Typography

Treczoks , in Making a font with 9,999 ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals — Digital Seams

Reminds me of my generator for Irish knots I have written decades ago for metafont. It produced woven band segments with "random" faults that a TeX macro could then use to put a frame around the page at shipout time.

DarrinBrunner , in Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period?
@DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world avatar

“It’s impossible to convey emotions through text, and this helps the reader understand your intent,”

No, it's not. It may be impossible for you, because you're an uneducated spawn who hasn't read more than half a book in your life. And, that, only because some English teacher demanded it once.

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

Calm down Andy Rooney.

gustofwind ,
@gustofwind@lemmy.world avatar

I have a feeling the more accurately we measure American literacy the more quickly it’s going to drop to well below 50%

halfdane , in Do Dyslexia Fonts Actually Work?

While the article is actually well written, so you really should give it a go, the answer it gives is in short: "no"

Slightly longer:

...
But the new fonts—and the odd assortment of paraphernalia that came before them—assume that dyslexia is a visual problem rooted in imprecise letter recognition. That’s a myth, explains Joanne Pierson, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Michigan. “Contrary to popular belief, the core problem in dyslexia is not reversing letters (although it can be an indicator),” she writes. The difficulty lies in identifying the discrete units of sound that make up words and “matching those individual sounds to the letters and combinations of letters in order to read and spell.”

In other words, dyslexia is a language-based processing difference, not a vision problem, despite the popular and enduring misconceptions. “Even when carefully explained, soundly discredited, or decisively dispatched, these and similar dyslexia myths and their vision-based suppositions seem to rise from the dead—like the villain-who-just-won’t-die trope in a B movie,” the International Dyslexia Association forcefully asserts.
...

eldavi , in Times New Roman Turns Right

this seems to utterly silly. lol

Cat_Daddy , in Times New Roman Turns Right
@Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net avatar

This is stupid, but also Calibri is stupid, too.

koavf OP Mod ,

How so?

Cat_Daddy ,
@Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net avatar

I just don't like it. If we're going to mandate a specific font on government products, make it an accessible one, not just an aesthetic one. Like, one that's designed for heightened legibility. Further, don't make it a platform-dependent font. They didn't pick Helvetica, for instance.

davel , in Times New Roman Turns Right
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar
koavf OP Mod ,

I can't read this. What does it say?

davel ,
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

RETVRN TO TRADITION

mechanismatic , in Worlds first Ai generated font, using nano banana.
@mechanismatic@lemmy.world avatar

Definitely not the world's first AI generated font. I imagine there are many out there already. Not everyone is likely advertising it though.

It's a relatively limited set of characters and the design is nothing new. Dripping fonts have been a thing for a while.

Looking at the font closer shows where an LLM can't replicate human effort well enough yet - the kerning is non-existent.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8a1af8ba-f931-41ad-82d5-72f1138a0517.png

The space character in the set is blank:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0da2c07c-07ec-447e-82af-ae8dc5b50a0b.png

The punctuation is disproportionate in size to the letters:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fc1a7be5-df05-4d39-b485-8f2aee9d175b.png

Which brings us back to the fact that you need a human with expertise/experience to understand that the LLM isn't performing as well as a human creator, just (potentially) faster and more recklessly, and to fix the issues with the output to make it actually usable/functional, which just feels like correcting someone else's homework for them while they get the credit for the result.

koavf OP Mod ,

Every rational person understands that tools like LLMs are useful for certain specialists and professionals to do a B+ job of some mundane work. It does not replace that expertise. Tragically, for many, a B+ that includes a few things that are just untrue and sometimes is actually a D+ is fine as long as it means that you can avoid paying someone.

antifa_ceo , in Worlds first Ai generated font, using nano banana.
@antifa_ceo@lemmy.ml avatar

This was a kind of fun write up to read, but maybe instead of teaching people to use an LLM to make fonts we just teach them how to make fonts lol

optissima , in Mumble Grumble: font for illegible handwriting, nonsense text and comic book tomes

This is great for my terminal :)

Hawke , in Mumble Grumble: font for illegible handwriting, nonsense text and comic book tomes

That’s a really cool font

But also: ew, Boingboing is shilling for Microsoft now?

koavf OP Mod ,

is shilling for Microsoft now?

?

Hawke ,

Nothing against you posting this at all, but just saw it in the other articles there.

https://boingboing.net/2025/11/24/microsoft-office-2024-just-had-a-quiet-little-glow-up.html

Sad how far Boingboing has fallen.

koavf OP Mod ,

BoingBoing has had ads for a ery long time and particularly, ads in the form of "This product solved all my problems in a personal testimony".

cerebralhawks , in Why do AI models use so many em-dashes?
@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Guess they trained on my posts. I’ve always used them.

I think the better question is, why do so many people not use them?

koavf OP Mod , in Why do AI models use so many em-dashes?

If you—like me—had no idea what “RLHF” means and could not figure it from context, it is evidently “reinforcement learning from human feedback”.

LadyCajAsca , in Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?
@LadyCajAsca@hexbear.net avatar

I don't know if this is relevant, but after reading the article, I asked Grok (Yes, I know, xAI, but I find it better to experiment on) and it also hallucinated until it was forced to search and correct itself. So, basically, AI, that doesn't have constant access to the internet will hallucinate answers to any question, and should not be trusted if there are no sources where you could look and see if it's saying anything coherent.

Of course, people who have used and knew of AI already know this, I just find the article's technical explanation interesting and wanted to express my own interpretation.

koavf OP Mod ,
davel , in The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign
@davel@lemmy.ml avatar

I always assumed it was a ligature of English “at” and knew nothing of its long European history, predating English itself. Its relation to “at” is apparently coincidental, and that coincidence is probably why it ended up on everyone’s typewriters and later keyboards.

“10 widgets at £1.50 each” ⭢ “10 widgets @ £1.50 each”

“&” came from Latin, from a ligature of “et” (“and”). At various times & places, it was considered a letter of the Latin & English alphabets. See also Et cetera.

Zachariah ,
@Zachariah@lemmy.world avatar

https://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/15-names-of-the-at-symbol-in-different-languages

Trust the German’s to come up with longest words! The at-sign is Affenschwanz (monkey’s tail) in German.

Ephera ,

You'll find hardly anyone that understands that word. We typically refer to it by its English name.

IndigoGollum , in Times New Dumbass

Also see Times New Ramen.