Font Activations: A Note on the Type | Hacker News Reader

Font Activations: A Note on the Type

robhorning.substack.com

55 pointsprismatic8 comments

I'm always happy to find a Colophon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon_(publishing)

...it gives a bit of history and behind the scenes of something that is trivial to consume (book, website), but technical to produce.

My grandpa had his own printing company back in the day, and that was one of the the original broadcast technologies. Books, periodicals, businesses, menus, invitations, professional directories... they all filtered through one of the local printing presses.

Practically as well, you'd take a million individual letter pieces, arrange them into plates with pressure-fit clamps, then run 1000 (or more) copies of each page or whatever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting

For bigger runs, they'd "lock" the page into slugs (lines of text) or plates (full pages).

At the end of the job, they'd melt the plates back down, so the colophon could also be considered "hey, this is how you reproduce it for the second printing run... it was Garamond, not Baskerville, and 25% cotton paper, not bond."

In a way, the colophon contains the original spirit of open source, and "opening the HTML pages to see how it's done."

> it gives a bit of history and behind the scenes of something that is trivial to consume (book, website), but technical to produce.

For a website, how does a Colophon page differ from an “About” page?

Usually more about the technology behind it than about the site itself. eg: I consider this a colophon https://world-playground-deceit.net/about/website.html ...and this recent link through n.y.c came through when I searched as having a "Colophon" for the project: https://ratfactor.com/snobol/

...the wiki link talks a little bit about "website colophons" as well.

Fun tidbit: all videos encoded by x264 (ETA: x264 not ffmpeg) contain the settings used by the encoder. The user can of course strip them after the fact or patch the code out of their build, but the upstream maintainers have insisted on leaving it in.

What's the command to extract those flags? Was it always there and I just didn't notice?

Sorry, I was misremembering on two counts: it’s x264 that does this, not ffmpeg (but you’re using x264 if you’re making H.264 with ffmpeg); and the info is the encoder’s actual settings, not the flags (so a preset like “veryslow” will get expanded). With those caveats, the information is displayed for example by mediainfo under “Encoding settings”.

As long as you get the content you paid for, any meta/side information included a book is just icing on the cake – forgive me – in my book.

Clinton, MA mentioned!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com