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Diacritics in the Arabic Script

The Arabic script has been a long developing writing system, and its diacritics constitute a visually rich and complex in dimension. There are points that differentiate consonants that have similar forms known as niqāṭ, vocalization marks known as tashkyl, Qur’an accents to aid in recitation, and decorative marks. What is the history and relevance of… Continue reading Diacritics in the Arabic Script

An Incise for City Navigation

This is the story behind a pretty special navigation typeface designed for a city in the southwestern part of Russia, Belgorod (the name means White City) that has a long and dramatic history. Starting as a Slavic dwelling in the eighth century, and became an important fortress defending the state border from numerous enemy attacks… Continue reading An Incise for City Navigation

Automated Kerning and Spacing: Present and Future

Discussion and exploration of existing, new, and emerging tools, techniques, problems, and solutions for automatic kerning and spacing in font engineering. Panelists include Tim Ahrens, Jérémie Hornus, Igino Marini, and Toshi Omagari.

Intuitive Design for Variable Font Specimens

Variable fonts have rapidly been rising in popularity. So what should an ideal variable font specimen look like? Since the movable type revolution, the font catalog barely changed its appearance, not even with the transition to the virtual sphere. As variable fonts span complex design spaces, users need intuitive navigation tools to accompany them. Such… Continue reading Intuitive Design for Variable Font Specimens

Results of an Automated Approach to Optically Scaling Letterforms

To date, optically scaled variants of typefaces have always been created by eye; indeed, there is a widespread feeling that it is impossible to fully automate this process, as there are so many seemingly unrelated guidelines that need to be followed. In this session, Siva Kalyan will present a unified, automated approach to optically scaling… Continue reading Results of an Automated Approach to Optically Scaling Letterforms

Bitmapping Chinese

Five-pixel height is all you need to deliver the entire English alphabet, but what size canvas is needed, and how many pixels are required to construct a Chinese character, called a Hanzi? The strokes in each Hanzi vary in number, direction, width, contrast, and style. At the first sight, it seems impossible to fit Hanzi… Continue reading Bitmapping Chinese

Inversion of Thai Latinized

Huai is a bilingual typeface which stands in between Thai script, Latin script, Thai Latinized and conventional. Most of the contemporary loop-less Thai typefaces obtained some Latin letterforms when crafting Thai alphabets. If Thai alphabets can borrow the form from Latin letterforms, what might happen when Latin alphabets are influenced by those original Thai letterforms?… Continue reading Inversion of Thai Latinized