As seen in the comments of Coding Horror’s article Typography: Where Engineers and Designers Meet:

Typefaces are the gateway drug of typography. It starts with fonts, then you’ll be hand kerning and eventually you’ll be up all night with grids and vertical rhythm and column width. Be careful, kids.

Don’t I know it! One day you’re saying “I’ll never use Arial” and changing the font in your annual review to something with more appeal than Times New Roman. Then you’re downloading Linotype’s FontExplorer™ X and reading Wikipedia articles about Apple Advanced Typography. A bit later you’re learning about how to create an input method editor for Mac OS X and writing about typography weblogs. After a while, you’re standing in the middle of the mall pointing out all of the Helvetica inspired typefaces to your spouse. . . .

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At The MathWorks, new hires have to post a brief introduction about themselves. The messages are rather formulaic and goß a little something like this:

Hi, I’m Jeff Mather, a not-so-new software engineer in the Image and Scientific Data Formats team, which is a part of the Image and Geospatial Computing group. Before starting at The MathWorks, I attempted to defend the business model of a late-90’s dot-com start up in Cambridge, Mass., from people who said you had to sell things to make a profit.

In my spare time I like to photograph, catalog names at cemeteries, and watch obscure dramas and documentaries. A little known fact about me is that I’m a bit of a dilettante and hate bad type.

There you have it, friends, my secret shame. I’m a type aesthete who can’t abide bad page layout and artless kerning. That’s why you’ll only see em-dashes and smart quotes here. (Of course, you wouldn’t know the depth of my feeling from the current layout of this web site; but I’m working on that, and self-flagellation is a very old family trait.) But my shame is also pleasant, because I revel in good design, too.

To feed that font- and type-loving part of me, I follow these typographic weblogs:

• I Love Typography (feed): The appearance of this newcomer is so nice that I die a little whenever I read it in my news reader rather than a browser. [1]
• fontblog (feed): They put a pro-Microsoft spin on type, but then again Redmond’s type technology is actually more interesting than Apple’s, though not necessarily better looking. [2]
• Typblography (feed): Adobe’s take on type.
• Typographica (feed): One of many font-porn sites out there.
• Mark Simonson Studio/Notebook (feed): A font designer’s virtual scrapbook.
• Microsoft Typography — News Archive (feed): Newsy but worthwhile.

[1] - For example:

(Click for larger…)

[2] - I love the way that text and graphics look on my Mac, but Microsoft is going to win the future if Apple isn’t careful. For several years now motivated Windows users have been able to get dead-simple multilingual support. The Windows type engine does a really good job of creating the complex ligatures in various complex scripts. Furthermore, for several South and East Asian languages, you simply type what you want in a Roman alphabet you get nicely transliterated script. On the Mac, if you don’t have a TrueType font, you won’t get all of those nice features, and forget about input method editors if you aren’t using CJK. Here’s a simple comparison that shows the incomplete support for OpenType fonts on Mac OS 10.4.10. (Note the appearance of the combining character “ ् ” and the awkward positioning of vowels with all faces except Devanagari MT.)

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