This National Park typeface is kind of funny to me, because it originates from a similar practical constraint, but adapting it to the finite-width OTF format eliminates the practical aspect of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I realize it's still useful.
And yes, to a comment below about kerning. From a signage perspective that is definitely an engraving font and it has serious kerning issues. Fortunately that can be adjusted with signage software.
And now I'm imagining tons of people searching for "shx" and going "Well, a shapefile sounds like something that could be a font... How do I convert this?"
Yes, that certainly was surprising.
But of course not everyone is so careful. There was a computer magazine back in the 80s that used a typeface for program listings that used the exact same glyph for 1 and l, which often could not be determined which one was correct strictly by context. Those were frustrating to try to debug.
That same culture also I believe didn't have lower case. Some brief searching brings me to some articles that show Latin lowercase came from monks/scholars under early French King Charlemagne.
I guess if you're a monk manually recopying texts, simpler forms are better, even if some forms look like other forms.
And it's definitely simpler/quicker to rout out a single stroke for I rather than give it the top and bottom lines.
But typefaces with associations like this one actually get a response from me. Almost like there is something subliminal.
National Park Typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20096120 - June 2019 (84 comments)
Any reason for the share?
