A while back I've moved from absolute glyph widths to relative sizing based on letter height ratios. Using vertical metrics (x-height, cap-height) ensures proportional scaling without distortion. This approach also simplifies small caps generation—just replace cap-height nodes with x-height values in a loop.
#parametrictype #algorithm #typedesign #typeInterpolating parameters to generate related font styles.
#parametrictype #algorithmic #type #design
I regret a bit, that I have been short-cutting the diacritics earlier in the process, by kind of semi-hard-coding their shapes, which caused a range of problems, and was not intended to stay that way. Now i made a bit of a break through, by making them fully customisable, just like other glyphs, which also means the accents itself have now their own skeleton, which can also be used with effects.
Still a long way to go…
Just wanted to share this snippet from a set of generated glyphs with an unreasonable setting in the inktraps/spikes module... I like the unexpected results. The purpose of this green/red preview is to detect mismatches in glyphs across masters for variable font export.
We had a small breakthrough today. Thanks to the help and collaboration of Florian Zia, we managed to export a test font with 4 axes, 16 masters from our parametric tool.
Unfortunately, many effects are not easily convertible to the variable system, so I stick with the circles for quick tests. Maybe we need some Higher Order Interpolation (HOI)-inspired mechanics...
Meanwhile a little visualisation for the outline generator: Depending on the total count of the shapes, the stroke color changes between pink and yellow, for debugging reasons and also the animation helps to get a sense for what is actually happening :)
@tribby @khaled @justvanrossum Thank you all for the suggestions. It will take me a moment to wrap my head around it as a web dev but, I'll share once something comes out of it :)
@rolanddreger Last time I checked, it could not do anything like writing variable fonts or color fonts, but I see there has been some more activity in the recent months. I meanly need it for writing font files not reading.
Is anyone working on a more recent version of opentype.js, or do you know of a similar JavaScript library that can handle reading and writing binary font files (e.g., OTF)?
I'd be happy to contribute if there's an active project in this space. I am thankful for any pointers!
Planned for a long time, but my first implementation prevented me from editing the preceding curves (as the algorithm moves around the outline and messes with each corner), but now this module can be applied nicely to curved edges, also because the core renderer already does a much better job of removing overlapping strokes, which is essential to make ink traps work, as in the letter A for example. The new feature is an angle clamp (min/max) that allows corners to be selected generatively.
