting photos of his neighborhood. That inspired me to dust off iPhoto and compile a set of photos of my own neighborhood. I'm a lettering nerd, so I usually take photos of signs. Luckily, my neighborhood is full of old, beautiful and/or weird specimens. Most ... http://talleming.com/2007/09/29/signs-in-my-neighborhood/ Among the avalanche of code I just open sourced is a humble little application called FeatureProof. This application is an environment for testing features in OpenType fonts. I've been thinking about this tool since TypoTechnica 2005. During a round table discussion at that conference, Erik van Blokland and I made the ... http://talleming.com/2007/09/21/featureproof-beta-1/ I'm happy to announce that I've decided to open source a large portion of of my font development code repository. This batch of code includes core libraries for building font development applications, FontLab scripts and one full fledged application. At last count it was around 25,643 lines of Python code. Why ... http://talleming.com/2007/09/21/codetypesupplycom/