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Interesting OpenType Trick
Shahab Siavash
Posts: 141
I don't know you ever seen this font or this trick or not, but I've never seen this before in a Latin typeface.
All letters are uppercase in this picture and the glyphs change automatically. I mean, we have this for Persian typefaces. Isolated converts to initial and final becomes medial as you type, but I don't think I have seen this in a Latin typeface. (Because there is no initial, medial, final and isolated forms in Latin and uppercase letters are usually just come at the beginning of the sentences.) I think it is a very good effect especially when you type something like: "Success", "Beep", "Food", "Tall",...
You can try this yourself: https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/macula/
P.S: Some of the designers have done this trick before, but not in an OpenType way, they would design different uppercase and lowercase letters and you have to type that manually.
Have you ever seen a typeface like this before? What do you think about the trick? I like the typeface, very much, btw.
All letters are uppercase in this picture and the glyphs change automatically. I mean, we have this for Persian typefaces. Isolated converts to initial and final becomes medial as you type, but I don't think I have seen this in a Latin typeface. (Because there is no initial, medial, final and isolated forms in Latin and uppercase letters are usually just come at the beginning of the sentences.) I think it is a very good effect especially when you type something like: "Success", "Beep", "Food", "Tall",...
You can try this yourself: https://www.boldmonday.com/typeface/macula/
P.S: Some of the designers have done this trick before, but not in an OpenType way, they would design different uppercase and lowercase letters and you have to type that manually.
Have you ever seen a typeface like this before? What do you think about the trick? I like the typeface, very much, btw.
0
Comments
1- Does Glyphs come to Windows some day?
2- Would you please name some of those fonts?
Thanks.
It is simple, at least for programmers.
There’s an animated version too.
Nick is quite adept at this kind of contextual substitution, and I’d be very surprised if the Checker fonts don’t provide their alternation automatically, in a similar way to the Bold Monday example.
Shahab, yes, Checker’s upper and lower case are different—so that users can create the effect manually where {calt} is not supported. But if any kind of normal text is set with {calt} support, the flipping effect kicks in automatically.
My designs which have a “pseudo-random” (i.e. global non-repeating glyph) effect of one kind or another: Duffy Script, Fontesque Pro and Neology. More on the way soon.
Check out the PDF specimens to see the effect.
I did a maximum possible level of randomness achievable in a Persian typeface here. It is a grunge typeface.
Persian (Arabic) typefaces always need to have different initial-medial-final-isolated forms by default. But usually designers create one set of glyphs and copy that for another similar letter. For example: (ب پ ت ث) are all the same and each has 4 forms.
So I took it to a whole new level by designing every single glyph, unique. So as you type, the dirty typeface changes glyph after glyph and not two letters are like each other. 214 glyphs and Latin is not supported. (I'm going to add Latin, though!)
Does anyone know of a statement by a MyFonts representative explaining why this problem persists?
I think the ability to toggle the effect is useful. No matter how well your font pseudorandomizes your letters, you can't prevent identical, obviously repeating glyphs above or below. If the users selects a single glyph and turns off liga, it can break the shuffle chain. Sort of like shuffling the deck to get a different result, perhaps avoiding an obvious vertically repeating letter or other undesirable effects.
If you take a deck of 52 cards, split it exactly in half, and perform a perfect shuffle (i.e., interleaving one and only one from each half in succession), after 8 times of doing that, if you start with the same half each time, you’ll end up with the original order again.
Here the 52 “cards” are represented by UC & lc alphabets:
I always thought that was fascinating and counterintuitive. ;-)
Fonts like Kosmik are much more clever and complex.