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Typotheque
Company blog · typotheque.com/articlesdesign
Typotheque is the company blog at typotheque.com, writing about design. Since 2008, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 50 times, most often “Zed: A sans for the needs of the 21st century”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Typotheque type foundry, get unique, high quality fonts for print and screens directly from the designers. We also create custom (bespoke) fonts for most world's languages.
Most-linked posts?
- /articles/hinting5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-12-30
- Zed: A sans for the needs of the 21st century3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-30
- Font hinting (making on-screen fonts legible)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
- The Nature of Type Design in the Digital Age2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-04-25
- In the Name Of the Father (or the troubles with L-caron) (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-01
What Hacker News says?
That's a common, traditional form for non-lining numerals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures ) Turns out, Al Gore doesn't like it, either: https://www.typotheque.com/blog/gores_choice
Comment linking /blog/gores_choice
on “Mmm, Pi-hole”Submitted Harir – Reducing Noise in Arabic Script as a story · 129 points
HN discussionThis is actually a normal manuscript π as taught in Greek school. See https://www.typotheque.com/articles/modern-handwriting-a-his...
Comment linking /articles/modern-handwriting-a-historical-survey-5
on “The number pi has an evil twin”Submitted Nara – the typeface that never existed (2011) as a story · 85 points
HN discussionHere is a comprehensive article on font hinting by Peter Biľak a very respected Typographer: http://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting "[font-face] also raises new issues, including poor onscreen display of non-hinted fonts. And because hinting is tedious, time-consuming and widely believed to be nearly obsolete, 99% of all fonts, even commercial ones, are non-hinted."
Comment linking /articles/hinting
on “Webdesigners: please make text readable”Submitted Gore's Choice as a story · 35 points
HN discussionso cool! in devnagri script text is aligned at the top of the line instead of the bottom of the line. e.g. https://www.typotheque.com/research/devanagari-the-makings-o... . would be cool to see a version where roman scripts are top-aligned, bottom uneven instead of the other way round
Comment linking /research/devanagari-the-makings-of-a-national-character
on “Alternative Layout System”Submitted Font Hinting as a story · 27 points
HN discussionThe Arabic type design community is already tiny, but there's a good number of really beautiful and well-designed Arabic fonts out there, and equally talented designers. My font here doesn't really even compare, it's an amateur's work. Examples http://www.sakkal.com/type/index.html http://www.amirifont.org/ http://www.29letters.com/ https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/arabic And also check out the Arabic fonts publishe…
Comment linking /fonts/arabic
on “Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font”Submitted Zed Icons, for communication beyond language as a story · 18 points
HN discussionGreat! Next step, programming in the Diwali style of Arabic script[1]. This is one of the amazing forms of Arabic calligraphy that often graces classical Arabic architecture and other works of art. Because really, don't we all want software that looks like this[2]? ;-) Unfortunately, I understand that Diwali takes sufficient liberties with the forms of written Arabic that it's often very hard to comprehend even for…
Comment linking /images/articles/thuraya/02.jpg
on “QLB (قلب) - Program in Arabic, display algorithms as calligraphy”Submitted Nara – The Typeface That Never Existed as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIt's that you're usually rasterizing much more complicated shapes than triangles in 2D, like polygons and curves and fonts with hinting (which is often actually implemented as Turing-complete byte code, not stuff that's easy to run in parallel entirely in the GPU). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting https://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting
Comment linking /articles/hinting
on “Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D? (2019)”Submitted A collection of new, original CJK fonts from Typotheque as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAll the examples of the Harir typeface from this post are the bold and bold caption fonts. Do you also think the regular and display regular fonts are too thick? https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/harir/regular/sample/arabic... https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/harir/display_regular/sampl...
Comment linking /fonts/harir/display_regular/sample/arabic/36?s=webfonts
on “Harir – Reducing Noise in Arabic Script”Submitted Balkan – bi-script typeface system consisting of Latin and Cyrillic scripts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionInspector is telling me it's "ZedTextFtl", with "Jetbrains Mono" used for the monospace blocks. Edit - More info on it here: 1) https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/zed-text 2) https://www.typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-...
Comment linking /blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century
on “Anticheat Update Tracking”Submitted Lettering Guides to CNC Plotters: A Brief History of Technical Lettering Tools as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe difference isn't as much as it used to be in terms of file-size optimization as woff2 is pretty much supported by all browsers and you don't have to serve anything else now. Except for CJK and Arabic fonts, which have to be split or their woff2 size would be a few MB - this is Progressive Font Enrichment [1]. However, once distinction is font hinting data [2]. Google Fonts serve different files based for Windows…
Comment linking /articles/hinting
on “Google Webfonts Helper – Self-Hosting Google Fonts”Submitted Reclusive Designers – Redefining Success in the Internet Era (2021) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFont playground: https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/nara Yes, this seems odd. The angle brackets, curly braces and parentheses seem to align nicely but the square brackets are entirely different sizes.
Comment linking /fonts/nara
on “Nara – the typeface that never existed (2011)”Submitted Comb, a suite of monospaced fonts ideal for designing forms as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wish browsers provided a setting to prefer internal system fonts over web fonts (or even option to disable web fonts completely). Readability is still important - not everyone has a >200 ppi display. Fonts distributed with the operating system are usually well optimized (hinted) for on-screen usage. Proper hinting is critical to readability at lower resolutions / small font sizes. Unfortunately it is a painstaking…
Comment linking /articles/hinting
on “Font-display for the Masses (2016)”Submitted The Nature of Type Design in the Digital Age as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813049 has an appropriate link: https://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting I think it explains things like what hinting is and the different approaches there are. I AM an expert and I read new information (that Windows 7 brought in a major change to font renderering). Something for everyone.
Comment linking /articles/hinting
on “Font Hinting”Submitted Font hinting (making on-screen fonts legible) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI believe the link should be: https://www.typotheque.com/articles/hinting
Comment linking /articles/hinting
on “Font Hinting”Submitted Microtypography, Designing the new Collins dictionaries (2005) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTypeface design is a generally an intuitive, convention-based activity without much of a scientific theory behind it. (see http://www.typotheque.com/articles/the_science_of_typography ) The designer Phil Baines used a strategy of subtracting elements from each character to design a difficult-but-possible-to-read font in the 90s called You Can Read Me. It was actually inspired by an experiment by Brian Coe which was…
Comment linking /articles/the_science_of_typography
on “Took me 5 years to do this font”Submitted From Lettering Guides to CNC Plotters History of Technical Lettering Tools as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
