shadows and light

home

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

Frank Lloyd Wright

Jaisalmer, India, 2009

»»  about

gallery

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..

comment ?

luft font

wednesday, 12 february 2025

(die) luft or air, breeze. This new font’s name encapsulates the unique glyph set development on this site with..

  • the ascending cap height lower case l introduced with the galley font (and till now, my default KOReader font)
  • the unique (AFAIK) reversed asymmetric lower case t introduced with the licht font in 2024
  • the toothless rounded lower case u—one of the dyslexia focused non-mirrored glyph shapes—introduced with the monolexic font and further expanded since 2021 to include the lower case b d p q and n m u glyphs (contrary to the glyph symmetry most fonts pursue)
  • (further improvements (IMO) of the non-mirrored glyph shapes, with the single arch short leg lower case m)
  • and now, the ascending cap height lower case f.

ascending f

Just as the ascending cap height serifless lower case l uniquely distinguished the glyph from the serifless capital I (in my general bias towards geometric typefaces), the ascending cap height lower case f increases the x-height gap between the letter’s crossbar and the ascending portion of the stroke to provide the glyph shape more “air”.

luft font

If one examines the lower case f of the luft and galley fonts, the glyph, unrestrained by the typeface cap height, no longer looks “squished” in comparison.

While the previous fonts from this site are highly readable with their standard cap height, this new relaxed glyph simply disappears—a tribute to its pleasing and more natural shape. It remains unobtrusive despite breaking the cap height, as it is still less pronounced than the ascending cap height lower case l (pronounced for separation from the serifless capital I)—both exceptions, adding to the unique character of the font.

single arch m

new to the luft font comes the single arch lower case m.

While the double arch is ubiquitous and the unique earless symmetrical rounded glyph common to the previous dyslexic fonts presented on this site, the single arch replaces the double arch’s visual stagger with a sweeping upper stroke, adding to the flow of the luft typeface.

Despite the earless stem negating the perfect symmetry achieved with the rounded glyph it replaces—when pixel peeping at small font sizes—the single arch presents a graceful and fluid single upper stroke, rendering an overall impression of symmetry.

As with the reverse asymmetric lower case t, this glyph may appear somewhat odd at first and take a few pages of reading to get used to.

As always, YMMV.

letter heights

Aside from the luft typeface’s distinctive non-mirrored glyph shapes (save for the serifless capital I and ascending lower case l), the lower case letters now uniquely cover six heights—increasing from the x-height of a c .. z, the reversed asymmetric t, dotted i j, cap height b d h k, the ascending f to the ascending l—rendering a subtle visual rhythm to lines of text.

Additionally, the luft font glyph set now encompasses the full UTF-8 symbol set—dingbats, mathematical symbols, etc.—similar to the Noto Sans Font (for potentially greater ebook compatibility).

‧   ‧   •   ‧   ‧

Dare i say.. this has become my end game serifless ereader font with its relaxed (tuned) monospaced visual cadence :)

lift font

while the ascending lower case l was created to distinguish it from the serifless capital I, the serifed capital I remains the more dyslexic legible glyph shape.

For those not as predisposed towards serifless typefaces, the repos contain the lift font—the luft font variant with all its distinguishing letter heights and a serifed capital I.

repos

This font may be found on OneDrive.

comment ?