Unanswered questions about fonts and open source

The annual ATypI conference is, historically, a bit more technical than some other typographic conferences, and the 2013 event in Amsterdam was no exception. These days, there are still working letterpress shops, but fonts are implemented, tested, delivered, and rendered almost entirely in software. As several talks showed, open source principles are having a big impact on how fonts are designed and released, but there are still pain points in need of attention.

Old tech and new tech

One of the recurring themes was that the existing tools and practices for designing electronic page layout are woefully underpowered. No fewer than three speakers (Nick Sherman, Claus Eggers Sørensen, and ATypI president John D. Berry) presented sessions which argued that web design copies too many design patterns from the print world without fixing the problems that dynamically rendering on a screen should fix.

For example, Berry noted that the majority of "tablet-friendly" web site designs simply re-flow text when the device is rotated from portrait to landscape orientation. In most cases this means extra-long lines of text, which are demonstrably harder to read. The proper thing to do in wide-screen orientation is split the text into two columns—and in fact APIs already exist that can detect device orientation, but web site designs do not take advantage of them. Similarly, most ebook readers have a feature that inverts the colors of the display, but they do not make the corresponding increase in line spacing that testing shows is needed to maintain readability for white-on-black text. Sørensen commented that web browsers give users the ability to increase or decrease the font size on a page, but that there is no corresponding way to make typographic adjustments (for example, to hyphenation) to keep blocks of text looking good when the size changes.

Berry's proposed solution to these problems was to start an advocacy group that will push for standards that take such typographic concerns to heart. He calls the group Scripta, and has put a brief landing page online at typoinstitute.org. Prior to the announcement, he got several big names to sign on to the project, including type designer Matthew Carter and author Cory Doctorow. Reaction to the announcement was mixed; some agreed that 30 years after the debut of TeX it was high time that page layout on the web received close attention. Others, however, thought that the name and presentation of Scripta sounded too much like an "old guard" approach that would be hard-pressed to make itself seem relevant to web developers and browser makers. On that point, Berry said he had intentionally taken a conservative approach to attract buy-in from traditional publishing experts, but that he would be happy to reconsider the messaging moving forward.

Coders

A different approach was advocated by several ATypI speakers who essentially argued that type designers simply need to become software developers. Leading that charge was keynote speaker Petr van Blokland, who criticized designers that are content to live "on the island of existing tools." He cited Adobe's InDesign desktop publishing application as an example: the application has no scripting interface because designers simply have not asked for it—while plenty of other applications have been adding Python scripting support over the last fifteen years.

Similarly, Van Blokland said, anyone who still works on static single files rather than version-preserving databases is "stupid." How is it that there is sufficient room on the Internet for all of the porn in the world, he asked, but type designers still work from a single file? Programmers solved this problem for themselves with Git, he said, but type designers are not working on their version of Git.

A later session by Cyrus Highsmith and David Jonathan Ross reiterated the importance of bridging the gap between type design and programming, although in less confrontational words. Highsmith and Ross showed several type projects that incorporate code into the final product delivered. For example, one typeface was designed to include ornamented drop-caps for use at the start of the document. But too ornate of an illuminated letter can be indecipherable at small sizes, so the final font includes several versions optimized for different text sizes—and it includes JavaScript that switches between the sizes as the window is resized. That sort of feature might historically be considered an add-on, they said, but as the web becomes the most important publishing platform, it should be considered an integral part of the product.

Solutions

On the whole, both the call for improved web typography tools and the call for type designers to learn software development were repeated enough to show that the industry considers both issues to be high priorities. But there were also positive signs that progress is being made on each front.

For example, Mark Barratt presented a session on the role that annotations play in defining a book. His premise was that there was something lost when annotations changed from being notes written from one scribe to another (as was common in the era of hand-copied books) to static footnotes in digitally typeset books today. As was the case with several of the other speakers, Barratt lamented that the web had not improved on this situation, despite the fact that it makes interactive discussions so easy. But there was hope for change, he said, and compared several tools for live web site annotation.

Several projects have attempted to use the HTML5 <aside> tag for this purpose, he said, although they suffer from incompatible and confusing browser implementations. He currently finds the hypothes.is project to be the best web annotation implementation. Although it requires a browser plug-in (which some might see as an inconvenience), the project is built around an open standard and is free software. Users can add comments to any page they read, without requiring permission or a time investment by the site owner, and everyone has the ability to see anyone else's annotations.

On the improving-software-tools front, several free software developers were intrigued by Van Blokland's comment that Git was unsuitable for font development, and a discussion followed during the coffee break. Van Blokland's dissatisfaction with Git came down to two points. First, most software tools have standardized on the XML-based Unified Font Object (UFO) file format created by (among others) Petr's brother Erik van Blokland, but many of them re-order XML objects when writing out UFO files—which, in turn, means "changes" are recorded to files even when nothing has actually changed. Second, Git tools are still optimized for showing diffs between text files, but the changes of interest between two versions of a UFO are most likely to be visual differences; a rendering of the changes is what users need, rather than a list of (x,y) coordinates that have changed.

The first problem should be solvable by serializing the UFO data before it is committed to the repository, of course; what is needed is a pre-commit hook. The second problem is a bit more work to solve, but it should be doable, too. Indeed, there are similar projects to do a "visual diff" comparison for SVG files. After the discussion, Van Blokland seemed much happier with the prospects for integrating Git with font development—although he would probably point out that it was the presence of software developers in the audience that helped find the right solutions.

There were plenty of other open source projects on display at ATypI Amsterdam—everything from major infrastructure projects like FreeType to small, one-person tools—although it is still quite common to see code released with nothing but an informal "you are free to use this" non-license attached. Of course, that is an issue all too common where the web is concerned, and it is not likely to disappear worldwide overnight. Perhaps if the type development community starts to take a more active role in the web standards process and develops the habit of releasing more software alongside digital fonts, that will change.