Another typography post, again? It seems like my subconcious is already preparing for the next Revision party, side-tracking me with procrastination distractions instead of doing actual brainstorming for ideas…

Anyhoo. As an update to the still very much present epidemic of ASCII-only TikTok fonts, there’s a silver lining: One of the new default fonts not only has umlauts, but even a capital sharp s!

Earlier today I watched a YouTube video showing symptoms of another epidemic: typographic replacements in code examples!

I was inches short of installing JDK 22 to check if my proposed quirks paste mode might have actually been implemented.

Over at Bluesky, I helped solve a tough typeface investigation, leading to an obscure font rarely anyone on the interwebs has seen before. :) Of course there’s a Google easter egg for that, too…

Added: Also at Bluesky, I saw this weird replacement character. It does look nicer than �:

It’s supposed to be 🫶, U+1FAF6 HEART HANDS:

It’s encoded as a U+D83E U+DEF6 surrogate pair, or f0 9f ab b6 in bytes – is that a mis-encoding? More importantly, where does that cool „no glyph“ image originate? Is it from Bluesky’s UI font? No, it seems to appear with completely unrelated fonts, too. Is it a Windows thing?

Who designed this? It sure looks like an ad-hoc placeholder by a programmer… Also, there are T-shirts with that design?!

Edit: No, it actually comes from the font! Seems to be the default .notdef glyph produced by the Glyphs font editor.

My suggestion for a capital sharp S in Topaz Unicode has been accepted! The font is 100% sharper now, finally having both a lower-case and an upper-case ß! :)

• topaz-unicode.zip
  Direct download link of the latest version

This might be a hot take, and I may be biased towards my childhood Amiga 500, but a green power LED just gives me the ick.

(While posting this, I unfortunately also noticed that there were so many Don’t hug me I’m scared episodes to catch on…)

What a show! Watch all the entries in the results presentation on YouTube. In time, the entries ought to show up on the competition website as well. Thanks and mad respect to Logiker for this Christmas miracle of an event and plowing through hundreds of entries from all around the world!

At 64 bytes, my Amiga entry ended up in the 33rd place of the assembly category, if I counted correctly. w00t! The shortest entries came in at 41 bytes on the C128 and Amstrad CPC, respectively.

Edit: 38th place! Still w00t! :) Also, the overall shortest entry came from Logiker himself with this pretty APL contraption in 34 characters: ⌽11↑'/o\'⋄' -|+'[1+T∘.+2×T←19⍴9↑1]

Anyway, special thanks to Logiker for including a blinking screenshot in the results video. :)

Yes, I’ve used Amiga’s alert function for this entry! :) Here’s a little write-up:

• Geschenkalarm
  A thrilling (?) byte shaving journey from 88 to 64 bytes

It was especially nice to see two other Amiga entries in the competition, by Crumb (90 bytes) and Saturnus the Invincible/SCA (80 bytes). The latter is using some clever BCPL shortcuts and stack arranging magic that I’m eager to study. I must refrain myself from typing out the source code in the barely readable 720p video capture, actually. :)

Topaz Unicode is the best thing ever. I’ve praised it before, and I’ve enjoyed using it as my daily driver for all things text ever since.

When writing a post about the German capital ß the other day, I noticed that Topaz Unicode was lacking that very glyph: U+1E9E, “Latin Capital Letter Sharp S”, introduced in Unicode 5.1.0.

Now the lower-case ß is already a special case in Topaz Unicode, as author Screwtape put extra effort into disambiguating it from the Greek lower-case letter β (beta), boldly abandoning the original pixel glyph and devising a distinctive new look. Großartig!

So how would a capital sharp S look in the classic Topaz font? I’ve been studying Luc de Groot’s excellent write-up and design musings about the (then-new) letter, and it turns out… it’s complicated. Even today’s big boy vector typefaces don’t all agree on how a capital ß should look! There are, however, several approaches that work well, as compiled by de Groot in his analysis.

My take-aways:

• Make it wide!
• A diagonal stroke helps to differentiate the capital sharp S from the small one
• A hard corner in the upper left can work
• Avoid a ball terminal (like “J” in many serif fonts)

That’s a lot of constraints for 8×8 pixels! Here’s what I came up with, and why:

For one, it’s wider than the small ß (and couldn’t be any wider, really). The hard corner is a bold choice, but I think it fits in nicely when used in capitalized text. And it helps to make it stand out when you use it incorrectly in place of a small sharp s. It would look like a subtle style variant of the lower-case ß otherwise! As for the inward turn in the belly: I don’t see it as a ball-style terminal, but as a reference to the letter’s history as a ligature of ſ and s. It also adds a bit of capital-letter gravitas: Look at me, I’m a big letter and have a fancy extra curl!

Heh, now that’s a lot of words for 8×8 pixels, too!

I’ll issue a pull request for Screwtape’s Topaz Unicode repository, let’s see if my design is a fit.

Update 06-Jan-2025: My suggestion has been accepted, yay!

In the meantime I’ll use my own homebrew Topaz version, as it’s quite easy to generate a custom version with the repo:

• Edit src/regular-glyphs.bdf to your liking
  • Download the Bits’N’Picas font editor (BitsNPicas.jar), then:
  • java -jar BitsNPicas.jar edit src/regular-glyphs.bdf
  • Export as BDF, overwriting regular-glyphs.bdf
• Install some dependencies, in my case:
  • sudo apt install python3-pip
  • sudo apt install pipx
  • pipx install bdflib
• And finally, make
• Enjoy your freshly baked TrueType fonts!
  • topaz_unicode_ks13_regular.ttf and
  • topaz_unicode_ks13_bold.ttf