B612 Font Family(b612-font.com) |
B612 Font Family(b612-font.com) |
You might as well ask when we'll consider fashion as a 'solved' problem. Or art.
And I wonder if there's a 0-with-a-slash in the downloadable version of the font, enabled with an OpenType stylistic set number or feature or something, or if that zero-with-a-slash is just something custom the Airbus folks do internally.
According to the Github issue mentioning in a sibling comment:
> We designed the two zeros having in mind the slash one to be used in alphanumerical sequences, and the normal one to be used in numerical sequences. > > You can find it in the ‘private use area’
When alphanumeric, put the slash, when only numeric leave it out?
There are two open tickets about it, the second is almost four years old, maybe someone here who is familiar with the tooling could contribute?
https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/24
https://github.com/polarsys/b612/issues/20#issuecomment-5448...
The only user who's demonstrated merge rights on the repo is the repo's Eclipse Foundation project lead, Laurent Spaggiari: https://projects.eclipse.org/content/laurent-spaggiari-proje...
Who's the only listed contributor on the repo: https://github.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.tx...
And who's been publicly inactive on GitHub since the repo's last merge in March 2019: https://github.com/LaurentSpaggiari?tab=overview&from=2019-0...
I don't think any amount of tooling knowledge could facilitate a contribution at this point. It's a dead project. The best anyone could do is apply the steps in issue #24 to a fork and start promoting it.
(https://intactile.com/projets/ameliorer-la-lisibilite-et-la-...)
Short words like “in” and “all” end up looking like they’ve got completely different tracking, which in turn makes it harder to see word boundaries.
Probably a high-DPI screen in a well-lit room is simply the wrong environment to judge this font though, since it’s designed for low-DPI screens in a cockpit. But if you’re planning to use it outside of that environment, do test against other options.
If you're designing a font not just for legibility, but primarily for safety, then it seems extremely important that each glyph is uniquely distinguishable from other glyphs. Although this font has different characters for 1/I/l, at a quick glance an uppercase i could still be confused with a pipe (|), and 0 (zero) and O (capital o).[1] I'm sure there are more. So from that standpoint, this font fails for me for legibility/safety.
Also a nitpick, but assuming Chrome is using 60pt B612 font for the title (../fonts/B612-Regular.woff), the "B/6/1" glyphs are hideously formed (that "1" puke) and make me doubt the rest of the character set.
[1] e.g., the FAA has already addressed this with tail numbers: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...
I imagine pipes aren't used beside uppercase I in cockpits.
The odd serif on the 1 is to ensure it degrades correctly at low resolution.
When you design for safety, you also have to ask "safety in what context". It's neat that they released the font with an open license, but they didn't design it for anything other than Airbus cockpits.
It was probably optimized for low-res screens and specifically for monospace usage.
Kerning looks quite off in the Google fonts specimen (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/B612?query=b612)
Bunch of previous discussion here from 2019:
The main reason is that I need to use a syntax to represent a music sequencer such as ___65. B612 can separate two or more underscores perfectly.
For a long time, it's always my first choice of coding font although I have no idea on its origin. I just feel it looks great when I browse all Google fonts. But it's great to know the story behind it, and thanks for sharing.
In my browser, I always use my own font choices (Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above), which makes me more sensitive to certain sorts of modifications: most significantly, I observe how unreasonably common it is for pages to change the whole document’s letter-spacing, normally to a positive value. (My firm opinion: you should absolutely never do this as a global thing, no exceptions.) I’m not certain if it might make more sense with some fonts than others, but the main thing is that I notice it.
So then, with this font, the main thing that immediately stood out to me is how wide its tracking is, so that I’d almost feel justified in adding `letter-spacing: -0.03em` (except that the shapes and some kerning pairs don’t work that way). Does it feel that way to others? And is there some kind of general trend in the direction of adding more space between letters?
(The font’s bold face, on the other hand, feels a mite cramped when in proximity to the regular weight, since it uses the same metrics. Also certain pairs are kerned much more tightly so that they feel out of place to me, e.g. Vi, DG (especially in bold). And as for the parentheses, I had to check that no, they hadn’t inserted a thin space inside the parentheses, the font really is just that weird.)
My alma mater is technically Université de Toulouse, the federating entity that formally gives the diploma, but the existence of such entities depends on the city, each university has its own head and administration. My grad school lab was attached to Toulouse III.
Such a tiresome defect in one font after another.
On the other hand, putting crossbars on their I would make it much more visually similar to their 1 glyph. Mixing I and 1 (again, in waypoint names, for example), is much more likely and the strong visual difference in I and 1 by not having crossbars on the I seems like a better choice for the stated goals/applications of this font. ("...improve the display of information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit")
So for example IATA and ICAO airport codes are not within the context of an airplane cockpit?
And the visual difference between "laa" and "Iaa" doesn't matter?
The first one is Lamar Municipal Airport, while the second one is Igarka Airport.
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I would assume in cockpit it's better to always use slashed version to avoid confusion.
Yes, it can be confused with 8.
There's a lot of distracting glitches like the K and Q having small gaps where strokes come together, and even glyphs like the N, M, Y and Z have weird little gaps at the joints, the F and B have a bizarre overhang at the upper horizontal stroke, the 1 and 6 have a weird cut in their strokes.
There are lots of weird confusing choices like the parenthesis being a round rect instead of a bow shape, the @ having a "complex a" inside, the 3 and 5 using a "cute" diagonal layout instead of the normal "rounded-and-rect layout".
Seems horrible for something that should be as simple as possible. The default system UI fonts like DejaVu Sans, Segoe UI, Roboto, etc. are far better.
I think I'll try this one on my 1080p monitor for a day and see how it goes.
https://intactile.com/projets/ameliorer-la-lisibilite-et-la-...
Without that "pixel trap" (?) the intersection (there's probably a fancy typographic term for this) would look too bulky.
BTW, I'm used to FontForge (which is not the most amenable to collaborative work) and would love to know what other font designers use and what would be a good collaborative workflow for open source fonts.
Example: https://www.dafontfree.net/data/41/m/94730/map/0-charmap-m-1...
There’s been a couple of attempts at making a monospace version, I currently use the one by Edward Shin in my editors and terminal https://github.com/Hylian/atkinson-monolegible
So obviously my understanding of the definition of grotesque is not what's meant as its use in relation to fonts, but the definition in a font's use is just odd on why it is used in this manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotesque_(Stephenson_Blake_ty...
According to Monotype, the term "grotesque" originates from Italian: grottesco, meaning "belonging to the cave" due to their simple geometric appearance.[14] The term arose because of adverse comparisons that were drawn with the more ornate Modern Serif and Roman typefaces that were the norm at the time.Also noticed the slash in the 0 runs top left to bottom right, rather than the far-more-common [in my experience] top right to bottom left
Any idea why that decision was made?
So you get LAA and IAA, which are indeed distinct in the typeface.
Nevertheless they (and most other typefaces) should have avoided the ambiguity.
interesting way to describe this in that it is described in reverse order of how i've always seen it. my first thought is that's because it is also opposite of how i would draw it when writing by hand.
because then you are comparing top to top
instead, i kept it left to left :)
Most strokes that start from a lifted position move from left to right (e.g. the crossbar of the lowercase t) and European languages are written left to right, so describing it as left-to-right seems more intuitive to me.
But more generally the font has an empty GSUB table which would be used for such substitutions. I'm wondering if the cockpit display maybe misses support for that and that's why they tried not to use it for anything.