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“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

Jaisalmer, India, 2009

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saturday, 4 march 2023

it’s rare to have an entry here. But 2023 appears to be a year of changes.

This all started innocently in 2022 with the acquisition of a Supernote A5X.. the intent, to delve deeper into digital journaling—eink reading being a primary driver for that thought. After a lifetime in technology i find myself gravitating towards the analogue despite my involvement with keyboards and optimizing their layouts for typing. And strangely, digital handwriting has rekindled my love of using fountain pens—i’ve never strayed from them for note taking, but journaling feels more complete with a “real” pen and paper or note book (as amazing as the eink technology of the Supernote represents—more on that later and how it will integrate into this site’s workflow.)

Recent software updates reminded me of the need to upgrade the VPS this site rests on.. an so a migration from a long unsupported Debian Linux release to Alpine Linux—here as well as the home base where Void Linux had previously served me well. Finally one distro to rule them all—the computers i dally with. More on that radical switch later.

Then there is the reorganization of a lot of the material posted that originally resided in colophon—it must have been strange for people perusing this site for information on keyboards and typography to be situated in that corner of the site normally reserved for a basic description of a site’s construction (even if fonts have played an important role in this site’s evolution). But honestly, the road traveled was never planned—these interests just morphed into deeper explorations at the time.

colophon articles were becoming a substantial portion of the site and with the slow personal transition to all things analogue, it feels appropriate to move the interest in eink usage of which the past years have been focused on dyslexic fonts to this corner of the site. So colophon will remain more hardware and technically oriented.

The changes are exciting.. though, in all honesty, they may result in even more diminished activity on this site! Reading and writing are satisfyingly complete activities. A sign perhaps of my age..

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grotesq font

sunday, 28 september 2025

early on in this dyslexic font journey, a universal grotesk font variant was created with its unique descending lower case f, aptly named grotesk whilst applying the signature non-mirrored glyph set common to the fonts created on this site.

The grotesq font adds this glyph to the lajt font with its latest edition of the non-mirrored dyslexic glyph set which, with the descending capital J, imparts a “script like” flair to the font (reminiscent of cursive descenders)..

grotesq font

NOTE: the extended lower case f artifacts as shown above, are the font viewer app’s interpretation of the glyph customizations (to extend both the stem and hook separation) and are not visible in use.

non-mirrored glyph sets

continue to be the hallmark of the dyslexic fonts developed on this site.

Two sets of non-mirrored glyphs now exist: those prior to—and including the luft and lift fonts—and those belonging to the recent quad of fonts—laft, lait, lajt and grotesq fonts—which introduced the tailed lower case a and d glyphs and the resultant alternate glyph shapes improving (IMO) their non-mirrored visual differentiation and flow.

For the lower case b d p q..

glyph grotesq font lift font
b toothless-corner toothless-rounded
d tailed toothed
p eared earless-corner
q hook-tailed hook-tailed

The non-mirrored lower case m n u remain unchanged..

glyph grotesq font lift font
m earless-rounded earless-rounded
n straight straight
u toothless-rounded toothless-rounded

distinctive glyph flares

glyph grotesq font lift font
G toothed-hookless toothed-hookless
I (eye) serifless serifed
J descending-serifless flat-hook-serifless
B P Q R open open
a double-storey-tailed double-storey-toothless-corner
f flat-hook-extended flat-hook
l (el) extended-serifless extended-serifless
t hookless-asymmetric hookless-asymmetric

Refer to the laft font for the glyph variations distinguishing the laft, lait and lajt fonts (notably the capital I and lower case a).

‧   ‧   •   ‧   ‧

This latest set of fonts with the minor tailed glyphs marks a significant departure from the prior sans serifed oriented typefaces. The fonts still reflect a sans serif slant but loosening this constraint introduces a pleasing visual flow (with imperceptible impact to the overall monospaced cell width character of the fonts) further relaxing (IMO) the visual effort to consume printed content.

The extended lower case f is reminiscent of the Universal Grotesk variants created very early on—an aesthetic return?—loosing some of the sans serifed glyphs in favour of visual flow and non-mirrored glyph shapes. Combined with the descending capital J, the subtle counterpoints to the extended lower case l render a pleasing visual (height/depth) balance to text lines.

Every typeface created, of course, quickly becomes a favourite for reading with, the nature of novelty.. but grotesq feels like a cumulative end game keeper :-)

My particular KOReader settings—font size, margins and line spacing—have elevated the grotesq font to a fiction favourite with its visual accent of occasional descenders. As always, YMMV.

repos

This font may be found on OneDrive.

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