YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Antique Fonts Collection – Restored 19th Century Typefaces

12 points eustoria 2 hours ago 6 comments

gilfaethwy 1 hour ago | parent

I've been doing some bookbinding projects recently, e.g. some of William Morris's works originally published by his Kelmscott Press, and have been typesetting them using some replica fonts. This is a very cool project.

I do wish they'd provide more details about where a given font comes from. For instance, CL Antique No.1's uppercase bears a strong resemblance to Morris's drop caps used in News From Nowhere, but there doesn't seem to be a reference to what CL Antique No.1 is based on.

Or maybe I'm just missing that somewhere?

Palomides 1 hour ago | parent

selling limited commercial licenses for fonts generated from public domain works (without any attribution?) seems gross to me

Nzen 34 minutes ago | parent

Popular works regularly mine the (public domain) past. Disney animated movies like Cinderella did so. Seth Grahame-Smith did so with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. and so on. That is literally the benefit of copyright expiration, that other people can utilize and transform a published work.

alex0015 13 minutes ago | parent

If someone took a close-up photo of a statue's stone texture, I don't see any problem with someone editing the photo and selling it as part of a texture pack for 3d modeling. I feel like what was done here involved a roughly similar amount of transformation. I agree that the right thing to do is attribute the source, though.

TriadDarren 39 minutes ago | parent

I had ChatGPT write me a program that takes their .webp files as input and outputs TrueType fonts that work on Mac or Windows. No membership required.

kixiQu 24 minutes ago | parent

Font-cloning of dubious quality not novel to the LLM era!

https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-27506.html

> Anyone who has a digital "OPTIfont" and a font editor can readily view the problems, including usually several times too many Bezier points within any character. I counted 78 control points on a minimal character, for instance, that should have had less than a dozen.

For a lot of folks, they're never going to notice the difference, but this gets into target audience sophistication, etc. etc.

(edit for clarity: I'm pretty confident the ChatGPT typeface clones would be low quality. Notable too, however, that the Century Library ones might also be!)