LTTR/INK

Mark Simonson

Another attempt to provide a way to design type using skeletons: https://www.lttrink.com

I haven't tried it yet, partly because I'm not really interested in building letterforms starting from skeletons, but it does look interesting. Anybody tried it yet?

It only works in Glyphs right now, but they are promising support in other font editors.

jeremy tribby

I have some experience with it. I think it's handy for prototyping ideas, especially if the idea being explored involves a steady translation contrast. also for prototyping ideas with a width axis. in a single master, you can apply simple transformations and it wont affect the stroke width etc. that's pretty cool, IMO. I found it helpful for figuring out some proportions and pen turns in a blackletter that would have taken more time through traditional means. in that way, I also think it's valuable as an educational tool.

I do not think it's a good way to build a final font, however. the reason I add "prototyping" as a qualifier is that it doesn't produce clean vectors. or at least, in my experience, there were a lot of points to remove. it's also hard to deal with some systematic things like overshoots etc. basically you end up spending so much time making adjustments to what your vision for the final drawings are, that you may as well not have used it, in terms of time spent. but, again, in terms of more low-stakes work, early ideation, playing around, working out broad-nib pen angles, axes that you havent quite commit yourself to, stuff like that — I think it's impressive and can definitely be valuable.

Nick Curtis

If I were still actively producing fonts, I would be on this like a duck on a Junebug, having produced most of my 800+ fonts using the skeleton method in some form or another.

Simon Cozens

The stuff that Matthew Blanchard is doing with Variable Width Stroking in the MFEK glyph editor is very interesting to me, especially the pattern-along-path feature. It's not terribly user friendly yet but that's only a matter of time. See here and here. 

AbiRasheed

It only works in Glyphs right now, but they are promising support in other font editors.

Yeah they've been saying that for some yrs now. This stuff was released some yrs ago, they even made a post in here about it and I was very interested in trying it out and mailed them if we could have a version for fontlab or AI. They said it was in the works but nothing came of it. 

Johannes Neumeier

https://typedrawers.com/discussion/2351/letterink-stroke-extension-for-glyphs

Mark Simonson

Ah, wondered if this tool might have come up before, but got no hits searching for "lttr" or "lttr/ink" before posting. Seems they changed the name.

Drawcard

This is sort of, kind of related but LTTR/INK are also working on a e-commerce product for font retail, https://lttrshop.com. Anyone tried this out?

Thomas Phinney

Plenty of nice features. Viewed as a work-in-progress it is impressive.

From the demo, it sure looks like there is a linear price multiplier on the scaling of quantities—which would make me much less excited. That’s exactly one of the key complications I would expect a custom font e-commerce solution to address. But if it is in the pipeline, then great. 

Filip Paldia

@Mark Simonson thank you for sharing.

The article about LTTR/INK has been recently published on Typeroom. (December 2021)

I also recommend seeing our YouTube channel or Instagram to get your own impression of what is possible with the tool.

1. You can emulate Translation, Contrast and Expansion with the ellipsis shape (more shapes is being researched) plus Rotation. 

2. The Stroke Imprint (brush/nib shape) can be changed along the Heartline since every Skeleton segment has independent settings.

3. The export to outlines is pretty clear — not messy vertices along the outline. @jeremy tribby

Those three features are our main advantage from the tools you might have tried or seen yet.
That's why the development was so long and still in progress. We had to literally do research in the computer geometry field. <bragging>I believe even Mr Knuth wouldn’t be ashamed</bragging> 

The only concern can be the perfection or smoothness of the emulated stroke shapes. So, in some cases, you have to make corrections to the generated outline. However, no one is expecting the production-ready shapes at this moment.

For @AbiRasheed

LTTR/INK for Adobe Illustrator
Is in progress and our plan is to release it in 2022.

LTTR/INK for other tools
1. FontLab 7 — we are not aware of possibilities for plugins. But, we are open to collaboration. Anyone from FontLab here?
2. RoboFont — Return of Investment is quite risky. But, if there is someone who can do plugins for Robofont we are enthusiastic to establish cooperation.

jeremy tribby

indeed, I just gave LTTR/INK another try and its outlines are much better than the last time I tried it. very nice work - this is an impressive technical achievement!

Filip Zajac said:

The only concern can be the perfection or smoothness of the emulated stroke shapes. So, in some cases, you have to make corrections to the generated outline. However, no one is expecting the production-ready shapes at this moment.

I think this understates the concern. after taking the time to properly set up the LTTR/INK brushes, there's still a bit of work to do. I'm reminded of Dürer's roman letters, which would benefit from some correction, even if (or, more likely, because) they are geometrically sound in some way.  it's tough not being able to control both the outer curve and the counter, independently, because you'll almost never want them to have the same amount of curve tension. here's an example of how I might begin correcting curves after expanding from LTTR/INK:

it's not really a different workflow than keeping my skeletons in a backup layer, and it takes more time to set up.

however, as I mentioned previously in this thread, in a blackletter typeface, or translation contrast serif, etc, it is an excellent tool for drawing shapes initially, even if you have to expand at the end for corrections, because it saves you time as you draw the letters, helps visualize the angle of the pen, etc. and if you're digitally tracing your own physically-drawn work, it makes it easier to catch where you got things wrong, geometrically.

now that the outlines are so much better I will play around with LTTR/INK more, I'm sure there's a place for it somewhere in my workflow outside those broad-nib examples. I'm very impressed, and apologize for misrepresenting the current state of the app when commenting on the outline quality in september.

Franz Gratzer

I was telling everyone who would listen to me that we need something like lttr-ink for years. I didn't know that anyone was working on that but was puzzled by the impression that nobody was. (I didn't have the means to make this project happen.) But, I will only benefit from such a tool if it is created as free software. (I don't say this because I want to cheap out. I support free software for the freedom aspect I believe in and donate probably more to free software projects than I would pay for proprietary software that is created to do the same things.)

I wonder now if my second idea in this area does also already exist: A font managing software that allows to filter fonts to any arbitrary attribute fonts can have ...