Going dotty

Nick Shinn

I’m making a font in which the glyphs are composed of many small, identical circles (dots).
If, rather than render each dot as a fresh element, I were to create one glyph that is a master dot, and link to that for each dot, non-decomposed, (hundreds per character), would there be any pitfalls?
Presumably this would make a smaller font that loads and renders faster.

Dyana Weissman

If I'm remembering correctly, that's the approach Petr took with Bitcount. Since he's not on here, you might try asking him directly. If you don't already have his contact info, it is here. 

David Sudweeks

Hi Nick. If you make it in Glyphs, there’s a special property that speeds up export called Disable Subroutines you should set under Instances. If you intend to align these dots to a Cartesian grid, I recommend this guide: https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/pixelfont Looking forward to seeing it.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Maybe ask Nina Stössinger about her experience with Sélavy.

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

I've done this without running into any problems. If you plan on interpolating, you need to watch the order of components.

Nick Shinn

Thanks everyone!
It seems to have worked out OK for Petr and Jackson.
Nina’s font has decomposed dots.
I’ll give it a try and see if I run into any problems due to the huge number of dots I’m planning. Disabling subroutines might be useful, if I do.

Arthur Reinders Folmer

The first hurdle I ran into was a bezier point cap and didn't get any issues with the amount of component items. Mind, the component count was a bit lower than what you have planned.

I don't think disabling the subroutines is even needed since each glyph is based on one central component, making exporting crazily fast.

Interested into the results! The idea sounds exciting!

Jacques Le Bailly

I did something similar for VT 323 when I reworked it for Google. You could have a look at https://github.com/Fonthausen/VT323/tree/master/old/v3.000

I do not know how well experienced you are with Glyphs, but in VT 323 I also used smart components.

Ray Larabie

I've had a lot of experience with that technique and I've seen very strange things. In FontLab itself, things were fairly stable. There's a breaking point but it's easy to figure out. The problem was the exported, unhinted TTFs. I made the font renderer on MyFonts go completely bonkers once. When components had 8 points. No problem. 10 points? Fine. 13 points? Complete mayhem. Vectors shooting out all over the place. The complexity of the component seems to matter more than the number of components. And it's not a matter of too many points overall because the decomposed fonts are quite chill. It was nutso. The Windows font preview had seemingly random parts of the glyph offset several lines below. And, the number of components wasn't that crazy...like 30ish per glyph. Decompose that stuff before you export unless you want the gates of hell to open up.

Dave Crossland

Decovar also does this