Jens Kutilek

@Hrant H. Papazian It will ultimately depend on layout engine support, but ‘optical size’ is a defined standard axis, so I think support will eventually be pretty good.

All the type designer has to do is to map point sizes to the desired axis positions.

I think it will work well for ‘normal’ viewing conditions (computer displays at normal reading distance), but factoring in a variable view distance or even zooming may be tricky to get right for the layout engine programmers.

I’m wondering about the decision to release the fonts in TTF format only, because the conversion quality of the TrueType curves is not very good. The source PostScript UFOs look good, but the TT curves could be better even with the same number of control points.

(PS in the background)


(left: PS, right: TT)

Well I noticed the bumpy curves by zooming in on the PDF specimen, which was the reason to compare the outlines on top of each other in the first place.

I agree that at the intended environment and size it will not be noticeable. But you never know how large somebody will mis-use a text font

Right before your quote from the UFL, it says ‘Permission is hereby granted, [...] to propagate the Font Software, subject to the below conditions:’

So I think the copyright notice clause only applies if your marketing department distributes the font files, but not any materials using the fonts.

In case of embedding the fonts in some materials, e.g. a PDF file, the original copyright notice of the fonts would still be intact if somebody extracted the fonts from the PDF.

Mark Simonson said:

The thing that has that helped me the most with working with Bézier curves is to realize that it's not drawing. It's more like sculpting.

And to me the difference between cubic and quadratic Béziers is that cubic ones are constructive, while quadratic ones are descriptive. It may be just a feeling because I am so used to building glyphs with cubic curves. You can get really nice curves with quadratic Béziers, but I wouldn’t want to use them for drawing.