Elisa Gabbert is immensely quotable (not the best thing to have read in the times of COVID though).

As the injustices pile up, and reserves run low, the question of where we should focus our moral attention becomes critical—when exposed to more evils than we can possibly attend to, most of us feel helpless. And what, more than helplessness, excuses apathy and inaction? Rather than confront global suffering, we may cull our feeds, or stop watching the news. Or, worse, we may make of the suffering other an enemy, turning apathy to antipathy. These unspoken algorithms by which we manage our empathy—they are almost innocent, almost “self-care.” (We’re not committing atrocities, just refusing to witness them.) But layered together, they have the shade of evil.

— Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory

The Mayflower outside has may-flowered and the ungg-tree’s leaves are that shiny dark green again. Via the quarantine-window at home.

Guaranteed repairs

Restoration: plastering over the cracks left on any surface by the erosion of time.

Writing: an inverse process of restoration. A restorer fills the holes in a surface on which a more or less finished image already exists; a writer starts from the fissures and the holes. In this sense, an architect and a writer are alike. Writing: filling in relingos.

No, writing isn’t filling gaps—nor is it constructing a house, a building, just to fill up an empty space.

Perhaps Alejandro Zambra’s bonsai image might come closer: “A writer is a person who rubs out. . . . Cutting, lopping: finding a form that was already there.”

But words are not plants and, in any case, gardens are for the poets with orderly, landscaped hearts. Prose is for those with a builder’s spirit.

Writing: drilling walls, breaking windows, blowing up buildings. Deep excavations to find—to find what? To find nothing.

A writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces.

Writing: making relingos.

— Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks

I tested COVID positive on Tuesday (last week). Post the trans-Kerala train-trip (both ways), I was feeling slightly headache-ey, weak and generally uneasy for three-four days when we decided to go see a doctor. I was afraid the symptoms were COVID-related but convinced myself otherwise since we were supercareful with masks and sanitisers throughout the trip and hospital-stay (R’s papa had a stroke and we were looking after him). The hospital had COVID patients. We were far from the block where they were, away on the fifth floor of a separate building with ample ventilation and few people (mostly babies) across the  floors.

Everyone except R had symptoms since then and are quarantining in separate rooms. Achchan and Ananthu tested positive so we haven’t bothered with testing Amma. R tested Negative, twice. We have video-meets at night and see that everyone is alright.

I have been cycling through (thankfully mild) symptoms all week, starting with a sore throat, blocked nostrils, head-heaviness, loss-of-balance and now a heaviness-to-the-chest. I haven’t lost my sense of taste; sweet stuff is sweet and salty stuff salty. Can’t smell a thing though; been burying my nose in the detergent-dabba after the sanitiser-bottle-test burnt its insides (of my nose, not the dabba).

For the first few days there were also the odd and persistent nightmares. The episodes would wake me up past twelve with a cold sweat, leaving some random scary detail lodged front-and-centre in my head for ten-fifteen minutes. These shorts are cinematic and detailed, with the details staying well past their regular welcome. To add more definition to the already high-d visuals, the neighbour has decided the best way to install high-intensity LED floodlights is to face them towards our house. There now is a whole (otherwise not scary) shadow-puppetry-bit on the bedroom walls as I stay awake trying to forget why the building is shaking, scenes involving chains apparently lifted from GhostRider, etcetera. The contrast there in the shadows is amazing and I catch myself admiring the shapes before remembering to go the eff back to sleep.

I am glad our symptoms are mild and manageable and that one of us is free to take care of the rest. R loves to be and excels in her caretaker-role, breaking character only to tell me how much she misses me. She’s been cooking and delivering food to everyone while managing papa’s hospital-related stuff over the phone. K is stuck in the balcony-room complaining all the time (R takes her for short walks but she misses running the house, perhaps).

I have been on Amoxycillin, Domperidon, Mondeslor and VitaminC-Zinc tablets and lots of vapour-inhalation. The vaporiser is a temperamental beast and will need to be opened up soon. I don’t know why we can’t get something as simple as sort-circuiting-with-water work reliably. The ‘Oximeter’ keeps things steady at 97–99 but nosedives to early eighties enough times to keep one wondering if all of this really is Maya-esque after all. I’ve also been reading through R’s reading list (thanks to getting stuck with her bookshelf) and looking for decent Malayalam movies. The classes are all post-postponed and I will have to effectively restart some of them given this gap.

All is well. Relatively.

[Timothy] Morton calls global warming a “hyperobject,” something that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” Such objects are more giant than the giant objects of megalophobia; they can’t be captured in a photograph or even an abstraction. Time-lapse gifs of melting ice don’t help; their extreme compression only minimizes the impact of what’s happening at actual size. Global warming is happening everywhere all the time, which paradoxically makes it harder to see, compared to something with defined edges. This is part of the reason we have failed to stop it or even slow it down. How do you fight something you can’t comprehend?

— Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory

Reading this, looking at the aerial-photographs of pyres in Delhi, tense-traversing the length of Kerala in the middle of the pandemic. My prayers are with the very many families weathering private hells and the possibility of unfillable voids. Title.

Here is a pixels-and-ink version of the ‘fonts vs typefaces’ discussion as a printable A4-sized PDF. Feel free to use in a classroom (thankses!), pinned on a board, printed and made a boat out of, wallpapered on a PC (why?), etcetera. 

Download (PDF, 106 KB)

My favourite jury-moment of undiluted confusion is when someone attempts to differentiate between a font and a typeface. That is when I extend the chair on its creaky springloaded extenders and stretch out like a variable font on its widest end and stare at the screen while sipping old-, cold-, dark-tea wishing life was simpler.

Here is an attempt at definitions. (Taken from a variety of sources—listed at the end—and validated with usage in a variety of scenarios.)

LISTICLE-VERSION

1. Concept: A font is the source from which the typeface renders itself.

2a. Object: The font (these days) is the font-file. The typeface is what you see rendered on screen or print or anywhere you set type.

2b. Object: In the early days of exclusively metal-and-wood-type, a font was the metallic-slash-wooden object—of a specific size—engraved with glyphs.

3. Use: The font is what you install and render a typeface with. The typeface is what you use in a poster-brochure-banner-logo to type-set words and other glyphs.

IN DETAIL

Think of a TYPEFACE as the face that the font-file helps one make. It speaks of a distinct design (purpose and intent) and a recognisable similarity in appearance across styles and sizes.[1] So, ‘Domaine Text Regular 10 pt’ is different from ‘Domaine Text Bold 10 pt.’ They are two different type-faces. (Also, if you want to be really pedantic, ‘Domaine Text Bold 10pt’ is a typeface while ‘Domaine Text Bold 50pt’ is another. With digital type that just scales from 10pt to 50pt, this detail doesn’t make much sense anymore. But often, a text or small-size-specific letterform differs in shape from a display or large-size-specific letterform. Look at Domaine Text and Domaine Display. In the metal-type era, these could both be called Domaine, even with all the variations in shapes and contrast. (Think complications in hand-cutting type combined with optical adjustments.) Therefore it would have been necessary to specify the size to really understand what the face looked like. Simply saying ‘Domaine’ would fail to tell us what kind of contrast to expect. The correct—or more pedantic—answer to ‘what typeface?’ in that sense would be ‘Domaine Text Regular 10pt’ and not simply ‘Domaine.’)

If one were less pedantic, ‘Domaine’ is one typeface and ‘Helvetica’ is another, but that fails to specify the appearance well enough. These names could refer very well to complete families of typefaces including versions like regular, semibold, bold, italics, etcetera. So, Domaine is a typeface-family while Domaine Text Bold 15pt is a specific typeface.

That is to say a TYPEFACE FAMILY has a set of typefaces with all kinds of weights and widths and styles (bold, light, regular, condensed, extended, roman, italic, etc.) that share common visual characteristics. For example, the family Helvetica Neue LT contains more than 15 variations (weights, widths, slants). There are SUPERFAMILIES that contain serifs, sans-serifs, slabs, monospaced ones, different scripts, etcetera. (PT Sans, PT Serif, PT Mono, etc., from Google Fonts is an easy-to-find example. The Noto family of typefaces is a good example of a multi-script typeface family.)

A FONT (from fount, as in fount-ain, meaning source in Old English) is the ‘source’ of the information for making a type‘face’ appear on paper or screen (or anywhere). In digital typography, this is the font-file on your computer (as a thing you can cut-copy-paste or upload-download-share). The font (file) has a definite presence (often kilobytes of data) and can be thought of as the software that makes the letters and glyphs appear. All the instructions for making the shapes, spacing the letterforms, replacing specific combinations of letters with a ligature, etcetera, are coded in this file. A variable font lets one change the appearance over defined ranges in addition to letting one pick instances like light or regular or semibold or upright and italic versions of the same. The variable font-file-as-software has set minimum and maximum values for such characteristics. When you license a font, you are paying for the use of such software to make a specific typeface(s) that it helps you make.Websites like Photolettering from House Industries used to let one purchase/license typefaces instead of fonts (words in a specific typeface as outlined shapes) but don’t anymore.

The beauty of this (above) definition of fonts is that it works well for variable fonts as well, by bringing clarity to the sources-origin of the word font.

WHO MAKES THESE THINGS?

Here is an easy distinction to remember. Type-designers design type-faces and font-designers or -foundries make them into usable fonts. Often, these two are the same person(s). A typographer then sets them (free) by using them well.

YE OLDE FONDRE

The other confusing bit comes from the word ‘font’ being a derivative of fondre (French for melt, cast, pour). Font-as-physical-objects matches this definition but doesn’t work that well with digital type. Back in the days of exclusively metal-or-wood-type, the ‘font’ was the metal or wooden blocks of a specific design and size. Not anymore.

TTF, OTF, ETCETERA.

TTF and OTF (and WOFF and WOFF2 and many more) are font formats, much like png and psd if one were to oversimplify. Apart from the differences in how they are drawn (quadratic- versus cubic-or-postscript-curves [2]) TTF and OTF also often render differently on screens (TTFs can be hinted better but it is finally on the OS-es how they render type on screen). These two started out with different capabilities with respect to features like ligatures, stylistic alternates, etcetera but modern versions of OTFs and TTFs are equally capable formats when it comes to these features.

IRL

The correct answer to ‘what font is that?’ could be ‘88FFSeq_34.ttf’ or ‘download-042.otf’ while the correct answer to ‘what typeface is that?’ could be ‘Domaine Text Regular 12pt’ or ‘Domaine Display 42 pt’ or even ‘Domaine Display.’ Just ‘Domaine’ would work too, as long as you are prepared to be judged. In general, the world will not stop making sense if one were to use ‘font’ and ‘typeface’ interchangeably. Just that in doing so, one eschews clarity for ambiguity and has to depend on the listener to decide whatever it means to them.

SOURCES

They’re Not Fonts from AIGA. Alan Haley, 2002. Also, look at that job-description! I am stealing it pronto.

Is it a font or a typeface? from TNW has more perspectives. Harison Weber, 2012.

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PS (Not that kind of Postscript)

The current correct answer to ‘what typeface is exif-the-blog set in?’ is ‘whatever serif your browser defaults to.’ I’ve pared the CSS down to the essentials and the site looks as close to ‘default’ as ever. The only rules are the type size (20px) and the line height (1.5). Since I am a fancy person, the numerals are set to oldstyle. Yes; I’m willing to spend some keybees that way.

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1: A notable exception is the typeface family History from Typotheque. The only easily recognisable (and useful) similarity is the physical size of each glyph. Yet, this is a distinct (as in clearly defined) design choice.

2: A beautiful explanatory post I always link to in classes is at Scannerlicker. This is almost required-reading for Typography-01, supplemented with discussions.

Been teaching on-and-off (typography with NID-V, mentoring final-year students from NID-K on a brand-identity project) and neglecting most other important things including Exif. I have also been referencing some architecture bits for some potential architecture-ing; I’ve always loved that discipline and consider dropping everything to enroll into a full-fledged program, often. Been reading through 30by40 (I love the LongStudio) and *faircompanies while keeping things local with AtticLab.

What I haven’t been neglecting is feeding Kamal(a) in his habitat (now sans-the-plant thanks to filterlessness). The betta is intelligent and quite angry-slash-excited to see people. I’m extrapolating; he is probably happy seeing other people and is just temporarily pissed off having to deal with me all the time. We got him from one of those shops where bettas are in tiny blue-tinted cups and look space-starved. The tank is large and sits on the other end of our shared work-table, facing the road and its election-related-brouhaha. It looks like there will be more tanks-on-tables soon. Kamal(a) is impossible to photograph; I’ll have to invest in some sports-photography-level gear to catch him sans all the blur.

The past month has been painfully slow and it looks like I would have read far fewer books than the last year by the end of December. It is a depressing thought and the whole working-alone-staring-at-angry-Kamal(a) isn’t helping. Podcasts and non-serious RSS-feeding has helped deal with it. So has a lot of calligraphy practice. I’m loaded with new pens, nibs and inks and cheap-and-perfect-for-fountain-ink papers from Kanakam PaperMart in town. The copperplate practice has helped mitigate some stress (good-joke; copperplate and stress), with random flourishes for extra effect.

Here is a thing I was part of, for Keralappiravi day. (My sunlit mug comes in at around the 3:50–3:51 mark; don’t blink too much or you will miss it.) The rest of the folks are all very good at what they do and it was doubly nice to see a former student of mine in there! (Do they ever become ‘former?’)

This (and the others) illustrates Bodheshwaran’s 1938 song on what makes Kerala, Kerala. My bit reads ‘malayaja-surabhila-marutha-nel-kkum’ and translated, that says touched by the richly sandal-scented breeze. UnniMaman explained the meaning in detail and suggested we shoot against some trees. (He is my first calligraphy-teacher and used to cut normal-tipped sketchpens into chiselled tips as if by magic. These letters reference what I remember from the college magazines he used to lay-out by hand.)

R shot the clips and framed it so the sunlight made it all look presentable. Thanks to GV-sir for the opportunity. Thanks to Somettan and Vijayettan for forcing the coconuts to fall so they didn’t have to on their own, ruining the shoot.

Here is the un-hyphenated (normal? broken?) composition, drawn on cheap-ish chartpaper with a dip-pen and counterfeit Parker Quink. There were so many trials before this one (and after) since I was nervous and the papers kept texturing the letterforms where I didn’t want them to.