7 posts tagged “fonts”

I have written to the creator of the WP-Cufón plug-in for Wordpress about this bug, which caused some missing characters at the Lucire website today:

It turns out that the ligatures (such as the fi character) are missing from the Javascript version of my JY Fiduci typeface family which we converted. Upon discovering this, I disabled the Cufón plug-in so that the text could display normally, albeit in whatever typeface the reader has on the receiving end.
   At least when we have bugs, I act on them (hello, Facebook?).
   But the above video is a great one. Click here to have a view of it—and watch it right to the end, if you don’t know how it finishes. I also put it here on Vox.

I like Keeley Hawes’s new VO at the beginning of Ashes to Ashes but why replace Helvetica Black (which was around in 1982, even though the cut used last series was not) with Arial Black (which didn’t exist in 1982)?

[Cross-posted] Both JY Ætna and JY Integrity are fonts that users of Vista Print can select to make their business cards.
   When I first found this out from my friend Dale, who uses Integrity on hers, I was quite chuffed. But then I thought: I don’t remember seeing Vista Print among our licensees.
   I am not accusing this company of piracy. Far from it. It could well have licensed the fonts legitimately for each location. I am simply curious which of our retailers the deal was done with, and whether everything’s above board. Maybe someone at the retailer end goofed. Maybe the fonts were part of a compilation. Maybe Vista is indeed among the client lists, but I missed that month’s report. Maybe we messed up on the wording of the licence that we provided to that particular retailer. It would be nice for everyone to put things right. This is just regular, everyday commerce. Any explanation is conceivable.
   If it is all above board, then I’d welcome the chance to promote the fact that JY&A Fonts’ products are good enough for Vista Print to use. I love the fact that they are being used in an online application.
   We win, they win, customers become aware of more choice.
   So I contacted Vista Print. I asked if we could do a joint promotion. And I asked about the licensing, just to be sure. How hard could it be, after all, to figure out where one purchased a couple of font licences from? And why not have the opportunity to promote yourself further?
   I appreciate this is an international company, but then I also know that the purchases would be centralized.
   It’s been a couple of months and I’ve heard nothing. I’ve also heard from a colleague that he’s been trying to find out the same thing—for a year.
   Vista Print, your silence has me worried, and you already have some unhappy customers.
   Fast forward to this week. I mentioned Vista Print on Twitter. One of my Twitter contacts mentioned she wasn’t a customer, but she gets their spam. (I did, too, and in French—the same company or a licensee? Sadly, I’ve deleted them all, so I can’t back this up.)
   And Vista Print itself has a Twitter account. In fact, they Tweeted me, asking if they could be of service:

   I said they could and asked for a contact address (presumably via private messaging) so we could chat through the above.
   And what did I receive via private messaging?
   Spam, entitling me to 25 per cent off.

[Cross-posted] With my computer glitches this quarter, I have had a few friends advise me to ‘get a Mac’. More than a few. While I appreciate the sentiment, they don’t know me well enough. I can break any computer just by using it. Even a Mac.
   The number-one reason for not switching is, of course, poverty. It’s not just that PCs are cheaper, but the thousands I would need to invest for software—notably fonts from my colleagues—would be too much. OpenType is cross-platform now but I have a lot on Adobe PostScript Type 1. And Macs had font management issues: it was one area where PCs made more sense.
   Secondly, are Macs that much more reliable? If we were talking pre-OS X days, I would have said yes. I worked a lot on Macs then and loved them. The memory management wasn’t quite as good on the really tough stuff, but for everyday use, for the graphics processing, they were plain unbeatable.
   These OS X machines have that fancy interface with programs enlarging down the bottom—the sort of fancy-pants gimmick I do not need. I know you can switch that off. But I remember one incident in 2005 that illustrates how computers sense I am near and go all funny. Think of it as the computer world’s Frank Spencer vibe.
   That time, three people spent 90 minutes trying to burn a CD on a Mac. This is a very hard thing to do on a Mac. The blank CD icon plain didn’t show up and we went online, through the help pages, and even called Apple, who was of no help whatsoever (the usual crapola about ‘But it should be there’—yeah, no s***, Sherlock). Now, I know that with PCs there is plenty of advice on the web, most of it inapplicable to me since I am the only person on the planet that finds that one error that the programmers had bet that no one would ever find. But at least all the bad advice gives me clues and I don’t have to call Microsoft or the program vendor. And the help pages are, for what it is worth, quite well written.
   The owner of the Mac was calling Apple Australia (since New Zealand couldn’t help) to get an answer when one of us accidentally stumbled on some setting three menu hierarchies down. It was not something that we should ever have had to deal with, but there it was. Tada! Ninety minutes to burn a CD.
   Of course I am not writing off Macs based on a single incident. There have been others with the Macs I have been in contact with, just that that one sticks in my mind. There have been missing emails, corrupted mailboxes in Thunderbird, networking issues, etc. In other words, just the usual computer fare that revolves around yours truly. And there is comparatively little help out there on the internet.
   I am the very first person to say that PCs do mega-stupid things. However, I wonder if the image of the more reliable Macintosh is due to the smaller user base. Per capita, I reckon that they are just as buggy, or they certainly would be for a person like me. Give me a Mac for a week and I will find fault just as often as with Windows.

After each posting to Vox I noticed that ‘Recent posts’ was filled with splogs, spam blogs. I have been reporting a lot to Vox, and wasn’t sure if they did anything with my reports. Others I know, who are friends here, have done the same.
   Today, I noticed something refreshing: no splogs at all among the ‘Recent posts’! I hope this wasn’t a fluke, but that Vox has genuinely fixed this problem. Maybe it went and deleted all the blogs associated with a certain group of IPs, or it has been able to tell which were started by spambots.
   Also notice, for the type geeks out there, the kerning in Firefox! I see Vo and Yo combinations below. I even enjoy typing YouTube for the kerns in Yo and uTu in my default Lucire sans serif typeface.

I have had a few odd things happen with posting to Vox since switching to Firefox. When posting a video, it is difficult to have two consecutive ones. If I click on the video image accidentally, another screen pops up inside the input field. There is no way to get back the original text.
   I also had an error when saving today and thought I had lost a post, when in fact it had got through.
   Anyone else face these issues?
   Likes: the automatic kerning for some typefaces, but there seems to be no consistency on which get kerned and which do not. Some of the versions of our in-house Lucire typeface get kerned and others don’t. However, I do know some are OpenType and others are PostScript.
   Most of my fonts are PostScript but I don’t think the Firefox developers would care about an old format like that (plus, PostScript support was terrible before version 3). So, I assumed that there is kerning for OpenType, but on investigation, that doesn’t hold true, either (Georgia, Trébuchet and Verdana are all OpenType here and they aren’t kerned). No doubt I’ll figure it out by process of elimination.