Making Software: How to make a font

I don’t think I ever really considered that some fonts could be computationally more demanding than others. I wonder if you could make a font whose characters are so overwhelmingly complex that it can kill performance maliciously? Like certain characters having millions of control points in an otherwise unassuming font.

I used to make a hybrid bitmap-vector font called Unison [1] a decade ago and I made it in that way so that I don't have to learn the fine art of (vector) typography. Or at least that I could skip most of it (for example, kerning is still required for proportional fonts, but that doesn't have to be very precise in bitmap fonts). I'm now working on Unison once again after 11 years of time, this time armed with a dedicated font editor called Uniform. I haven't publicly released Uniform in public yet but anyone interested can already download and compile it.

[1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/unison

Thank you, that was perfect Sumday-morning reading: Easy to read yet dense information-wise.

I learned today: The difference between ttf and otf, what strong and weak characters are, what an Em is and where kerning and leading really come from.

My favorite parts: Learning where the magic of ligatures and those tiny postion-changes in moments like "To" come from.

Upvoted and favorited!

Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43678144

i love the mono font used in the tables, anyone know what it is?

edit: might be https://www.departuremono.com/

Misleading title. This is an explainer on how fonts are encoded and rendered, not a tutorial on how to actually make a font.

The home page is beautifully illustrated.

The concept behind this website is truly innovative.