3 ms·

I originally submitted this article because I saw the NYT (maybe?) started using them. If you can view this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/worl

by cellis 3y ago

I originally submitted this article because I saw the NYT (maybe?) started using them. If you can view this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/world/asia/china-economy-job-market-young-adults.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/world/asia/ch..., I had to squint and saw that, "yes! that's a different 'F', and that's a different 'L'". It made so much sense, I thought "surely they didn't hire an artist to handwrite these captions. They must be using some kind of 'variable font'", and I googled just that and this site popped up. :) But then, maybe that's just an artist that works on these sorts of presentations.

chrismorgan 3y ago
You mean the handwritten text, “FINISHED SCHOOL” and such? If so, even if you did that with text, you’d be very unlikely to use variable fonts at all, but rather just draw multiple versions of each character, and choose randomly or based on context (there are a few techniques). That’s waaaaaaaay easier than going variable would be—and variable still wouldn’t be sufficient to achieve the result on its own, though it could be a part of it. But in this specific case: it’s in an image, the variations look unrealistically authentic for a font, and the framing lines and tiny illustrations and text are all done together. Pretty sure it’s authentic digital hand-drawn art. Won’t take long, genuinely just a few minutes for the actual drawing. The only hard part is fitting fluid-sized text content into the fixed-size illustration frames; that’s why at larger sizes it’ll be oddly spacious in places (and always inconsistently so), and since they’ve only taken care of it down to viewport widths of about 400px, below that (or if you use different fonts, or for a number of other possible causes) you start getting bad collisions. New York Times decide it’s important to do things like this sometimes, so they get more people involved—not just a writer, but an illustrator and a developer.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  For a paper discussing selecting various alternates and constructing ligatures see: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

by cellis 3y ago

chrismorgan 3y ago

You mean the handwritten text, “FINISHED SCHOOL” and such? If so, even if you did that with text, you’d be very unlikely to use variable fonts at all, but rather just draw multiple versions of each character, and choose randomly or based on context (there are a few techniques). That’s waaaaaaaay easier than going variable would be—and variable still wouldn’t be sufficient to achieve the result on its own, though it could be a part of it. But in this specific case: it’s in an image, the variations look unrealistically authentic for a font, and the framing lines and tiny illustrations and text are all done together. Pretty sure it’s authentic digital hand-drawn art. Won’t take long, genuinely just a few minutes for the actual drawing. The only hard part is fitting fluid-sized text content into the fixed-size illustration frames; that’s why at larger sizes it’ll be oddly spacious in places (and always inconsistently so), and since they’ve only taken care of it down to viewport widths of about 400px, below that (or if you use different fonts, or for a number of other possible causes) you start getting bad collisions. New York Times decide it’s important to do things like this sometimes, so they get more people involved—not just a writer, but an illustrator and a developer.

WillAdams 3y ago
For a paper discussing selecting various alternates and constructing ligatures see: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf