People perceive thickness of letters very individually, and that’s why we are conducting Font Weight Survey to understand the regional preferences of font weight. Could we ask you for 10 min of your time? The findings will be published publicly once we have some results. tptq.com/weight

New release! Futura မြန်မာ ខ្មែរ ລາວ ไทย and more!

Having trouble getting Myanmar fonts to trigger the Myanmar shaping engine on Word/Windows — reordering isn't even occurring — does anyone have troubleshooting suggestions? I fear having too many Unicode ranges (geometric shapes etc) selected might be interfering with USE handling?

Had a little time over the last few days to make progress with this pair of typefaces. Couldn't find a Lao version of the Stranger Things logo so here's my guess how it could look, along with Thai, and the geo-grotesque interpreting how a contemporary loopless design might have looked in the 1980s.

New documentary out now! Around Luang Prabang is one of the world’s few regions where traditional manuscript culture still thrives. Researchers Agnieszka Helman-Wazny & Volker Grabowsky spent years capturing the voices of those keeping this legacy alive. 🎞️Watch the full film here: uhh.de/csmc-laos

This book, The Garden of Delights, is a real treasure! Such a joy to read! Deeply imaginative, deliciously written, multi-layered story with magic, gods and flowers. Stunning! Thank you @amalsingh.bsky.social

The fundamental miscalculation that the ruling elite in the UK are making is that they can have polite fascism against trans people. You cannot contain it. Don't be surprised if Reform UK is elected into power with Farage as PM in the next few years and plunges the UK into authoritarianism.

This is why they can't fix it: it's not broken It's *structurally indifferent to truth*

On hatred.

We persistently underestimate the vulnerability of democracies to authoritarianism, because we treat tyranny as something that attacks democracy from the outside. We need to recognise it as something that can grow up within democracies, and that wins support by latching on to democratic ideas.

Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.

Don't use generative AI

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity. TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

Myanmar marks four years of a bloody civil war on Saturday. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), at least 73,069 people have died in this conflict with almost 20,000 deaths added to the list in 2024 alone.

➡️ January 20: FAA director fired ➡️ January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring frozen ➡️ January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded ➡️ January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees ➡️ January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years Making America Great Again!

Working with the languages of the world means also engaging with the world and feeling both its joys and pains. After the unspeakable horrors in Lebanon and Gaza, @tptq-arabic.com thought it was highly inappropriate to go about business as usual, and promote fonts.

If you’re starting a new project this week and reaching for the Lorem Ipsum text, make sure you also testing with real-world copy. Latin always looks great, it’s all n’s and o’s and beautiful rhythm — real text is messy, full of k’s and 5’s and punctuation. Design for the mess!

Has anyone managed to get scrollbars back in Acrobat Reader? I've enabled 'always show scrollbars' in Acrobat preferences and in Mac system preferences, and I've disabled new Acrobat Reader. Still no sign of scrollbars, quite annoying in a long document to only be able to advance one page at a time.

Just learned that, for the first half of 1849, a newspaper called the 'Fonetic Nuz' was published in London...

Proofing Thai Mon letterforms for Pali language, which use different constructions for a few letters, and add loops to others. See how Thai characters ๚ and ะ are used as separators, along with ᪥. There's also a contextual version of the round -aa vowel to avoid ambiguity after certain letters.

we should be concerned about the impacts of social media on kids and teens, but i don’t think we’re worried nearly enough about what it’s doing to middle aged people and seniors

@hoaxeye.bsky.social Any thoughts on this one from Burma? m.youtube.com/watch?v=oVWX...

Here are a list of easy tweaks to permanently turn off Google's AI for most browsers. tenbluelinks.org

As someone who has looked at dozens of ancient inscriptions from SEAsia, I find the lack of erosion a bit fishy if this is ~2000 years old. And 'inscribed with a conic drill' in that era?

Anyone here know the Myanmar-script orthography for Asho language? I understand we can find initial clusters ကွၠ ခွၠ ဂွၠ but I'm not sure how they should look. Top or bottom version?

And this is why I won’t touch LLMs

My top 12 books of 2024! Moved a bit away from SF&F this year to mostly historical fiction, learning about times and places through the eyes of protagonists with stories to tell. This year it's been Syria, St Kilda, Malaysia, Georgia, Texas, Kerala, Barcelona, Sri Lanka & more, some treasures here:

Excellent, in-depth analysis of why generative AI is not the panacea promised by the tech companies.

Nice to see our font NaN Metrify Thai in use for Chiang Mai’s local organisation เชียงใหม่ ฉันจะดูแลเธอ (chiangmaiwecare.com) Visit NaN’s microsite to play with or license the fonts (which have three versions with different letterforms): www.metrify.world/tweet-decisi...

I’m trying to read more about matchbox designs from around the world, with a focus on Asia. Lovely people of Bluesky, do you have any book recommendations? (I’ve already read The Match Book 🇮🇳 / Light of India 🇮🇳 / Striking! 🇸🇬 / Matches 🇮🇷 / and have Matchbloc next on my list) Please RT for reach!

Calligraphy workshop coming up in Brighton! (Unfortunately I can’t attend but if anyone’s in Brighton hmu!)

In the same way the Latin script has loads of extra letters like ⱭƁƐƏꞰŊÞẞƔ for different languages, the Myanmar script has lots of extra letters for some of the 100+ languages of Burma. Even where language groups use the same letters, different communities have their own preferred letterforms.

First draft of a proposal for Letalanyah, an orthography of S’gaw used by Buddhist communities in Myanmar. Comments most welcome. fontpad.co.uk/Documents/Le...

I talked with the Southeast Asia Globe about some of the challenges for SEAsian scripts in the digital environment, and some of the ways we’re trying to help.

This is a wonderful example of how modular Burmese script is! Look how every glyph is built from the same three elements: a circle, a line and a dot. Reposted from TikTok www.tiktok.com/@aungkyawmyo...

Currently scraping through 24 Tai Laing / Shan Ni manuscripts from the early 19th to mid-20th centuries to inventorise every grapheme. Engaging with manuscripts this deeply is extremely finickety work, but really cements understanding of letterforms and their different reflexes.

The Science Museum has started digitising items from the old Monotype Archive! Here's some of the punches for Monotype's Burmese types. collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/search/colle... Hopefully they'll tackle the digitisation of the pattern drawings and correspondence next!

It's very interesting to me that the manuscript tradition among Tai groups managed to evolve a companion style of writing for indicating different kind of text. Here we see letterforms with large dots used for special emphasis in a Tai Laing manuscript from 1821...

The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) has completed the digitisation of almost 1000 Mon manuscripts from monasteries in Thailand. Congratulations to Patrick McCormick and the team! eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1...

One of the loveliest temples in northern Thailand, Wat Analayo near Phayao. Such a peaceful place in harmony with nature, as a Buddhist temple should be :) From my visit 5 years ago:

We'll also be doing Q&A so if you have any questions about scripts, lettering and fonts in SEAsia, ask away!

Join Sirin and me this Saturday on TypeLab's Asia channel for a chat about typo adventures in Southeast Asia, and how they help us really understand scripts, genres and letterforms. 10am BST, 4pm Bangkok. Free registration: 2024.typographics.com/typelab

It’s not just that they got to skip humanities (Peter Thiel was a philosophy major), but that they have always lived in spaces that validated their experiences exclusively. They’ve never actually had to think critically or be challenged. (That’s why diversity matters, and why they hate it.)

Tai Khamyang manuscript (on avoiding dangers 𑁍 predictions 𑁍 omens) from Chow Kensan Tunkhang's great-grandfather, and our updated Phake Ramayana font now including some optional Khamyang letterforms slightly different from the Phake style. Together we can help preserve Khamyang literary culture.

This is so clever and beautiful

Do you work in typography, font design, production design or other kinds of art involving writing? If so, we'd love to hear from you for the VIEWS conference 'Writing as Visual Experience'. viewsproject.wordpress.com/writing-as-v...

สุขสันต์วันปีใหม่! Happy New Year everybody!

So many strange looking sequences in Kwekor script. Most of these won't occur in native words, but testing and figuring out how to resolve collisions is quite a brain stretcher!

I talked with the Southeast Asia Globe about some of the challenges for SEAsian scripts in the digital environment, and some of the ways we’re trying to help.