I just dropped News Cycle 0.4 onto the internets.  Right now the deets are all at https://launchpad.net/newscycle/trunk/0.4 — why wait?  If you haven’t yet decided to click on that tantalizing new link, I’ll now explain why you should.

First, News Cycle is (of course), my open font revival of the classic ATF News Gothic from 1908.  In 1908, News Gothic included the Basic Latin character set, and that’s pretty much it.  The previous (0.2) release of News Cycle added to the original via a greatly expanded set of accents and extended character blocks, covering a large swath of Latin Extended-A and Latin Extended-B.

This release continues to expand on the original, and adds two new alphabets: Greek and Cyrillic.  There have been proprietary versions of News Gothic released by commercial foundries in the past that included one of these alphabets or the other, but as far as I can tell, News Cycle 0.4 is the first open source News Gothic to provide coverage for them.  In theory, they should look unified and coherent when mixed together with Latin.  That’s not inherently easy for someone who has very little experience reading Greek & Cyrillic languages, so by all means, if you have feedback, please send it.

I’ve also tried to learn a teensy bit more about OpenType funnery in this development cycle, so version 0.4 also includes “text figures” — aka, Oldstyle numerals.  I also updated many of the punctuation and non-alphabetic characters, and just cause I felt like it, added a nice selection of mathematical symbols (although they are limited to the symbols one would use to write in-line equations and expressions; complex and scaled symbols are a bit outside the scope).  Plus there are one or two easter eggs which I don’t feel like looking up at the moment, so let them serve as awesome little surprises.

The kerning was done by Igino Marini through his iKern service.  Hinting & instructions are autogenerated.  It is possible that I’ll be able to use ttfautohint to get better hinting; if so that will be made available in an update.  Right now you can download TTFs and OTFs from the Launchpad project page.  News Cycle is also provided through Google’s Web Font library, although there will be a delay before the new version is served up there, because the company does rigorous testing.

I’m currently working on bold; more about that in a week or so. Although … if you’re dying of curiosity, I did add the -Bold SFD to the Bazaar repository at Launchpad.  Don’t be alarmed when you open it, however — I’m starting with the regular version of each glyph and emboldening them one-by-one.  There aren’t that many glyphs done yet.

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As mentioned in my previous post, I’m currently working on Cyrillic designs for News Cycle, my open font revival of ATF News Gothic.  The sheer number of additional glyphs you need for a full alphabet is daunting (or at least it seems so when it’s an alphabet you don’t natively use).  I don’t have access to high-res versions of any of the commercial News Gothics, and the ATF face included only Basic Latin, so I find myself spending a lot of time trying to make the Cyrillic characters both relate to the Latin and be interesting on their own. Several of the web samples I’ve seen for commercial News Gothics look extremely geometric — and while NG is pretty spartan, the original Latin glyphs have their share of subtlety, and duplicating it is the challenge for the new characters.

For example, most of the commercial News Gothics with Cyrillic support seem to use completely rectangular descenders, like so:

To me, that looks dull as dirt, so I’ve tried to add a tiny bit more nuance to News Cycle’s:

It could be entirely inappropriate; I don’t know.  I do have some alpha-testers … presumably they’ll tell me.  Speaking of which, if you’d like to be one, please let me know (or just grab the SFD from the Launchpad project page and start filing bugs; either method is fine).

Anyway, what I meant to write about was the fact that because adding a new alphabet is mentally demanding, I’ve found myself taking frequent breaks to add other characters — lots of mathematical symbols (more on that in another post), plus a whole set that just interest me for one peculiar reason or another.

Take U+214f, for example.  This is (officially) the “Samaritan source” symbol.  And I can find no documentation on what it means. My dad happens to be an antiquities guy, with specific expertise in 1st Century Christianity, and he’s never heard of it.  Nor have his buddies who study other (earlier and later) Centuries, for that matter.  It *seems* to be a bibliographic reference character, but why anyone would need a specific symbol to indicate that a source is Samaritan in origin, but not a symbol for, say, Essene sources, Gnostic sources, or what have ya, is a mystery.

U+2672 and U+2601 are simpler.  I added both to work with the open microblogging site Identi.ca. The former is the “recycle” symbol, which Identi.ca uses in place of the comparatively wordy “RT” used by Twitter when you repeat someone else’s notice.  Saving one precious character is a lot when 140 is the upper bound.  The latter is the “cloud” symbol, and it came up only because Platinum-Level Microblogger Bradley Kuhn uses it for shorthand whenever discussing/lamenting “cloud computing.” In fact, he commented that in most fonts, the U+2601 character most closely resembles a steaming pile of dog crap, which might be appropriate for discussing cloud computing, but is a bad representation of “cloud” otherwise.  I like Kuhn’s microblog stream a lot (talk about squeezing a lot into 140 characters), particularly his ability to live-blog conferences, so I wanted to make a decent cloud glyph.

Then there is the n-umlaut; it’s not defined in Unicode “proper” (and I air-quote when I say that), but you do need it to discuss the movie or hypothetical band Spinal Tap. In News Cycle, n-umlaut is U+E211 … in the Private Use Area (PUA).  Try saying that code point out loud if you wonder why I chose that location.

Finally, I’ve added an obscure and (apparently) controversial mathematical symbol at U+E210, also in the PUA. It is the “such that” symbol, which is used in proofs (akin to the existential quantifier ∃ or the therefore-symbol ∴, it just replaces notational text — it’s not a variable, operator, function, or anything). The trouble is, not only is it *not* in Unicode, but half of the mathematicians you talk to don’t even know what it is.  By which I mean “they don’t use it in practice, so they assume no one else should either.”  Typically when someone asks about it on the internets, they get told “no, that’s the ‘contains as an element’ symbol; you’re confused.”  What a tragedy.  There is documentation of its existence, of course. We just have to educate people.  For the time being, News Cycle might be the only font that includes it.  Tell your friends; it’s the only way well ever right this injustice.

Anyway, there’s more Cyrillic to come (particularly letterspacing), so I’m sure I’ll add to this list as time goes by.

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Started working on Cyrillic support in News Cycle this morning. It’s quite fun, since it involves a lot of creating glyphs, but not so far outside my own writing system thought-processes. And having spent some time in Ukraine, the alphabet is not entirely unfamiliar to me.

Still, there are challenges, largely due to lack-of-familiarity with different typographic conventions in a new alphabet. For example, the “Zhe” character Ж — naively to the Latin-reader, it resembles a doubled K, however, that’s not its lineage. Which is something we might care about because News Gothic’s K is not symmetric about the horizontal axis. That is, the upper and lower arms are the same length, and they join into a horizontal crossmember.

The Zhe I’ve drawn is the screenshot here is in fact derived from K, in order to duplicate the angle used in the K, but to me I’m not quite sure if it looks right. But I’m also not sure if that’s just me, just my exposure to Ж in other sans serif fonts. The seriffed samples I’ve seen are not symmetric; they have curved upper arms, but I’m *really* not clear if that is supposed to carry over into sans serifs or not. There are a few commercial revivals of News Gothic, and their Zhes have all straight-arms, but seem symmetric. And if you’ve ever looked for an English book on the history of the Cyrillic alphabet, you know what a fool’s errand that is….

Onward and upward.  The thing is, I’ve still got questions like that for six or seven of the other capitals, and that’s not even touching the lowercase stuff and archaic letters.

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Spent an interesting week at MeeGo Conf in San Francisco this week.  Overall, a very impressive project that’s doing something no other embedded OS is even attempting: building an open source, cross-platform OS for devices (netbooks, phones, tablets, cars, TVs & set-tops, etc., etc.).  Why is that important?  Cause if you think “app stores” are going to stay on phones and phones alone, you’re woefully behind-the-times.  And all MeeGo products are guaranteed to be compliant, so the same apps will run on all of them.  Even Google, in spite of the fact that Android is ostensibly open source, is trying to push three separate OSes for its device strategy: Android, ChromeOS, GoogleTV.  Hope you like writing the same game/music player/browser three times, developers!  And the fact that MeeGo just happens to be compatible with desktop Linux distributions — just gravy.

On the other hand, there are some unfortunate “black boxes” in the larger MeeGo project, presumably relics of upstream corporate bootstrapping.  One of those is branding.  At more than one session, I heard community members beg and plead for somebody to drop the preschooler-like cartoon characters.  That’d be wise.

More directly, however, we have a problem with the logotype.  The MeeGo wiki details the logo itself:

… and gives typography guidelines for the “MeeGo font,” which it describes as DIN, linking to the Wikipedia entry on the family.  It also shows a specimen, in three weights:

Pretty clear, right? Well, not really. You see, whatever font they actually chose, it’s at the very least a proprietary remake of DIN.  You can verify that by looking at the two open font implementations of DIN, Paulo Silva’s Open DIN Schriften Engshrift and Open Source Publishing’s OSP DIN. Here’s a side-by-side sample:

As you can see, neither is even close. Starkly different proportions and weights.  Neither has the same non-alphabetic glyphs (though I have no idea where any of them come from).  And that includes the text sample; re-reading the MeeGo wiki page, it could be interpreted to say that the MeeGo logotype is not in DIN at all, but rather is an original design. But regardless of whether that is the intent, the vague “use DIN” instructions can’t be followed, because whatever font they’re using, it’s not available in open source form.  Moreover, since both of the open DIN revivals are based on scanning the original paper designs, it’s clear that they better represent the original typeface — the MeeGo design team may have bought a nice font, but you can hardly call it DIN.  It’s some sort of derivative.  And they won’t say which.

So what now? Adopt an open source DIN for MeeGo? Specify which proprietary DIN-derivative is in use, then wait for a font designer to produce a MeeGo-compatible variant of one of the open versions? Ditch it all together, and pick something with a little more character?

The latter option might be worth considering, since even if you ignore the fact that DIN is a blasé street-sign face that makes you sad just to look at, reading through OSP’s blog on the subject reveals that the widely-repeated mantra that the original DIN was “put into the public domain” is less-than-documented and less-than-clear.  So that’s at least two strikes, maybe three, depending on how highly you value your local streetsign.  But who knows; maybe there is a third open source DIN revival out there that I simply haven’t located yet.  Any hints?

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