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Comment by unraveller | Hacker News Reader

Doves is insanely easy on the eyes despite so much going on. There is also mebinac[1] an unauthorized contemporary take on the original doves. Mebinac doesn't leap off the page as well yet deals with modern punctuation in a more normal way.

Personally you can freely use them to great affect in your RSS reader or mail app that you read everyday.

[1] https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font

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I tried looking at code in Mebinac, and was surprised at how strongly it reminded me of old screenshots of Smalltalk.

When you are looking for a font, how can you know which grapheme clusters have glyphs? Is there some classification system for fonts that let you know how complete they are?

https://wakamaifondue.com/

A discussion of other digitisations: https://web.archive.org/web/20220705070449/http://luc.devroy...

Thanks!, hadn’t come across Mebinac. It’s quite good!

I’m also a big fan of Igino Marini’s recreation of the Fell typefaces:

The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an unique collection of printing types but he started one of the most important adventures in the history of typography. — https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomari...

The IM Fell fonts themselves seem to live on Google Fonts these days: https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini

I use Doves Type for… everything. One day I started to find my monomaniacal obsession a bit funny and sort of to spite myself I set every font in Firefox to Doves Type. Serif, sans-serif, monospace, no other fonts allowed, as well as the UI font by tweaking the Firefox user profile iirc.

And it was just… very good. And I kept using it.

I use Doves Type for everything, and to be able to do that on my phone I use iFont: https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-install-any-font/id...

Or yeah I do use IBM PC VGA 9x16, IBM BIOS 8x8, and Eagle Spirit PC CGA Board Alternate 3 a little :) From the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

I even munged together a combination of Doves Type Regular and IM Fell Great Primer Italic that matches the character scale and linespacing to both each other and to the IBM PC VGA 9x16 font at 1:1 size. The open-source FontForge did the trick!: https://fontforge.org/en-US/

(FontForge can autogenerate italics for any font. If you’re bored, I suggest loading up the classic VGA font and pressing the ITALICIZE button on ot. It’s… interesting!)

In general, on Windows I much prefer MacType’s fomt rendering: https://www.mactype.net … it’s kind of amazing that this kind of surgery is even possible.

Curious what you did in FontForge to merge IM Fell Great Primer Italics into Doves Type Regular. (As I'd very much like to use Doves, e.g., for an e-reader font, but I do want to have italics for such purposes.)

I made a native attempt in FontForge (just doing 'merge fonts'), which (unsurprisingly) didn't work.

It’s a bit of a blackout when I try to recall it, haha. I should figure it out and write it up.

If it’s useful: As far as I can recall it involved simply changing the font family to match, i.e. “Dovesfell”, and then exporting the regular and the italic. The OS font system then figures out that they belong together.

The scale is slightly different and the linespacing too. Did like a 90% rescale on one and 95% on the other? And then there was something to change in the Metrics window to make the linespacing identical.

I've become enamored of this typeface as well as of this morning, moved even if I'm honest, but I'm having trouble finding one that looks as nice as the bible page sample in the OP. I made this account here just to ask; which version have you been using, and where did you get it?

I bought it from Typespec :)

This font is beautiful, thanks for sharing.

On "unauthorized" -- how would this not be public domain at this point?

Unauthorized doesn't mean it isn't in the public domain. It means there was no authorization.

Certainly -- I'm just not sure who would "authorize" it in the first place.

Interestingly, the font seems to be copyrighted because it's code...?

So if you see someone's web font, can you print it out and then redigitize it into a font and bypass copyright that way...?

As I understand, yes: but that'll be inferior to the original, since it won't have ligatures or hinting or anything. It's a lot of work for not a lot of benefit.

Copyright applies to the NAMES as trademarks, and the exact program used to reproduce them, but not to the shapes and designs, and yes, I made a lot of changes to that article to reflect current law.

I meant unauthorized in the autobiographical approval sense, the original doves creator frowned upon any modern takes of his typeface, the new designer acknowledged this and let us know.

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