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Text for Proofing Fonts: A Farewell to the Quick Brown Fox
- eganist 6y agoI see the value in the author's mission to create a replacement for pangrams, but it sounds less like he replaced pangrams (on which I've always been sold as being a tool for content creators to quickly visualize a font with loose approximations of common use cases) and more like he came up with a quicker letterproof. http://famira.com/article/letterproef http://famira.com/article/letterproef Almost like unit testing a font more efficiently rather than using a full letterproof for that process. Which is pretty cool and probably fills a need, though maybe not the same need that pangrams address more broadly. -- I'm not an expert on this topic and am prepared to have what I've learned in the last five minutes fact-checked by someone who actually does this for a living.
- cardamomo 6y agoGood point! In fact, the author himself calls this new document a "font proof."
- mark-r 6y agoThe author is someone who "does this for a living", and has for a very long time. His Hoefler Text font was included by Apple with the Mac since 1991.
- eganist 6y agoYou're right, I gathered that when I read his wiki page before commenting. But I'm still confused as to why pangrams were mentioned, is my point.
- mark-r 6y agoFor a very long time, pangrams were used to demonstrate typefaces because they were the shortest string that included every letter. I think it was perceptive of him to realize that they weren't optimized for showing letters in their typical settings.
- scotty79 6y agoWhy use "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" if you could use "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow"...
- lemoncucumber 6y agoPack my box with five dozen liquor jugs!
- ink_13 6y agoZing! Vext cwm fly jabs kurd qoph. New job: fix Mr. Gluck's hazy TV PDQ
- mysterydip 6y agoEither one is still lacking when evaluating a font. While seeing every letter is helpful, knowing how different letter combinations look adjacent to each other is also important (a j in the middle of a word for example).
- kick 6y agoMust we really fill the comments of Hacker News with lazy twitter copypasta? https://twitter.com/JackOfQuills/status/984290288259788800 https://twitter.com/JackOfQuills/status/984290288259788800
- scotty79 6y ago
- parhamn 6y agoFor those interested Hoefler and typography.com were covered in Netflix’s Abstract (last episode of season 2 I think). I really enjoyed it and learned a few things about typography in general.
- crazygringo 6y agoVery interesting article, but set up against a strange straw man. First, the usefulness of a full page of text for critically analyzing a font is obviously extremely useful for type designers looking for flaws to fix, or perhaps a national newspaper or magazine selecting a new body type that must be absolutely flawless. This is indeed a great text for proofing fonts. But "quick brown fox" was never intended for proofing fonts. When the author says pangrams are "singularly useless" for that, he's right, but they're very good for something else. Mainly, browsing fonts in a catalog to get the full personality at a single glance, on a single line. Above all what kind of "a", "e", "f", "g", "j", "l", "t", and "w" it has, since these (in non-italic) generally have the most variation. To check if there are any letters the font does something "weird" with. And just get an overall basic sense of look and spacing. So setting the paragraphs he comes up with, as a replacement for pangrams, just feels like the entirely wrong way to frame it. (All that said, I have insane respect for the man -- his designs set the absolute top bar.)
- noizejoy 6y agoMmmhh - I’m not a font designer, but just someone who chooses fonts for websites on a regular basis. And I’ve often found myself frustrated about not finding a good representative page of text, allowing me to evaluate fonts better than just single sentences. So this is a hugely welcome addition to my toolkit - definitely replacing pangrams for me and big thanks to Mr. Hoefler for making it publicly available.
- daxterspeed 6y agoI think the parent argued that both serve a purpose. When you're dealing with a large selection of fonts a small pangram is more useful to help you narrow the list down - until it becomes small enough that you can switch to one of these font proofs to evaluate the final few fonts. Websites like Google Fonts should absolutely use one of these font proofs for the dedicated font pages - or when simply comparing two fonts, but use a shorter pangram when comparing several fonts at once.
- beardyw 6y ago
- remcob 6y agoAs a typography and Polish enthusiast, it bugs me that "Zloty" is not spelled "Złoty" with an 'ł'.
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- rosstex 6y agoSide note, I really like the illustration on this article.
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- Pxtl 6y agoYou can pry "Sphynx of black quartz, hear my vow" from my cold dead hands.
- twicetwice 6y agoThat's missing "d", "g", "i", and "j", unless I'm missing something. Just for fun, the JavaScript one-liner I used to check: const check = str => [...Array(26)].map((t, i) => String.fromCharCode("a".charCodeAt(0) + i)).filter(l => str.indexOf(l) < 0)
- 5mk 6y agoYeah, I believe the line is “... judge my vow” for that reason. (Sphinx supplies the “I”)
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- jmchuster 6y agoIf you have access to a keyboard, it might be easier to just run your fingers over it to get "qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm".split("")
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- dri_ft 6y agoAnd a mildly golfed true/false check: str => [...Array(26)].every((e, i) => str.indexOf(String.fromCharCode(97 + i)) >= 0) There should probably be a .toLowerCase() in there, though.
- jbaber 6y agoDub waltz "Nymph", for quick jigs vex.
- JaceLightning 6y agoEvery. Single. Day. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=typography.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=typography.com
- gitgud 6y agoWoah, that's even more interesting. You can see the effect different titles have on the popularity of the exact same link.
- slezyr 6y agoCan you? There is a link with the exact same title but with 2 points.
- gitgud 6y agoActually, yeah you're right, it only occurs in some cases, so the title seems to be of less importance than I thought... weird
- cardamomo 6y agoTitles, or more likely time. I submitted this a couple weeks ago and was just notified it was in the "second chance" pool, so I resubmitted. Second time around, it made it to the front page with the same exact title. Or maybe people are just more into typography news now as opposed to two weeks ago...
- temporallobe 6y agoSometimes you just need large quantities of text to see how it really fills a space for proofing. What about using good old lorem ipsun text or the copious number of ipsum variations that generate natural-sounding sentences in almost every imaginable combination?
- unhammer 6y agoI was hoping to find a good example text here, but this still just covers a fraction of ascii. In 2020, you have to expect das große ß und من اليمين الى اليسار and perhaps even ө, ү, ң (which should be the same height as о, у, and н[1]). So far [2] is the only page I've found with some representative samples. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/issues/1141#issue-335119936 https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/issues/1141#issue-33511... [2] http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/unitest/ http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/unitest/
- Someone 6y agoI guess you mean Unicode, not ascii. It covers just a fraction (about half of it) of ascii, but not for those reasons. I would add digits and more punctuation. Question marks, for example, can be cases where type designers let loose their creativity. I think the sample also is biased towards English. It’s missing letter combinations such as “sch” and “cht” that aren’t uncommon in German (or French, which has the wonderful word “schtroumpfs” since 1958), or the pairs “au” or “oe”, used in Dutch, all of which may have ligatures.
- fxtentacle 6y agoThis sounds like a perfect use-case for AI. 1. You run statistics on a large text corpus to determine the most likely letter combinations that a font needs to display correctly. 2. You train a skip-word model on a large text corpus to evaluate if a sentence makes sense or not. 3. You train an AI to produce random sentences that match the word-pair-probabilities from #1 while being natural sentences according to #2. => You should end up with natural-sounding text with proper grammar that still contains all the important character pairs for font testing.
- zeepzeep 6y agoAnd there's your next covid project!
- fxtentacle 6y agoSounds great :) I wonder if FontGAN could then be used to design the perfect font. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12604 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.12604 That said, I already have my covid project. All state of the art optical flow algorithms have problems seeing thin branches. You might have seen videos of Skydio drones crashing into branches, wires, or water. My goal is to fix that. I started designing a new AI architecture in February and the main detection training finished mid-May. By now, I'm building the post-processing for guessing plausible fillings for occluded areas. Plus, I'm now working from home, so my basement is already overheating from all those GPUs. I should probably pause AI for a while or I'll have to move the icebox to another floor.
- totetsu 6y agoJust tried to try this out.. Has anyone else noticed how slow and unusable the Font Book app built into osx is.
- pitdicker 6y agoI am missing words with 'ij' in the proof text. If they do not look roughly similar and with their dots on the same height, the font looks pretty bad in Dutch (ij is a frequent combination, and often even taught as one letter). Should a proof text care about a few of such language specific cases?
- amelius 6y agoImho, the repetition in that text makes the font look ugly. And why not use full English sentences, instead of something you would never read?