6 ms·

"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 maintai

by 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 ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    If 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.
    - perardi 4y ago
      almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font licensing Ha, that seems to imply that people even know there’s such a thing as font licensing. I’ve been a graphic designer for a long time now, and I barely even remember font licensing exists. Even though I know better, my gut instinct is “well we paid for it, we can use it however we want internally, send it along with the InDesign file to the printer, why not?”
      - xp84 4y ago
        The super fun thing about fonts that isn't quite intuitive to most, is that once you rasterize them you're freed from all shackles, meaning you can use a $12 font license and make an iconic piece of art, print it out and sell 50,000,000 copies of it and make a billion dollars, and you're completely in the clear. Or even produce a JPEG and sell that the same way. But if you make it into a webfont and render that same font in a browser as text, lawsuit city.
        zorked 4y ago
        Depends on country. Font makers scanning magazines to check which ads use unlicensed font is a thing that exists. Also for TV. And often a TV license is different from a print license.
nerdponx 4y ago
It's a lesson in what happens when you give private for-profit entities responsibility for public goods.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Fonts aren't public goods. Same as computer programs aren't public goods either.
  - imagineerschool 4y ago
    Not with that attitude
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    The historical record is a public good.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      The historical record isn't saved as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign files. Final products are saved in things like PDF's which continue to work just fine.
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        At some point, does not the software itself become part of the historical record? Otherwise we wouldn't care about things like the Internet Archive hosting its DOS emulator.
  - crabbone 4y ago
    I studied graphic design and designed (by hand, and later "digitized" some using Fontmaker and Freehand) about a dozen of fonts. So, about that "public goods" part... Are works of art a public good? I think, well... there isn't a very good definition of what constitutes public good. Usually, this is used in the context of economics, describing a good or a service managed by the government and provided to most of the population governed by the said government. Some works of art do provide a service, in a way (well, entertainment is a kind of service, right?) and some are sponsored and otherwise managed by the government. Not every work of art earns the same attitude. The governments are very selective about what works of art they put on display in museums that are free for the general public to attend. Museums are public good though, right? So, back to the fonts. The ones I developed, well... they are barely more than just an art academy student projects. I showed them to couple of my friends and my dad... and that was it. I doubt the government of whatever country I end up in will want to invest much efforts into preserving those. However... the teacher of my teacher (when it comes to fonts), Bazhanov created this font: https://meganorm.ru/Index/42/42375.htm https://meganorm.ru/Index/42/42375.htm . The "ГОСТ" in that document means that this font received a government-managed identification number. The font is still in use today, and the government released the IP of that font to the general public to use. I don't know if the government has any kind of a digital storage for the modern fonts and how would they be admitted there, but, back in the days when the linked font was accepted into publishing industry, the original films with the letter outlines were placed in an archive managed by the state's standards committee (that's what "ГОСТ" stands for). Bottom line: it's complicated, and fonts aren't automatically public goods, but some of them are promoted into being public goods, based on many criteria, so, it's not easy to tell which are public goods and which aren't.
Swizec 4y ago
> 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). Mark Lawrence kinda explores this idea in his Prince of Thorns universe. Former AI researcher, now fantasy author. Without spoiling the books too much: There’s a lot of stuff left over from The Ancients who had these weird rectangular things that sometimes pop to life and do magic, but are otherwise inert, useless, and have no moving parts you can analyze. Very strange black rocks that seem to do things when you hold them just right but nobody knows what makes the assembly work, or how, or when it might suddenly pop into life. You kinda just fiddle with it until something happens and hope for the best. Oh and The Ancients had a lot of “liquid stone”, which is very strong and would come in handy for building forts, if anyone knew how it works or how to make more.
- Filligree 4y ago
  Concrete is an old, old recipe though. It's hardly some complex modern novelty. I wonder how it got lost. Does the series involve recovering this lost knowledge? Or is it just the backstory for a fantasy novel?
  - a2tech 4y ago
    Some of it, but its just there. It comes up sometimes but isn't omnipresent.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Concrete requires a lot of energy to produce and the ongoing practice of making it would stop if there was ever a collapse of civilization.
SideQuark 4y ago
The Dark Ages had nothing to do with changing writing media. Also modern scholars don't use the term as they're learned there was a lot of stuff discovered and done during the "Dark Ages".
tablespoon 4y ago
>> "No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more modern vellum based media." > And then, the Dark Ages. Nitpick, but IIRC vellum is far more durable and long-lived than papyrus. > 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). One of the ways software engineers (and software engineering organizations) tend to be terrible is they prioritize their myopic desires over others' long term needs. Part of that is probably driven by software engineering's tendency to create systems that require constant active upkeep (due to its deficiencies), which leads software engineers to think it's right for everyone should be forced to perform constant active upkeep (or they "get what they deserve"). IMHO, the right thing to do is to carrying around some legacy baggage to prevent old documents from becoming unusable.
- enriquto 4y ago
  Maybe that's the point? Breaking backwards compatibility, even if for a noble intention towards a better future, results in practice in annihilation of the past. No good deed goes unpunished.
- lucumo 4y ago
  > software engineering's tendency to create systems that require constant active upkeep Nearly everything requires active upkeep, especially if it interacts with a changing environment. Software is no exception there.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Nearly everything requires active upkeep, especially if it interacts with a changing environment. Software is no exception there. In some cases, but software engineers tend to decide to make that environment change more, so even if your environment isn't otherwise changing, you still have deal with a bunch of change (e.g. you don't get to have software unless you can pay someone to regularly track framework updates, because some software engineers would rather not do the work to maintain backwards compatibility or support old versions).
OliverJones 4y ago
My brother the academic librarian / archivist has, for many years, been warning about this kind of obsolescence. It's necessary for we software folk to ask ourselves "two centuries from now, how will people make sense of our digital files?" One of the challenges is, of course, that it isn't obvious to any generation of creators what will be of lasting value. Academic archivists and MLS degree holders can't do it all, any more than they could control the 19th-century paper factories that churned out all that junk paper that turned brittle in a few decades.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Two centuries? I don't have an optical drive or zip drive or any flavor of floppy drive anymore. Lots of files from the last two decades are inaccessible to me even before considering whether they're still parseable / executable.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    I think we can safely view the 1980s/1990s as the testing grounds for finding out what works and what doesn't. Naturally, the things that worked were acquired and consolidated by larger and larger companies, which allowed tech to be cheap and commonplace. The #1 necessary factor for something being accessible later on is the sheer amount of popularity it enjoyed in the past. E.g. I think some common interfaces, like SATA / USB Type-A will never die, willing to take a $10k long bet that they will still be easily accessible in 15-20 years. Maybe not as popular as some newer ones like M.2 or USB-C. > Lots of files from the last two decades are inaccessible to me Yes, but not by volume. The amount of files ever stored on all 3.5 floppies in the world could very easily fit into a single server rack these days. Are these 0.01% of files more valuable in proportion than others? If not, then it makes 0 sense to focus on preserving those interfaces.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      Is the data produced in the past month more valuable than, say, all the writings of the 1st century just because there's more of it? Would the data produced in the first week of 2099 be worth more than all of history prior to 1900 just because there's more?

by ncphil 4y ago

klodolph 4y ago

I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  If 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.
  - perardi 4y ago
    almost no one even acknowledges the existence of font licensing Ha, that seems to imply that people even know there’s such a thing as font licensing. I’ve been a graphic designer for a long time now, and I barely even remember font licensing exists. Even though I know better, my gut instinct is “well we paid for it, we can use it however we want internally, send it along with the InDesign file to the printer, why not?”
    - xp84 4y ago
      The super fun thing about fonts that isn't quite intuitive to most, is that once you rasterize them you're freed from all shackles, meaning you can use a $12 font license and make an iconic piece of art, print it out and sell 50,000,000 copies of it and make a billion dollars, and you're completely in the clear. Or even produce a JPEG and sell that the same way. But if you make it into a webfont and render that same font in a browser as text, lawsuit city.
      - zorked 4y ago
        Depends on country. Font makers scanning magazines to check which ads use unlicensed font is a thing that exists. Also for TV. And often a TV license is different from a print license.

nerdponx 4y ago

It's a lesson in what happens when you give private for-profit entities responsibility for public goods.

crazygringo 4y ago
Fonts aren't public goods. Same as computer programs aren't public goods either.
- imagineerschool 4y ago
  Not with that attitude
- nerdponx 4y ago
  The historical record is a public good.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    The historical record isn't saved as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign files. Final products are saved in things like PDF's which continue to work just fine.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      At some point, does not the software itself become part of the historical record? Otherwise we wouldn't care about things like the Internet Archive hosting its DOS emulator.
- crabbone 4y ago
  I studied graphic design and designed (by hand, and later "digitized" some using Fontmaker and Freehand) about a dozen of fonts. So, about that "public goods" part... Are works of art a public good? I think, well... there isn't a very good definition of what constitutes public good. Usually, this is used in the context of economics, describing a good or a service managed by the government and provided to most of the population governed by the said government. Some works of art do provide a service, in a way (well, entertainment is a kind of service, right?) and some are sponsored and otherwise managed by the government. Not every work of art earns the same attitude. The governments are very selective about what works of art they put on display in museums that are free for the general public to attend. Museums are public good though, right? So, back to the fonts. The ones I developed, well... they are barely more than just an art academy student projects. I showed them to couple of my friends and my dad... and that was it. I doubt the government of whatever country I end up in will want to invest much efforts into preserving those. However... the teacher of my teacher (when it comes to fonts), Bazhanov created this font: https://meganorm.ru/Index/42/42375.htm https://meganorm.ru/Index/42/42375.htm . The "ГОСТ" in that document means that this font received a government-managed identification number. The font is still in use today, and the government released the IP of that font to the general public to use. I don't know if the government has any kind of a digital storage for the modern fonts and how would they be admitted there, but, back in the days when the linked font was accepted into publishing industry, the original films with the letter outlines were placed in an archive managed by the state's standards committee (that's what "ГОСТ" stands for). Bottom line: it's complicated, and fonts aren't automatically public goods, but some of them are promoted into being public goods, based on many criteria, so, it's not easy to tell which are public goods and which aren't.

Swizec 4y ago

> 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). Mark Lawrence kinda explores this idea in his Prince of Thorns universe. Former AI researcher, now fantasy author. Without spoiling the books too much: There’s a lot of stuff left over from The Ancients who had these weird rectangular things that sometimes pop to life and do magic, but are otherwise inert, useless, and have no moving parts you can analyze. Very strange black rocks that seem to do things when you hold them just right but nobody knows what makes the assembly work, or how, or when it might suddenly pop into life. You kinda just fiddle with it until something happens and hope for the best. Oh and The Ancients had a lot of “liquid stone”, which is very strong and would come in handy for building forts, if anyone knew how it works or how to make more.

Filligree 4y ago
Concrete is an old, old recipe though. It's hardly some complex modern novelty. I wonder how it got lost. Does the series involve recovering this lost knowledge? Or is it just the backstory for a fantasy novel?
- a2tech 4y ago
  Some of it, but its just there. It comes up sometimes but isn't omnipresent.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Concrete requires a lot of energy to produce and the ongoing practice of making it would stop if there was ever a collapse of civilization.

SideQuark 4y ago

The Dark Ages had nothing to do with changing writing media. Also modern scholars don't use the term as they're learned there was a lot of stuff discovered and done during the "Dark Ages".

tablespoon 4y ago

>> "No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more modern vellum based media." > And then, the Dark Ages. Nitpick, but IIRC vellum is far more durable and long-lived than papyrus. > 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). One of the ways software engineers (and software engineering organizations) tend to be terrible is they prioritize their myopic desires over others' long term needs. Part of that is probably driven by software engineering's tendency to create systems that require constant active upkeep (due to its deficiencies), which leads software engineers to think it's right for everyone should be forced to perform constant active upkeep (or they "get what they deserve"). IMHO, the right thing to do is to carrying around some legacy baggage to prevent old documents from becoming unusable.

enriquto 4y ago
Maybe that's the point? Breaking backwards compatibility, even if for a noble intention towards a better future, results in practice in annihilation of the past. No good deed goes unpunished.
lucumo 4y ago
> software engineering's tendency to create systems that require constant active upkeep Nearly everything requires active upkeep, especially if it interacts with a changing environment. Software is no exception there.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Nearly everything requires active upkeep, especially if it interacts with a changing environment. Software is no exception there. In some cases, but software engineers tend to decide to make that environment change more, so even if your environment isn't otherwise changing, you still have deal with a bunch of change (e.g. you don't get to have software unless you can pay someone to regularly track framework updates, because some software engineers would rather not do the work to maintain backwards compatibility or support old versions).

OliverJones 4y ago

My brother the academic librarian / archivist has, for many years, been warning about this kind of obsolescence. It's necessary for we software folk to ask ourselves "two centuries from now, how will people make sense of our digital files?" One of the challenges is, of course, that it isn't obvious to any generation of creators what will be of lasting value. Academic archivists and MLS degree holders can't do it all, any more than they could control the 19th-century paper factories that churned out all that junk paper that turned brittle in a few decades.

thfuran 4y ago
Two centuries? I don't have an optical drive or zip drive or any flavor of floppy drive anymore. Lots of files from the last two decades are inaccessible to me even before considering whether they're still parseable / executable.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  I think we can safely view the 1980s/1990s as the testing grounds for finding out what works and what doesn't. Naturally, the things that worked were acquired and consolidated by larger and larger companies, which allowed tech to be cheap and commonplace. The #1 necessary factor for something being accessible later on is the sheer amount of popularity it enjoyed in the past. E.g. I think some common interfaces, like SATA / USB Type-A will never die, willing to take a $10k long bet that they will still be easily accessible in 15-20 years. Maybe not as popular as some newer ones like M.2 or USB-C. > Lots of files from the last two decades are inaccessible to me Yes, but not by volume. The amount of files ever stored on all 3.5 floppies in the world could very easily fit into a single server rack these days. Are these 0.01% of files more valuable in proportion than others? If not, then it makes 0 sense to focus on preserving those interfaces.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Is the data produced in the past month more valuable than, say, all the writings of the 1st century just because there's more of it? Would the data produced in the first week of 2099 be worth more than all of history prior to 1900 just because there's more?