A lot of us will have seen things set on a Selectric in the 1970s, especially in New Zealand. I’ve even seen professional advertisements set on a Selectric here. And because of all that exposure, it was pretty obvious to those of us with an interest in type that all the glyphs were designed to set widths regardless of family, and the only one that looked vaguely right was the Selectric version of Times.
Jens goes into a lot more detail but, sure enough, my hunch (from the 1980s and 1990s) was right: Times was indeed the starting-point, and the engineers refused to budge even when Adrian Frutiger worked out average widths and presented them.
It’s why this version of Univers, or Selectric UN, was so compromised.
What I didn’t know was that Frutiger was indeed hired for the gig, to adapt his designs to the machine. I had always believed, because of the compromised design, that IBM did it themselves or contracted it to a specialist, but not the man himself.
There’s plenty of maths involved, but the sort I actually would enjoy (having done one job many years ago to have numerous type families meet the New Zealand Standard for signage, and having to purposefully botch the original, superior kerning pairs in order to achieve it).
I think I kept our IBM golfballs, which carried the type designs on them, and hopefully one day they’ll resurface as they’re a great, nostalgic souvenir of these times.
What is really bizarre reading Jens’s recollection of his digital revival is that it’s set in Selectric UN 11 Medium (an excerpt is shown above). Here is type that was set on to paper, now re-created faithfully, with all of its compromises, for the screen. He’s done an amazing job and it was like reading a schoolbook from the 1970s (but with far more interesting subject-matter). Those Selectric types might not have been the best around, but the typographic world is richer for having them revived.
The hits per post here have fallen off a cliff. I imagine we can blame Google. Seven hundred was a typical average, but now I’m looking at dozens. I thought they’d be happy with my obsession over Bing being so crappy during 2022, but then, if they’re following Bing and not innovating, maybe they weren’t. Or that post about their advertising business being a negligence lawsuit waiting to happen (which, incidentally, was one of the most hit pieces over the last few months) might not have gone down well—it was a month after that when the incoming hits to this blog dropped like a stone. Maybe that confirms the veracity of my post.
I’m not terribly surprised. And before you think, ‘Why would Google care?’, ‘Would they bother targeting you?’ or ‘You are so paranoid,’ remember that Google suspended Vivaldi’s advertising account after its CEO criticized them, and in the days of Google Plus, they censored posts that I made that were critical of them. Are they after me? No, but you can bet there are algorithms that work to minimize or censor sites that expose Google’s misbehaviour, regardless of who makes the allegations, just as posts were censored on Google Plus.
Como consecuencia de todos estos cambios, surgen numerosas cuestiones sobre cómo afrontar el uso y la creación de la tipografía en un nuevo contexto, sometido a constantes transformaciones tecnológicas. Para muchos, los modos tradicionales de concebir la tipografía ya no funcionan en el mundo de la pantalla. Así, para el diseñador Jack Yan, la tecnología está cambiando tan rápidamente que la idea de que la tipografía se crea para imprimir está llegando prácticamente a su fin. Los nuevos dispositivos electrónicos empiezan a demandar tipografías específicas y no sólo meras adaptaciones de las ya existentes. Esto implica igualmente un adiestramiento por parte del usuario final, el lector, que no sólo debe familiarizarse con los nuevos dispositivos sino con los nuevos procedimientos asociados a la lectura dinámica.
This is pretty mainstream thinking now (and I would have thought in 2012, too) but also nice to be credited for saying it—I guess I would have first publicly pushed this idea in Desktop in 1996. But designers like Matthew Carter and Vincent Connare were already there …
Amazing what you can find in a Mojeek ego search, as opposed to a Google one.
My last post implied that I ego-surfed and found a Wikipedia chat entry about me, but that’s not the case. I was searching for information on how to remove a system-protected font from Windows 10, and seeing as I often post solutions to obscure technical issues on here, I had hoped I recorded my how-to last time. The libel posted by some Australian Wikipedia editor came up during that search.
Once upon a time, Microsoft didn’t care if you removed system fonts, but at some point, it began protecting Arial, whose design, for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere, I’ve always considered compromised. There was one stage where you could replace Arial with something else called Arial, and as I had a licence for a very, very old Agfa version of Helvetica (do people remember CG Triumvirate?!), I decided to modify its file name to fool Windows into thinking all was well.
The last time Windows did an update—version 1909—I had to resort to a safe-mode boot and taking control of the font files as admin, but I really could not remember the specifics. The problem is that when you install the “new” Arial, the existing roman one is used by quite a few applications, and you don’t really replace it—your only solution is to delete it.
With version 2004, safe mode is quite different, and the command prompt and Powershell commands I knew just didn’t cut it. I realize the usual solution is to go into the registry keys—I’ve used this one for a long, long time—and to remove or modify the references to the offending fonts at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts. I’ve also used the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes key to make sure that Helvetica does not map on to Arial (in fact, I make sure Arial maps on to Helvetica). Neither actually works in this case; they are ignored, even bypassed by certain programs. And, really, neither deletes the file; they just attempt to have Windows not load them, something which, as I discovered, doesn’t prevent Windows from loading them.
By all means, use these methods, but be prepared for the exception where it doesn’t work. The claim that the methods ‘delete’ the fonts is actually untrue: they remain in C:\Windows\Fonts.
The other methods that do not work are altering the equivalent keys under WOW6432node (which get intercepted and directed from the 32-bit keys anyway), using an elevated command prompt to delete the files (at least not initially), or doing the same from safe mode (which is very different now, as safe mode is in the same resolution and the Windows\Fonts folder displays as it does in the regular mode—so you cannot see the files you have to remove). You cannot take ownership of the font files through an elevated Powershell (errors result), nor can you do this from safe mode. Nothing happens if you delete FNTCACHE.DAT from the system32 directory, and nothing happens if you delete ~fontcache files from the Local directory.
What was interesting was what kept calling arial.ttf in the fonts’ directory even after “my” Arial was loaded up. The imposter Arial loaded in most programs, but for the Chromium-based browsers (Vivaldi, Edge), somehow these knew to avoid the font registry and access the font directly. This was confirmed by analysing the processes under Process Monitor: sure enough, something had called up and used arial.ttf. This Wikihow article was a useful lead, getting us to delete the fonts under the Windows\WinSxS folder, and showing how to take ownership of them. I don’t know if altering these ultimately affected the ones inside Windows\Fonts, but I followed the instructions, to find that the original Arial was being accessed by three programs: Vivaldi, Keybase, and Qt Qtwebengineprocess. I shut each one of these down and removed the Arial family.
Reboot: it was still there. Then it hit me, and I posted the solution in the Microsoft Answers forum (perhaps inadvertently prompting a Microsoft programmer to make things even harder in future!). Another user had told me it was impossible, but I knew that to be untrue, since it had been possible every other time.
The solution is pretty simple: since you can’t see the full Windows\Fonts directory with Windows Explorer, then I needed another file manager.
Luckily, I had 7zip, which I opened as an administrator. It allowed me to go into the folder and view all its contents, not just the fonts called up under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts, which we know is not an accurate representation of the fonts being used by the system. From there I could finally delete the offending four fonts without changing the ownership (which makes me wonder if the Wikihow advice of changing the owner under Windows\WinSxS wound up affecting the Windows\Fonts files). Once again, I had to close Keybase, Vivaldi and Qt Qtwebengineprocess.
It took from c. 4 p.m., when my desktop PC updated to v. 2004 (my laptop had been on it for many weeks; soon after its release, in fact) to 2 a.m., with a break in between to cook and eat dinner. I’m hoping those hours of having typographic OCD helps others who want to have a font menu where they determine what they should have. Also, user beware: don’t delete stuff that the system really, really needs, including an icon font that Windows uses for rendering its GUI.
Using Google as a last resort—except this search, which I did again as an illustration, now displays in CG Triumvirate rather than Arial. Normally, Google is a big Arial user (Arial and sans-serif are in the CSS specs) and Chromium browsers are all too happy to circumvent the registry-registered fonts and go straight into your hard drive.
There was an Epson bag hanging from the back of my bedroom door, hidden by larger bags. I opened it up to discover brochures from my visit to a computer fair in 1989 (imaginatively titled Computing ’89), and that the bag must have been untouched for decades.
I’ve no reason to keep its contents (if you want it, message me before Thursday, as the recycling comes the morning after), but I wanted to make some scans of the exhibitors’ catalogue for nostalgia.
Let’s start with the cover. It’s sponsored by Bits & Bytes. Kiwis over a certain age will remember this as the computer magazine in this country.
You can tell this is a product of the 1980s by the typesetting: someone couldn’t be bothered buying the condensed version of ITC Avant Garde Gothic, so they made do with electronically condensing Computers and Communications. In fact, they’re a bit light on condensed fonts, full stop, as they’ve done the same with the lines set in Futura.
While the practice is still around, the typeface choices mark this one out as a product of its time.
Inside is a fascinating article on the newfangled CD-ROM being a storage medium. Those cuts of Helvetica and Serifa are very 1980s, pre-desktop publishing. It should be noted that Dr Jerry McFaul remained with the USGS, where he had been since 1974, till his retirement. The fashions are interesting here, as is ITC Fenice letting us know that he’s speaking at the Terrace Regency Hotel, a hotel I have no recollection of whatsoever. I can only tell you that it must have been on the Terrace.
The other tech speakers have a similar look to the visiting American scientist, all donning suits—something their counterparts in 2018 probably wouldn’t today. In fact, the suit seems to be a thing of the past for a lot of events, and I often feel I’m the oldster when I wear mine.
The article itself makes a strong case for CD-ROM storage, being more space-saving and better for the environment: it’s interesting to know that the ‘depletion of the ozone layer’ was a concern then, though 30 years later we have been pretty appalling at doing anything about it.
The second article in the catalogue of any note was on PCGlobe, supplied to the magazine on 5¼-inch diskette. Bits & Bytes would have run the catalogue as part of the main magazine, and did a larger run of these inner pages, back in the day when printing was less flexible.
It’s a fascinating look back at how far we’ve come (on the tech) and how far we haven’t come (on the environment). Next year, we’ll be talking about 1989 as ‘30 years ago,’ yet we live in an age where we’re arguing over Kylie Jenner’s wealth. Progress?
Star Wars is in my feed in a big way. To get up to speed on the film series, I had to start with the memorable theme by John Williams.
Thanks, Bill and Paul.
And who better to describe the plot than someone else in the science-fiction world, Doctor Who?
Seriously though, I hope all friends who are big Star Wars fans enjoy Episode VII. It seems to be getting positive reviews, partly because it appeals to our sense of nostalgia. It hasn’t blown anyone away in the same manner as the 1977 original, but then Disney would be very foolhardy to stray for this sequel. If you are building a brand that was at its height 30 years ago, nostalgia isn’t a bad tool—just ask the team that came up with the 1994 Ford Mustang. J. J. Abrams—the creator of Felicity and What about Brian?, plus some other things—has apparently been a genius at getting just enough from the past.
One item that is from Star Wars’ past is the opening title, or the crawl. I’ll be interested to learn if they’ve managed to re-create the typography of the original: they were unable to provide perfect matches for Episodes I through III because of the changes in technology and cuts of the typefaces that made it into the digital era. The main News Gothic type is far heavier in these later films. ITC Franklin Gothic was used for ‘A long time ago …’ for I to III; this, too, was originally News Gothic, but re-releases have brought all six films into line to use the later graphic.
However, it could be argued that even between Episodes V and VI there were changes: News Gothic Extra Condensed in caps for the subtitle for The Empire Strikes Back, switching to Univers for Return of the Jedi. (It seems even the most highly ranked fan wiki missed this.) And, of course, there was no equivalent in the original Star Wars—’A New Hope’ was added in 1981.
Here’s how it looked in 1977:
And if you really wish to compare them, here are all six overlaid on each other:
I wasn’t a huge fan in the 1970s: sci-fi was not my thing, and I only saw Star Wars for the first time in the 1980s on video cassette, but I did have a maths set, complete with Artoo Detoo eraser (I learned my multiplication table from a Star Wars-themed sheet) and the Return of the Jedi book of the film. But even for this casual viewer and appreciator, enough of that opening sunk in for me to know that things weren’t quite right for The Phantom Menace in 1999. I hope, for those typographically observant fans, that The Force Awakens gets things back on track.
A final postscript on my IE9 blank-window bug, again solved, as so many technological matters are here, by not following the advice of a self-proclaimed “expert”. Hayton at the McAfee forums—which seem to be populated with polite people—mentioned the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer earlier today. This checks for what updates are missing, etc. As I was told that my missing Windows 7 updates were a direct cause of my ‘injudicious’ use of System Restore by the man from Microsoft—who then proceeded to say that the only way to fix my blank-window issue was to format my hard drive—I wanted to confirm that he was wrong about everything.
You see, he was wrong about the cause of the bug. He missed the basic fact that before my System Restore, IE9 was already not working. And I suspected he was wrong about the updates, since they should have occurred before the System Restore.
This is what you get with some of these experts: they’re never right.
And lo and behold, what did I discover?
Just as I expected: Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer reported that all my updates were up to date and I wasn’t missing a thing.
Lesson: believe polite people. Disbelieve snarky people. Especially if they tell you to format your hard drive.
Speaking of experts, Conrad Johnston found gold today for our Font Police site. In Whitby, there are some Experts in property—that’s right, with a capital E. If you’ve been to our Font Police site before, you’ve never seen anything this bad yet. One façade, countless offences—it’s the funniest one we’ve ever had.
Finally, here’s a Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 thread that’s even weirder, as one user finds that the browser is incompatible with Helvetica and Neue Helvetica. Mine works with these families, but it looks like the only way William La Martin got his IE9 going was to delete them.
Based on recent experience, the IE developers at Microsoft really have a problem with handling fonts.
It has been interesting reading the comments from other disgruntled Firefox users over the ‘unmark purple’ error (nsXULControllers::cycleCollection::UnmarkPurple(nsISupports*))—now that I can trace the majority of my crashes to this.
Yesterday, Mozilla’s Crash Reports’ site crashed (rather fitting), and today, the CSS wouldn’t load, which allowed me to read what others wrote on the Crash Reporter dialogue box.
Unhappy Firefox users who are finding our favourite browser plagued with endless problems. As there was no mention of ‘unmark purple’ in the 3·6·13 change-log, I presume we’re going to continue to suffer till Firefox 4 comes out. (Beta 8 is due out around the 21st now, delayed by several weeks.)
Here is a selection of comments, complete with typos. One is from me (guess which one; no prizes offered):
why is this happenign so much lately…at least once a day..I get disconnected from Firefox
Really got fed up with this. Why this is happening again and again?
Yet again…c’mon Mozilla!!!!
and again
god .. whats wrong with mymozila .. ???
i CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’VE DONE THIS!
Two crashes in two days. Nothing unusual at all. Flash, of course.
After the update.. this is 3. crash.. // güncelleme sonrası 3. oldu çöküşü oldu.
it just went off air
Well, looks like your 3·6·13 update didn’t solve the crashes. Plug-in container crashed at the same time.
boom goes the dynamite
The positive Firefox news today is that we implemented our first font-face, at the Lucire website. We’ve been experimenting with font embedding ever since Microsoft WEFT at the turn of the century, and the results were always variable.
They are by no means consistent today, because I’ve noticed that it works in Firefox, IE8 (before it crashes, but, then, it is Microsoft; and without kerning) and Opera 11 Beta (also sans kerning). Despite the presence of SVG files and references to them in the stylesheet, and the assurance that it is now switched on by default, it does not work on Chrome. No surprises there, with Google’s ever-buggy, typographer-unfriendly browser, though I am willing to accept the possibility that we mucked up on the CSS spec.
It’s the Royal Wedding headline that has a font-face spec, set to JY Fiduci:
Firefox 3·6·13
Chrome 8
Opera 11 Beta
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
Big thanks this week to Andrew, who installed some of the Lucire font family to see if he could experience what I do with these browsers. Interestingly, he did not encounter Opera’s ligature and quotation-mark bug (where any word containing a ligature changes font, and where quotation marks and apostrophes display in another font altogether) on any browser, though we did learn that Firefox 4 and IE8 were the only two browsers that picked, on his computer, the right weight for some of the specified type. He could see the installed fonts in his Chrome menu, unlike me. However, he was able to confirm that soft hyphens were not being picked up by Chrome—they were being displayed as regular hyphens, mid-line. (You can see this in the Chrome screen shot above.)
Another friend, Steven, was able to confirm Chrome’s failure to switch fonts when it encountered a change in language. Thank you, gentlemen, and for those who called to help earlier, for giving me the benefit of the doubt.
My friends Julian and Andrew both provided advice on how to fix the Firefox problems I had been having. Removing and reinstalling plug-ins seems to have solved the constant crashing, though eventually it stopped loading images whenever it felt like it (hit ‘Reload’ enough times and they would return) and Facebook direct messaging stopped working. It did crash a couple of times since their advice and, strangely, on pages without Flash animations (prior to that, it would almost always crash when Flash was around).
I got rid of my old profile and created a new one (a lot easier than it looks, though some of the Mozilla help pages are lacking) and all seemed to be pretty stable. About the only thing it could not do was opening some Javascript windows, but then, that could be the remote site or the scripting.
As Karen and I communicate via Facebook DMs during the day, not having the feature is a bit of a pain. I had to go into Opera to read her message to me—I recall how one of my friends had to change browsers just to use the now-dead Vox.com site. So, after some insistence from friends who do know better and are far more expert than me on web browsers (Nigel), I re-downloaded Chrome and gave it another shot.
I’m going to continue using Firefox, too. It would be unfair after the phone calls from Julian and the DMs from Andrew if I didn’t. I want to see first-hand if their suggestions paid off, and I’m sure they’d like to know, too. But, I gave Chrome a good thrashing beginning 30 hours ago without any crashes (other than a page with a Flash plug-in that failed to load and needed four refreshes), though it must be said that in my first 30 hours with Firefox, it probably didn’t crash, either.
I tried Chrome before I began my year of Google-bashing, and back then, it was about on a par with Firefox in terms of speed. And since Chrome didn’t have as many useful extensions, I decided that it really wasn’t worth the trouble of switching. After all, Firefox, then, was a fairly stable browser, in the pre-3·5 days. It was since 3·5 that the problems really started …
Now, Chrome is the speed champion, by some degree. I always have an echo delay on Twitter; it’s unnoticeable on Chrome. Pages load more quickly. And if I dislike Google and I compliment them, you know it’s pretty good.
There are some differences with the way it interprets CSS and HTML. The column on the right of this blog page is flush on Firefox and Internet Explorer, but there are some entries that jut out to the left on Chrome. (I know which CSS spec does this, too—I have to admit that on this, Chrome is likely right and Firefox and IE are wrong.) My company home page columns are less well balanced on Chrome, down to the way it handles tables—no widths are specified so I can’t really say who’s right and who’s wrong.
Interface-wise, one pet peeve is the lack of a pull-down address bar. Since this has been part of browsers since Netscape 1, its omission goes against the habits of some web users, I am sure. My father relies on this, in particular: as a relatively new web user he doesn’t like typing URLs again and again. I, too, found myself getting annoyed that it wasn’t there. (Going through the Google forums and in searches, there are others who would like it appear in a future release of Chrome.)
Andrew had a bit of a joke at my expense when I told him that I still used Google Toolbar, as a Google-hater. It is useful given that it has an “up” button (to go up one directory level), which neither Firefox nor Chrome has. Interestingly, there is no Google Toolbar for Chrome, which has made my Google News searches a bit harder. And with Duck Duck Go as my default search engine, that’s the only one Chrome searches with when I type a query in—though I can always search on Google by typing Google as the first word in my query.
So functionally, Chrome doesn’t fully work with my habits.
Now on to typography. Like Opera, glyphs on Chrome appear finer, which I like. And unlike Opera, Chrome doesn’t change fonts on you mid-line. And no sign of bitmaps, either!
However, it is lacking in some cases versus Firefox. The font menu (above) is incomplete, for starters. The PostScript fonts I have are gone, which is fair enough, given that PS1 is obsolete. But a lot of my OpenType and TrueType fonts are also missing.
Granted, I have more fonts installed than the average person, but there’s neither rhyme nor reason for which ones are omitted. Adobe Caslon and Adobe Garamond aren’t there. My Alia and Ætna aren’t there. And that’s just the As. But I can choose from Andale Mono and ITC Avant Garde Book. Not really much of a choice.
The last two browsers I remember that limited the typeface choice were Netscape 6 and Internet Explorer 5. IE5 also was PS1-free, but there was no OpenType in those days. My choices were limited, but I lived with it. But to have Chrome’s selectiveness over OpenType and TrueType is a bit strange, to say the least. I’ve noted this on the Google forums which, as you may recall, was where my whole frustration with Google began. As expected, no one gives a damn. But rather no one than an argumentative a****** whose job, it seems, is to obstruct and disbelieve rather than assist and empathize.
Funnily enough, even though the Lucire family that we use in-house is missing from the menus, guess what Chrome displays a lot of sites in? You got it: Lucire 1. This is most likely due to the font substitute set I have programmed in to our computers (this is why I found it odd that Opera failed to make the substitution when I tested it). In fact, everything you would expect to be in Verdana comes out in Lucire 1. I’m not sure why Verdana has been substituted (it’s Arial that’s substituted in the registry), but I rather like this serendipity on Chrome. Imagine: all of Facebook and Wordpress in a typeface you designed. I simply find Lucire 1 easier to read than Verdana (sorry, Matthew and Vinnie) and that suits me to a T.
However, this leads to other problems. While IE, Firefox and Opera are quite happy to switch to another font to display non-Latin text, when the chosen font lacks those glyphs, Chrome doesn’t. As I never made non-Latin glyphs for Lucire 1, then everything in Cyrillic, Greek and Chinese—the three non-Latin languages I encounter in a given week—comes out as dots. In fact, the dots seem to emerge in the strangest places (this example from Tumblr):
I thought they were the hard spaces till I realized that this blog entry’s paragraph indents are made up of them (it’s not a CSS spec!). They appear at the strangest places and I can only assume this is linked to Chrome’s incompatibility with (or omission of) some OpenType fonts.
For the overwhelming majority of users, Chrome is perfectly fine. Downloading it does not add an extra entry on my Google Dashboard, so, as far as that company is concerned, there’s no immediate connection between my use of this product and the privacy issues that it has suffered from this year. Users can turn off crash reports so Google doesn’t know where you’ve been. Most people also don’t care about typography to the same degree as I do, and again Chrome delivers there, if you want a basic, no-frills browser. It has its quirks, but, then, every browser does. I have always preferred the clean interface in Chrome to the others, so that’s another bonus.
I’m still not prepared to make it my default browser yet. You can’t get me on to the dark side just yet. The advantage it would have over a crash-free Firefox (if such a thing exists) is speed, and I’m still not 100 per cent seduced by its charms. It’s not like the case for IE5 over Netscape 6—a browser that leapt ahead versus a piece of bloatware. Nor is it like the case of Firefox 3 over IE7. But if Google has improved Chrome’s speed this much since I originally downloaded it, and such a pace continues, it might make a very firm case for itself in the very near future.
