Fonts Across the Libre Desktop: Design and Graphics Focus

Today, each application, and each toolkit, offers font selection. But fonts have become gradualy more complex, and none of the interfaces seem really excellent. None of the libre graphics programs support the range of font features avaiable in newer or more “mainstream” commercial software such as Photoshop or Figma. It’s not a race, we dont have to copy other software, but the additional complexity of fonts, and OpenType in particular, was added to meet real needs that we can’t easily serve today.

Desktop packaging systems were not designed for packaging individual fonts (and users end up searching 100,000 packages without previews).

We could improve things one program at a time (I originally wanted to start with GIMP) but that leaves the user frustrated.

We could improve one toolkit at a time, such as Gtk or Qt.

Or we could make a desktop-wide service that any toolkit could use, and that’s client-agnostic, so people could write multiple font tools. That way, we could maybe pool our knowledge, too.

This proposal is to see how far we can plausibly take the idea of a desktop font service for font management, selection, configuration, searching. Perhaps the service could sit on top of dbus, with a font client being started automatically by the desktop (dbus is cross-platform).

Layered Fonts with CSS and JavaScript

The established ways of using layered fonts on the Web all have problems, so I tried to come up with something new.

Layered fonts are typefaces designed to be overprinted, so that you get a colour effect. Here's an example from Tom Chalky’s Rivina font family:

If you look closely at the word “Chapter” you can see the letters are blue with a greyish outline. I've magnified some of it in the inset circle. The way this works is that there are two separate fonts: TC Outline just draws the outer edges of the font and TC Fill draws the inside of the letters; the text is repeated at the same location, once in each font, to create the effect.

More complex fonts can include many more “layers” than the two I’ve used here (and in fact Rivina includes more variants than I’ve shown).

This technique was invented in the 19th century and has been used in every medium to make a simple coloured printing of headlines.

To use fonts like this on the Web and not be ashamed of ourselves we need: ...

Some typographic history

I recently encountered “Bablestone”, a blog with some carefully researched articles about typographic history. Rules for the long s (the ſ symbol, if you have it in a font) was the first one i read, but the site is worth exploring. Probably it would have been better to have talked about Conventions rather than Rules.

mentalfloss has a less scholarly and rather more popularist article that introduces the long s and several old letters Latin scribal abbreviations, although it’s probably worth reminding readers that æ and œ at least are still in use in British English, although less widely than thirty years ago.

Update: the Babelstone blog went away so i now link to archive.org for this page.