Paul van der Laan

Based on my own findings when making pixel typefaces in the 1990s I found that serifs require a certain fidelity from the medium in which they are rendered in order to improve readability. On a grid of anything between 9 and approx. 20 ppem serifs are usually just heavy slabs that clutter shapes, and make good spacing more difficult. In these environments a pixel more or less can make a huge difference.

My experience can be seen and read on www.type-invaders.com/outbox/serifs.html, a design investigation from 1999 where I tried to design a pixel typeface for e-mail. Here is a small excerpt:



I was curious if the addition of serifs would enhance the legibility of my typeface. In traditional type design the role of serifs is to emphasize the horizontals and to optically ‘glue’ letters together within a word. I was looking for ways to achieve this effect in my design but discovered that the addition of horizontal serifs was not the solution. Some letters started to physically touch each other (like the rm combination for instance). The spacing between the letters altered dramatically as well. In my opinion it became too tight.

And then there was RoboFog, a customised version of Fontograper 3.5 modified by Petr van Blokland, Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland in 1995, that was the first font editor to include Python scripting. This introduced many type designers at that time to Python.

The Python FontTools library gives access to the contents of most common font file formats. For OpenType and TrueType fonts it will be a matter of writing a Python program that can iterate through folders with font files, open them via FontTools, and then collect all necessary info from the 'name' table. Additionally the code can check for the existence of a 'glyf', 'CFF ' or 'CFF2' table to determine whether the font is TrueType or PostScript flavoured.

Output could be a tab-seperated text file which can be imported in a database or spreadsheet.

Not sure what font formats are exactly used by LaTeX (pfa?). There is a chance that FontTools will be able to open that format too. But you will have to check that particular file format spec how it stores the naming.

Hope this helps!

I find Windows PostScript fonts indeed give a warmer appearance to text, but only when used on vintage equipment such as an Intel Pentium 120 MHz with 4 MB RAM running Windows 3. Those bigger transistors really make a difference there.

set the first line of your feature to:

sub i l' l' by l_l;

The order of the substution rules does matter, and you need to define the longest substitutions first.