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The end of Type 1 fonts
- numtel 4y agoThat's a misleading headline if I've ever seen one. Type 1 without extra qualifiers refers to diabetes.
- admash 4y agoOddly enough, I was not misled and assumed that it referred to Adobe Type I, given that is HN and end of Type I diabetes would be making headline news in most all other news outlets. Which it is not.
- numtel 4y agoAn article about therapies under development before they reach the market would absolutely fit on HN while being ignored by news outlets. I guess that article would be titled, "The coming end of Type 1"
- nyrikki 4y agoIt was type 1 errors or “false positives” that popped into my head especially as a post just a few lines down had “false positives” in the title
- skissane 4y agoI immediately thought it was about fonts, because I saw the website was “typenetwork.com”-never heard of them before, but their name rather obviously suggests typography over anything else. Personally, I wouldn’t associate “type 1” without context with diabetes over its other possible meanings (type 1 fonts, type 1 errors, type 1 hypervisors, HIV type 1, herpes type 1, etc). Diabetes may well be the most famous example, but numbered types are very popular in medical science, and many other fields besides
- pastage 4y agoThat is an interesting fact, considering you seldom see type 1 refering to diabetes without the qualifier. I guess medical society is used to naming things and the problems with that. (Even though T1D is really too broad, often used to describe other types of diabetes)
- russdill 4y agoAnd see here I was hoping it was a discussion of post Kardashev type 1 civilizations.
- ur-whale 4y ago> Type 1 without extra qualifiers refers to diabetes. That may very well be accurate. In your world, though.
- jhoechtl 4y agoWe are not writing here for AI bots but for humans. In this (CS) context, the first association clearly isn't about diabetes.
- hnbad 4y agoI'm not sure what "this context" refers to. The site (typenetwork) is probably more "design" than "computer science". The HN user base includes a lot of people from computer science backgrounds but not exclusively so, nor does the majority of the articles featured on here (remember that "tech" does not mean "computer science"). HN itself is an outlet of a venture capital startup accelerator. I'd say the expectation for HN users would be to at least be "tech-adjacent" but computer science is neither a necessary nor sufficient part of that and the topics in submissions far exceed direct professional interests (or even "hacking" in any sense of the word, despite what the guidelines suggest). An article about research that could mean the end of Type 1 diabetes would hardly be out of place here, though I agree that assuming that "Type 1" without qualifiers automatically refers to diabetes is not a safe bet here, if anywhere.
- bawolff 4y ago> (remember that "tech" does not mean "computer science") If you're going to be that nitpicky, this article isn't about anything that could reasonable be called "computer science" either
- jhoechtl 4y ago> I'm not sure what "this context" refers to. HN, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- hnbad 4y agoDid you read that? Because it doesn't contradict what I said. You probably meant this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html And that doesn't mention computer science either. Instead it says this: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Note that this doesn't even mention technology, just "startups" and "hacking" (which to be clear isn't specifically about technology either).
- Dalrymple 4y agoThis headline is also initially alarming for those interested in the most performant type of hypervisor.
- thom 4y agoI was worried that Wizards of the Coast had announced the end of the Vintage format.
- lynx23 4y agoI think you might be biased. I didnt think about diabetes in the slightest when seeing the headline.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rejectfinite 4y agoTo you it does.
- cs02rm0 4y agoIt's where my head went too and I'd be in favour of the headline being updated, but I don't think diabetes owns the association between a letter and number.
- bawolff 4y agoPersonally i thought it was clear. This is a tech website, and we're obviously not going to solve type 1 diabeties overnight out of nowhere. That's two context clues for what it is about. [Which is not to say that the headline shouldn't be disambiguity]
- gpvos 4y agoAlso, Type 1 fonts have been on the decline for a long time, so announcing their end is a likely thing to do.
- elevaet 4y agoI got nerd-baited, expecting this to be about Type I Civilizations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
- holistio 4y agoI was expecting the end of Type 1 diabetes.
- elevaet 4y agoI like this one better
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mtrycz2 4y agoIt's a common problem on HN to have too little context. Even in the tech space, there is so many subdomains, that it's easy to get confused. It also doesn't help that often (not in this case, tho) writers assume you already know what they are talking about. A couple of words of context (or maybe a "category tag"?) would be so much helpful, most of the time.
- msla 4y agoThat, and the re-use of abbreviations. Like VM for example: Is it Virtual Memory, Virtual Machine, or Virtual Machine? Distinguishing Virtual Memory from the other two is easy, but is a Virtual Machine a bytecode interpreter like the JVM or a hypervisor like IBM's VM or Xen? You might well have to think hard about the VM settings you use for a VM that runs on a VM.
- Sharlin 4y agoJust append the word "fonts" to the title.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pantulis 4y agoI remember installing Adobe Type Manager from 3.5'' diskettes on Windows 3.1, with a special supplementary disk that included the Lucida fonts. "Goodbye Times New Roman!"
- zmmmmm 4y agoThere I was thinking they cured diabetes :-(
- romeros 4y agoyeah me too. :-( dang should change the clickbaity title.
- coldtea 4y agoNo one involved in typography, typesetting, DTP, and graphic design (the target audience) would even conflate this title with diabetes... The website is called "typenetwork" even. Not everything is "clickbait"...
- frogulis 4y ago"type" is a very common and overloaded word. Consider its meaning for designers, programmers, taxonomy, keyboard enthusiasts, diabetics, Pokemon fans, and so on. The website being called "typenetwork" doesn't clarify much to me. If I had to pick a topic to associate "type 1" with, it would be diabetes, personally. You're absolutely right that it's not clickbait, but it is confusing, considering we're not on a website focused on typography or graphic design.
- coldtea 4y ago>"type" is a very common and overloaded word Yes. Just not in the audience of that publication. You're just not their type of reader (pun intended)
- Sunspark 4y agoThis is the same as saying "we are removing your ability to look at jpg, use heic instead". T1 is a perfectly fine file format with many quality fonts. It does not burden a system to have it. Support is not lost on Linux systems which use the freetype renderer.
- pilif 4y ago> It does not burden a system to have it. any file format you support poses a significant attack surface, especially an old and creaky one whose parser you've written in the 90ies and ever touched.
- hulitu 4y ago> any file format you support poses a significant attack surface, and yet the trend is to use more and more libraries, sometimes from dubious sources and sometimes (hello npm) with malware.
- scrollaway 4y agoActually it’s the same as “removing support for XBM because nobody uses it anymore”. Would you not make completely out of scale comparisons just to be contrarian on HN? Please?
- hedora 4y agoHow many xbm files were used to store archival copies of documents? Adobe Reader has always been terrible; I’ll happily continue to avoid Adobe software whenever possible. However, I hope this doesn’t lead to other PDF software ending support for Type 1 fonts.
- maxnoe 4y agoThis is about removing support from applications creating PDF files (InDesign, Acrobat, ...). From the article: > Keep in mind that older PDFs created with Type 1 fonts are safe—as long as their font data was embedded in the PDF when it was made. PDF readers, whether from Adobe or elsewhere, will continue to render these documents as they always have.
- zorked 4y agoModerator: title request change to "The end of Type 1 fonts" to disambiguate from Type 1 errors, Type 1 diabetes, etc.
- sealeck 4y ago(cc @dang)
- jcutrell 4y agoWas going to mention this, and also the Bezos classification of Type 1 and Type 2 decisions - definitely would benefit from a better title.
- comradesmith 4y agoI thought this would be about the transition to a Type 2 Civilisation…
- dmak 4y agoMe too! I was so disappointed when I saw the article.
- lucakiebel 4y agoWe would have to be a Type I civilization first, we’re only at about 0.73
- Doctor_Fegg 4y agoOh, I thought it was Type 1 Fun: https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale
- ho_schi 4y agoI also expected sth. about diabetes.
- ant6n 4y agoI thought it was type 1 personalities.
- 4y ago
- gpvos 4y agoGood to see PDF viewers will at least keep supporting it.
- wolrah 4y ago> Good to see PDF viewers will at least keep supporting it. No, the reason PDFs created with these fonts will remain viewable is the same reason printed documents will remain readable. The glyphs used are part of the document. You don't need to have the font installed or even have the ability to render fonts to display a PDF, that's the whole point (*Portable* Document Format). You may have noticed that some PDFs, especially older ones, either don't allow text to be selected or have weird behavior when selecting where the selection might go in a line across columns instead of following the text. This is because they don't include the metadata required to explain the document as text, it's just a bunch of glyphs.
- gpvos 4y agoWell, they are embedded in the PDF as a Type 1 font. That support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font rendering depends on a library shared with other software that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO standard). Reasons for text selection going across columns can be very varied, although indeed documents with metadata will also otherwise usually be structured enough to have proper text order.
- wolrah 4y ago> Well, they are embedded in the PDF as a Type 1 font. That support can in principle be removed (e.g., if your font rendering depends on a library shared with other software that drops Type 1 support), although indeed that would not be in the spirit of PDF (and go against what is now an ISO standard). Type 1 fonts are a subset of Postscript sufficient to describe glyph outlines, plus hinting and font specific metadata. PDFs are a larger subset of Postscript that keeps more features but still strips it down from a programming language to a document description language while adding a stricter structure, embedding of files, and other features relevant to its use as digital paper. The Venn diagram of PostScript, PDF, and Type 1 fonts has a LOT of overlap. Any useful Postscript or PDF viewer inherently has to support everything about Type 1 fonts other than hinting, and hinting only matters at sizes where subpixels matter.
- ncphil 4y ago"No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more modern vellum based media." And then, the Dark Ages. Of course, backwards compatibilty will be maintained: at least to the end of the century? Digital culture is already so ethereal, fragile, that you have to wonder if millennia from now our descendents may posit this period as another "dark age" because none of what we've generated since the 90s will remain (or be decypherable).
- klodolph 4y agoI am somewhat more hopeful. There are conversion tools. Fidelity is reportedly not perfect—I haven’t seen problems, but the metrics may not match exactly. Tools like FreeType, FontForge, and GhostScript will remain in their current form, even if development / maintenance is abandoned. Archivists have all sorts of guidelines for how to preserve digital media. We won’t save everything, but we ARE churning out plenty of people with master’s degrees in library sciences, who often go to work (in some capacity) preserving the world’s digital data.
- kps 4y agoThe article is vague, but OpenType CFF fonts remain supported. These are Type 1 outlines in an OpenType container. Type 1 fonts should be 1:1 convertible to OpenType CFF, techincally. The hitch for commerical users is that fonts often have ridiculously restrictive licensing forbidding this rewrapping.
- xp84 4y agoIf there's anything I've learned in my career, it's that almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font licensing, let alone abides by it. And in general it's usually the kind of thing that the "font police" has limited ability to discover from outside the business. In practice, people will do what they need to do to use their software, and tbh, there may be legal exceptions for interoperability, such as the DMCA has. You're allowed to circumvent DRM, under DMCA, if you're doing so solely to enable interoperability with different software/hardware (rather than, in order to distribute it). Not a lawyer, don't @ me.
- upofadown 4y agoAdobe doesn't support bitmap fonts either, but that doesn't stop me from using them in my terminals. This is only limited to a single producer of software. It will be interesting to see if any other generators of PDFs will pay any attention...
- detourdog 4y agoYes, at this point type 1 fonts are bigger than Adobe. Type 1 fonts just exist. Adobe needs subscriptions to exist.
- simooooo 4y agoBut it’s THE producer of PDF software. Several of my clients are already moving their entire catalogs to new fonts
- DaiPlusPlus 4y agoCorrection: it’s the producer of PDF software with up-sells baked into it, even if you paid for the full-fat Adobe Acrobat with a perpetual license (which is still a thing, fortunately) you still get steered towards using their Subscription SaaS features like Adobe Sign, Document Cloyd, etc. Fortunately Adobe’s PDF specification is an open, public standard (a surprisingly altruistic move for a company seemingly ran with the same level of malevolence as if Lucifer got himself an MBA) so now, in 2023, there’s no shortage of high-fidelity PDF viewers and virtual printer drivers. Browser JS-based PDF viewers are the best thing to happen in this area in decades - remember all those Acrobat Reader splash screens in the early-2000s?
- snotrockets 4y agoCorrection: It's the producer of enterprise-adjacent PDF software, with some offering for smaller users. Adobe is focused on capturing the media producing pipeline, and there is where it puts most of it efforts.
- manv1 4y agoSome of the fonts (Beowolf) will never be duplicated because the font re-renders itself every time, which lead to some neat effects when ripped for print There's an OpenType version, but since TT fonts aren't programs the way Postscript fonts are it's not really the same. https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf I believe it's still the only RandomFont ever made.
- nereye 4y agoFor other examples, see http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html. Amongst other things, assuming what that page says is true, only Type 3 fonts support that (randomizing glyphs at render time), not Type 1.
- barefootliam 4y agoBeowulf was a Type 3 PostScript font, not Type 1, so that it could bypass the font cache and could access random numbers on the LaserWriter PostScript interpreter. Type 3 fonts don't have hinting in the renderer, and require a full PostScript interpreter, so they have never been widely supported.
- manv1 4y agoI saw this and went back to the black book to read up, and yeah, type 1s are limited to a certain subset of PS because the font is pre-tokenized. Interesting I never noticed that before now. FYI Type 3s were totally widely supported, and supported by everything that supported Type 1s. Type 3s may not have worked with ATM, but I had a huge collection of fonts and never remember seeing a Type 3 font that didn't render correctly. I did have commercial fonts from real foundries, so maybe the ones made by people didn't render.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoHow does it work when they are embedded in a PDF? Does the renderer have explicit support for these fonts or are they embedded in a way that transcends the format itself?
- compiler-guy 4y agoThey are embedded as postscript subroutines so all is well that way.
- schrijver 4y agoYou should be able to convert them to OTF files with Fontforge. OTF supports both Postscript outlines (cubic bézier) and TrueType outlines (quadratic bézier). That should be lossless for the curves, however does someone know if it’s the case for the kerning data as well?
- elmimmo 4y agoYou are but, as of today, reliably, only via the GUI, and therefore, one by one, not in batches via scripting due to a bug[1]. That is the case at least for Type 1 Mac fonts. [1]: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/4668 https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/4668