l don’t undersand why we Iive in a worId where capital I and Iowercase l are allowed to Iook near identical. PeopIe are paid to design and seIect fonts and they have aII agreed on this Iudicrous convention.
Why has this happened? And is there anything I can do about it as an individuaI or as part of a coIIective?
I can’t even do thorn-master Sxan’s thing and insert a character code because U+026A, ɪ, is too damn small.
That’s kinda my point though, if someone wanted text to all look a certain way on their devices, someone choosing to work around that for whatever reason is doing so without consent, right? Blocking is a reactive act, rather than consent which is proactive.
If someone came into your house and painted all your walls vomit green because they like the colour better than whatever you’ve currently got, that’s not really just a consent issue is it?
Yeah, that’s approaching the situation on my Samsung tablet. I have to buy fonts from them if I want to change them.
But I’m saying why is my right to present my words they way I want to present them not at all considered? I don’t consent to arial font. Maybe my words are best expressed in Times New Roman.
I know the answer is MySpace–giving people absolute freedom led to absolute chaos…
At the risk of creating a monster, if how your text looks is more important to you than the content itself, I guess you could render all your text to an image and share that. Though, I’d suspect you’d end up in quite a few blocklists because people generally prefer to have their own preferences rather than someone else’s on their own devices.
Regarding the Samsung tablet font situation, a few things:
Firstly why they are sold, commercial fonts kinda generally cost money, I won’t get into how Monotype is basically operating as a cartel, but foundries own the designs of fonts and they license them to operating systems at a cost. Apple and Microsoft bundle the cost of the licenses in with the price of their software/devices, Samsung decided to not do that and pass on the fee to the users that specifically wanted them. Not saying it’s good or anything, just explaining why.
Secondly, doesn’t Samsung offer some free? I’ve not used a Samsung device in years so I might be misremembering, it wasn’t an incredible selection, but there were a few fonts for each of the main typeface categories.
Finally, if there isn’t a current root exploit already for the device, it never used to be too long before someone figured it out. Once that’s possible it was always pretty trivial to add in custom font files IIRC. Have a dive on the XDA forums and see if anyone’s working on your device
I was playing with the idea of taking page from Sxan’s book and inserting the I from the title into my text, then people would be forced to deal with it, even though it would unfortunately wreck the flow because it’s not designed to replace a captial I.
I get why fonts can cost money, but Samsung doesn’t seem to let me install free fonts, which we can agree is BS.
Second, there might be free ones, but it would be tedious to determine which ones have the I I’m looking for… but it’s something i would only have to do once, I guess.
The exploits I’ve seen for the Tab A seem to work for older versions of the firmware, but not the current ones. Maybe if I were willing to mothball the tablet until they caught up, I could manage something, but Samsung forces updates otherwise.