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The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts
23 days ago
- The Ninth Circuit court uses Times New Roman font for its decisions, which is a median typographic choice.
- Several U.S. circuit courts, including the Third, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh, use Times New Roman, while the First Circuit uses Courier New with full justification, and the Second and Seventh use Palatino.
- The Fifth Circuit upgraded to Matthew Butterick's Equity font in 2020, improving typography and margins, setting a higher standard.
- The U.S. Supreme Court uses Century Schoolbook font, maintaining consistent typographic style for over a century, as required by court rules for submissions.
- Historical comparisons show older Supreme Court documents had better use of small caps and more vigor, inspiring current courts to aim for similar quality.
- Judge Don Willett emphasized that clear presentation of opinions is crucial, as it impacts real-world lives and livelihoods.
- The author advocates for all federal courts to improve typographic styles to reflect professionalism and clarity.
The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters
18 days ago
- Fleurons are decorative typographic elements that have been incorporated into digital fonts via Unicode, including symbols like the Manichaean Punctuation Fleuron.
- The Manichaean fleuron () is a right-to-left (R) character, which can cause unexpected rendering issues in bidirectional text, such as rearranging adjacent numbers.
- Unicode's Bidirectional Algorithm determines text direction based on character types (strong, weak, neutral), with R-type characters taking precedence over weak types like European numbers.
- To fix rendering problems, wrap the fleuron in the <bdi> HTML tag or use the CSS style 'unicode-bidi: bidi-override;' to isolate its directionality.
- Manichaeism was a historical world religion that declined due to persecution, competition from other religions, and the collapse of supporting empires.
- The post highlights practical solutions for web developers using decorative characters in mixed-direction text environments.
The Proportional Web
12 days ago
- The author created a new side project, The Proportional Web, inspired by Robert Bringhurst's 'The Elements of Typographic Style', as a sequel to The Monospace Web.
- The design uses the Alegreya font for body text and headings, with Courier Prime for code, and bases all sizes on a root font size of 16px for scalability.
- Text is justified with hyphenation controls to avoid spacing issues, paragraphs are indented, and the design is monochrome (black on white) for minimalism and focus.
- The stylesheet supports semantic HTML5 elements like headings, side notes, blockquotes, figures, lists, and tables, and is geared towards prose-heavy web documents.
- It is responsive, with adjustments for smaller viewports, and is available for reuse under an MIT license, with setup instructions for Pandoc and quick-start guidelines.
Backtrack-Free Cursive
12 days ago
- The author finds English cursive writing less enjoyable due to frequent backtracking needed for dots and crosses, unlike Russian cursive which rarely requires backtracking.
- An analysis of Crime and Punishment shows English requires backtracking in 51% of words (0.68 per word), while Russian only needs it in 6.4% of words (0.066 per word).
- To address this, the author designed a new cursive script based on SmithHand, modifying letters like x, t, i, and j to eliminate backtracking and improve flow.
- Key modifications include drawing x as two mirrored c's, adding a loop to t for continuous strokes, and creating a fused loop-and-stem design for i and j.
- The script has been used for months, making English writing as enjoyable as Russian, despite some inconsistencies in letter formation.
We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes
9 days ago
- Letters are the result of millennia of evolution, tracing back to ancient symbols like the ox-head representing 'aleph' which became 'A'.
- The design of modern typefaces, such as asymmetrical shapes and serifs, originates from historical human practices like Roman brush techniques.
- Generative AI lacks human experience and creativity, unable to invent new techniques or understand cultural nuances, risking the stagnation of visual culture.
- AI tools are limited by training data up to 2021, potentially overlooking underrepresented traditions and ideas, and may not support diverse languages or cultures.
- The author advocates for human-driven type design to preserve innovation, support new designers, and avoid a future where AI dominates and stifles creativity.
Decoy Font
8 days ago
- Decoy Font is a TTF font that prints a decoy for every letter to make it harder for AI to read text.
- It uses separate spatial frequencies to display two letters in the same space: thin outlines in the foreground and low-frequency blurred background.
- AI systems focus on the foreground text, but from a distance or with squinting, the hidden message becomes readable.
- The font is free for personal, commercial, and client projects, derived from DejaVu Sans Mono.
- Decoy Font is part of anti-AI fonts to protect information from AI scrapers, using hybrid image techniques.
- It can trick advanced LLMs like ChatGPT, GPT Sol, and Gemini 3.5, and exists as an installable TTF file for typing text.
- Future applications could include CAPTCHA, private messaging, and extending to character-based languages like Chinese.
Preventing line breaks in <code> elements
4 hours ago
- The author uses non-breaking spaces/hyphens in body text to prevent awkward line breaks for phrases like '5 cm' or 'New York'.
- They extended this practice to <code> elements to avoid unhelpful line breaks in code snippets, such as splitting '--multiline' or '(?-u:…)'.
- To prevent line breaks, they add the 'nowrap' class to short <code> elements (15 characters or less) that contain hyphens or spaces, using a Python regex.
- A CSS rule with 'text-wrap: nowrap' is applied to the 'code.nowrap' class to enforce no line wrapping, though it's a minor improvement.

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#typography

The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts

The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

The Proportional Web

Backtrack-Free Cursive

We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

Decoy Font

Preventing line breaks in <code> elements