3×3; Writing A TrueType Font Renderer

Just two resources on this topmost Typography Tuesday tome, as ＃2.1 decided to invade the early AM usual’s quiet time by deciding that “Yes, I’m up, now, Pampa”.

The second resource should keep you engaged for quite some time if you’re keen to dig in a bit.

TL;DR

This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.

It looks like I need to completely overhaul my prompt for the “TL;DR” section, since Perplexity failed miserably on a couple passes today. We’ll hopefully get proper AI-summaries with links back in the next go-round.

The first section delves into t“e “3×3 Font for Nerds”, created by Anders de Flon, a Swedish creative advisor, graphic designer, and industrial designer, was designed for use on the Sheath album by the British electronic music band, LFO. This font is a bitmapped typeface that showcases how simplicity and minimalism can be effective in design.

The second section covers the intricacies of creating a renderer for TrueType fonts. TrueType fonts are the standard for encoding and distributing fonts, and rendering them involves parsing structured binary files and converting their data into pixels. The process is more complex than rendering simple 8×8 bitmaps, as TrueType has sophisticated support for manipulating the rendering process in constrained font sizes.

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3×3

At the tail end of 2023, some references to 3×3 Font For Nerds by Norwegian Ink / Design for Dough (d/l) were re-flying around the internets (it pops up every now and again). It’s attributed to Anders de Flon, a Swedish creative advisor, graphic designer, and industrial designer, who (if the references are accurate) created it for use on the Sheath album by British electronic music band, LFO. A sample of it is in the section header image.

We usually cover fancy fonts on the Drop, but these “nXn” bitmapped typefaces showcase how one can do more than just “get by” via simplicity and minimalism.

Anders is, by no means, the only 3×3 game in town.

Alexander Fakoó brought forth Fakoo around the same time, though I guess it’s more accurate to call it a 4×3 font (the fourth column of dots is more oft used as a “spacer”, so I’m keeping it in the 3×3 world).

If you’re a purist, 3×3 Dots by dustBUST more strictly adheres to the 3×3 spec.

Writing A TrueType Font Renderer

We spent a fair amount of time covering the technicalities of TTF/OTF fonts on “Typography Tuesday” in 2023. So, let’s start off 2024 with an intriguing post by Phillip Tennen on “Writing a TrueType font renderer” from scratch for axle, a hobby microkernel and userspace built around message-passing.

As we learned in 2023, TrueType/OpenType fonts are distributed as structured binary files (.ttf/.otf), and rendering them involves parsing these files and converting their data into pixels. Phillip begins by explaining the importance of text rendering in a UX-capacity, and moves on to discuss how to naively accomplish something like this in a plain 8×8 grid. He then rapidly descends into the gory details of more exquisite rendering techniques.

The post discusses the complexities of parsing TrueType fonts, including dealing with compound glyphs and the hinting VM, which adjusts glyph outlines for better display on small pixel grids.

A compelling feature of the post is how Phillip incrementally walks us through the rendering process, which helps peel back the covers on some of the complexities involved in turning these binary blobs into recognizable glyphs.

You can skip ahead to just reviewing the Rust source for the almost-finished product if you like.

FIN

Apparently, there’s this thing called “a job” one has to go back to doing after a long holiday. Sounds…scary? ☮️