Holotable Title
Holotable Title is a free display typeface made for the card titles of the swccg-cardmaker program, which remasters Players Committee virtual cards.[1][2] Its letter shapes are traced from the card titles on the Players Committee's own Holotable card images. It is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, so anyone may use, modify and redistribute it.[3] It replaced Fiorello CG Condensed, a commercial typeface, in swccg-cardmaker revision 62 on 3 November 2026.[4]
Background
The Players Committee set its card titles in Fiorello Condensed, the face of Decipher's printed titles (see Typography of Star Wars CCG cards). Its Defensive Shields sheet embeds the face as ATFiorello-Condensed.[5] Fiorello CG Condensed, which came with Bardez's template pack, is a commercial copy of the same design.[4] United States copyright law does not protect a typeface's letter shapes as such,[6] but font files are software. Holotable Title was therefore drawn from printed and rendered card titles, without copying or editing any font file, and was given its own name.[7]
How it was made
- Sources. The title strips of 1,267 Players Committee virtual cards, taken from the Players Committee's 745 × 1039 pixel Holotable images. Location titles use a different all-caps face, so they were left out.[7]
- Finding the letters. Each title's ink was split into letter shapes and matched to the card's title text. Titles were used where every shape could be assigned to a letter: 405 directly and 263 more by aligning shapes to letters.[7]
- Averaging. Every copy of a letter was scaled to a common capital height (32 pixels on the card image), aligned to the others to a fraction of a pixel, and averaged at eight times the image resolution. The most common letter, e, has 1,166 copies.[7]
- Outlines. The averaged letters were smoothed and traced into vector outlines with potrace.[7]
- Spacing. Letter spacing was fitted to 689 letter pairs measured on the cards. Kerning was kept only where at least eight measurements agreed (V–a, O–r, O–f). The word space is the median measured space.[7]
- Characters the cards never print in a title (: ; ' ‘ “ ” – / # ◊ and accented letters such as é) were assembled from traced parts or drawn to the measured stroke weight. The curly quotes are built from the Players Committee's apostrophe, a slanted tick.[7]
- Build. The font was built with the fontTools library. The sources and the build script are published beside the font and rebuild it byte for byte.[2]
The font has 92 glyphs. They cover every character in every Players Committee virtual and legacy card title.[7]
How close it is
Each card was rebuilt in swccg-cardmaker and compared with the Players Committee's image of the same card.[8]
| Measure | Fiorello CG Condensed | Holotable Title |
|---|---|---|
| Title width against the Players Committee's, 180 titles, median difference | 2.70 px | 1.11 px |
| Title width on 24 rebuilt reference cards, median difference | 2.0 px | 1.0 px |
| Stroke thickness on black titles (Players Committee: 4.70 px) | 4.40 px | 4.78 px |
| Stroke thickness on white titles (Players Committee: 4.94 px) | 5.54 px | 4.91 px |
| Pixel difference, white Dark Side interrupt titles, median (0–255) | 12.1 | 9.3 |
Measurements are in pixels of the 745-pixel card image.[8]
Where it falls short
- On long black titles (Light Side cards), the pixel difference from the Players Committee's image is higher than with Fiorello CG. The worst case is The Destiny Of A Jedi (10.8 with Fiorello CG, 15.2 with Holotable Title). Fiorello CG is a copy of the Players Committee's own typeface, so it places every letter within one pixel. Holotable Title gets the total width and height of each title right, but single letters can drift by one or two pixels in the middle of a title, and its edges are softer. Across 24 reference cards, its pixel difference is higher than Fiorello CG's on 10.[8]
- The largest known images of these titles are 745 pixels wide, so a capital letter is only about 32 pixels tall. Averaging many copies recovers detail finer than one pixel, but not every fine corner.[8]
- The characters the Players Committee never printed in a title are constructions, not traces.[7]
- A final per-letter adjustment, fitted to 340 titles and scored on 60 others, improved the match by only 0.2 percent.[8]
See also
- Holotable Text and Holotable Numbers, the program's other fonts
- Typography of Star Wars CCG cards
- Making Custom SWCCG Cards
- Players Committee
References
- ↑ swccg-cardmaker, GitHub. Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Holotable Title, swccg-cardmaker on GitHub: the font, its licence, FONTLOG, sources and build script. Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ SIL Open Font License, SIL International. Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Fonts, swccg-cardmaker on GitHub (revision 62, 3 November 2026). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ Defensive Shields, Players Committee (PDF; the embedded fonts list ATFiorello-Condensed, AkzidenzGroteskBE-Cn, AkzidenzGroteskBE-BoldCn, AkzidenzGroteskBE-BoldIt and Arial Narrow). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ 37 CFR 202.1(e), Code of Federal Regulations: "typeface as typeface" is among the material not subject to copyright. Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 FONTLOG for Holotable Title, swccg-cardmaker on GitHub. Preserved copy: Internet Archive.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Holotable Title: how close it is to the PC's titles, swccg-cardmaker on GitHub (3 November 2026). Preserved copy: Internet Archive.