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…)