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Gabor Heja

I was half-joking when I said I'll make a custom font out of the font used on the U3 subway displays. But I have a preview TTF now available here: github.com/gheja/wu3-segments/

It's free, open source, but still missing characters.

If you could send me (your own) photos of texts containing missing characters, I'd list you as a contributor in return :)

#font#ttf#vienna

@tajpulo Thank you! I hope I can find all the characters that are available on this display :)

@gheja nice … seeing u3 #vienna subway reminds me of a nice stay in the town this year … with your ttf i can get this remembering every day … thanks for doing nerd things

@sentor Thank you, I am so glad so many people like it! And I'm happy you had a nice time around here :)

@gheja Did you research the display technology or contact Wiener Linien about it? Or are you having fun reverse engineering from the pictures?

@ryepenchi I didn't research it, I just took a few pictures, also stacked some and worked from here - so I chose the fun way.

And very likely they have multiple versions with subtle differences, maybe I'll post about these and the process. (I also haven't made a font either earlier.)

@gheja Tagging @letterformarchive just in case they have any useful resources here

@gheja There is far too little documentation and study of the typography of electronic displays.

We don’t have more photos of this one, but you might check transportation geek websites.

CC @arialcrime who is from Vienna.

@mwichary @letterformarchive @arialcrime Wow, I really like this site! And love the presentation, great work!

@gheja ooo I should do that with some of philadelphia's train signs, I've looked at the shapes of all the letters but it hadn't occurred to me to make a font ionathan.ch/2023/07/24/MFL

⟨ortho|normal⟩The Designation Sign Design of the MFL

@ionchy I'll write a blog post about creating the shapes and the fonts, It might be useful if you wanted to make a font out of it.

The TLDR version with Birdfont:
- make the base segments,
- save all the characters in a directory in separate SVGs ("<letter>.svg" or "<letter>#<comment>.svg", special characters by Unicode codepoints "U+2a.svg" for "*", etc.),
- use Birdfont's "Import SVG Folder" to import them all,
- export it directly to a TTF file.

@ionchy I took a few pictures of a displays using a very similar font. These have way more segments and comes in two sizes, it seems.

@gheja
I spent a few days in Vienna. Failed to find any other characters. Well done!

@meisterluk Thank you for checking anyways! I hope you had a great time :)

In the meantime I kind of guessed the missing letters and made a font with them: mastodon.social/@gheja/1132504