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a shopfront on the street · open, and noisy

A compositor’s galley: three pieces of metal type standing on their feet with a nick cut across each shank, their letters mirrored and reading right to left the way cast type does, and a pulled proof sheet lying under them.

Cast, proofed, and credited

The Foundry

Every typeface on this street, and the name of whoever drew it.

This is a workshop rather than a shop. It is grey because iron is grey, it is lit through a dirty roof because that is how a workshop was lit before anybody could afford to light one properly, and there is nowhere in it to sit down. Every other room on this street uses a typeface. This is the room where the typefaces are the thing in the window.

Put your own words on the bench, or take a passage out of The Playhouse, The Mopery or The Zibaldone, and set it in anything the street owns. Change the size, the leading, the tracking and the measure. Take a weight, a real italic, or the machine slant that is not one. Then pull a proof and print it, with the name of the person who drew the letters on the bottom of the page.

The bench

Typing here moves the picker above to your own words. Nothing you type is stored, sent or remembered, and reloading the page empties it.

Grouped the way each family’s own record groups it, not the way we would have. Choosing one is what downloads it: nothing here is fetched until you ask for it.

Every weight this street declares for this face. Several of these families are one file with a weight axis inside it, declared against two or three weights — the same bytes, genuinely different drawings — and this picker used to drop those, because it asked whether the bytes differed instead of whether the letters did. A weight that came out the same drawings as the regular would be a control that does nothing, so the offered weights are rendered and measured rather than assumed.

An italic is not a leaning roman: it is a second alphabet, drawn separately, often with different letters in it altogether. Where this site holds no italic file the option says so and the machine slant is what is left — which is honest, and is what a phototypesetter did.

30px

A foundry sold type by the size it was cast at. This one is pixels, and it is the only setting here that changes what you can read rather than how it looks.

1.4

The strips of lead a compositor slid between the lines. Multiples of the size, so it stays right when you change it.

0em

Space added to every letter at once. Metal type could only ever have more; this can have a little less.

44ch

How wide the column is, in characters. The oldest setting here and the one that does most of the work.

Ink and paper

Four pairs, and the measured contrast ratio of each one is printed on it. There is no colour picker in here: this is the one room on the street where somebody else chooses the colour of the text, which makes it the one room where an unreadable pair would be ours and theirs at once. Everything offered clears the bar for body text at any size.

Printing sends the proof and nothing else — not this bench, not the street, not the shelves below. It comes out black on white whatever is on the screen, because paper colour is a screen decision and a printer would spend your toner on it, and it carries a colophon saying what it is set in and who drew that.

The proof

Queer without fear. Interdependent and here. Divergent and proud. Living out loud.

Stardos Stencil · drawn by Vernon Adams · SIL Open Font License 1.1 — set at 30px, 1.4, 0em, 44ch. Self-hosted from stimpunks.world; the typeface is not ours.

What is on the bench, and where it came from

Four passages and a proof of the characters. Every one of them is either ours and already published on this street, or out of copyright and already checked in another room’s data file — and the two that are written out in this room’s own data are checked word for word against the page they came from every time this room is built, so it cannot end up quoting a neighbour that has since been rewritten. The other two are not stored here at all; they are read out of The Mopery’s and The Zibaldone’s own files when the page is made.

A specimen room needs something to set, and the friendly edit that will arrive here is somebody quietly adding a paragraph of a book because the bench looked bare. That is The Feed’s refused summary field wearing a type sample. The bench is for your words; ours are here so it is not empty when you arrive.

Why this room is set in a stencil

Every other world on this street chose a display face for how it sounds. This one chose one for what it is. A stencil letter is a hole rather than a mark — a shape cut out of a sheet of metal so that it can be used again and again and come out the same every time — which is the whole idea of type, arriving about four hundred years early and in the wrong material. It is also what actually gets painted on a workshop’s crates and machinery, which is the other reason it is over the door.

The bridges you can see holding the middle of an o in place are not a decorative flourish. Without them the counter — the enclosed space inside a letter — would fall out of the sheet, and there is no way round that in a stencil. Nobody drawing type in metal or on a screen has that problem, which is why nothing else here looks like this.

Why nothing here describes a typeface

There is no sentence beside any face saying what it looks like, what it is good for or what century it is pretending to be from, and that is a refusal rather than an omission. Writing a line of appreciation for every family on this street would mean inventing type history at scale, in the one format most likely to be believed — which is the same reason the herbarium two rooms over refuses to name a pressed plant to species. What this room can say truthfully is who drew it, what licence it travels under and which room here sets it, and all three are read off records rather than remembered. The specimen is the description.

An italic is not a slant

A real italic is a second alphabet. It was cut separately, it has different letters in it — look at a single-storey a, or at the way an f descends — and it was never made by leaning the roman over. A machine slant is exactly that leaning: the upright letters pushed sideways by a machine that has no idea what they are. Both are offered here and both are labelled, because the difference is the kind of thing this room exists to show you rather than to tell you.

Where this site holds no italic file, the italic option says so and stops being offered. An italic control on a family with no italic is not an error anywhere: the browser answers by inventing one, nothing looks broken, and the room has quietly told you a lie about somebody’s typeface. And the slant is a font setting and never a transform — check-gentle.py reads rotation and skew out of the computed matrix and cannot be asked to take this room’s word for the difference between a tilted page and a slanted letter.

Every face here is self-hosted, and none of it is ours

Reading any page on this street makes no request to anybody’s font service. The files are in this repository, subsetted to Latin, and a face is downloaded only when something actually sets it — which in this room means when you pick it. Nobody who never opens the picker pays for a single one.

None of these typefaces belongs to Stimpunks. Every one of them is somebody’s work, released under a licence that asks to be named, and the name beside each face here is verbatim from that family’s own record rather than typed from memory — including where the record credits a studio rather than a person, and including where it disagrees with the fuller credit in our liner notes. Most are under the SIL Open Font License; a few are under the Apache License 2.0, and the shelves below say which is which face by face, because “they are all OFL” is the sort of thing a site says once and stops checking.

Nothing here is counted

Not the faces, not the proofs pulled, not the sizes tried. This is the room on the street most likely to want to boast about how much type it holds, and a number in the window would be out of date the next time somebody adds a face and wrong in a way nobody would notice. There is also no favourite, no most popular and no ranking of one designer’s work against another’s.

The nook next door is not this room

The Mopery has a reading nook where The Raven can be set in any face on the street, and it stays exactly as it is. That is one poem in one face inside a library, where borrowing all of them is the joke. This is a bench where any words go into any face at any size in any ink and come out on paper. The two rooms have one list between them and tools/check-faces.py now makes sure of it — before that tool existed, adding a typeface to this site quietly made the library’s claim to hold every one of them false, with nothing anywhere saying so.

Who made these letters

Everybody named on the shelves below, and nobody here. The family name, the designer, the licence and the classification of every face on this street are read out of that family’s own record in github.com/google/fonts by tools/pull-foundry.py and are not typed by us. This room itself sets Stardos Stencil and Work Sans, both under the SIL Open Font License, credited with everything else in the liner notes.

The street · The Mopery · Liner notes · Changelog · A Stimpunks Foundation street.

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. In here it moves the dust in the light and nothing else — the daylight through the roof is on at every setting, because it is the room rather than an effect. Nothing in this room flashes at any setting, and the bench does exactly the same thing at all three.

The cases

Every face this site holds, on the shelf it is filed under in its own record, set in itself, with the person or studio who drew it, the licence it travels under, and the room on this street that sets it.

Serif

Sans Serif

Display

Handwriting

Monospace

Job marker — a single piece of type lying on the workshop floor

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: The letter that is a hole

Before the code: This room is set in a stencil, and it says a stencil letter is not a mark. What is it instead? One word.

Hint 1

It is in the section called Why this room is set in a stencil, in the first paragraph, in bold.

Hint 2

Four letters, and the opposite of a mark.

Last hint

It is what a counter would fall out of.

Give me the answer

The answer is A hole. A hole. A stencil letter is cut OUT of a sheet of metal so it can be used again and come out the same every time, which is the whole idea of type arriving four hundred years early and in the wrong material. It is also why a stencil has bridges across its letters: without them the counter — the enclosed space inside an o or an a — would simply fall out of the sheet. Nobody cutting punches or drawing outlines has that problem, and no other face on this street has that shape.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: COUNTER

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →