Streamlining Dafont Creation?

Dave Crossland

Inkscape powerstroke is the same technique, and it uses Spiro for the envelop, so they are smooth. Illustrator also has a Width tool that uses the same technique too.

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland

‘skeletons’
‘spine’

Commonly all letters seem to be treated as skeleton forms on which a contrast-flow principle is applied: ‘It seems doubtful that Renaissance scribes thought of their letterforms as anything but organic units, but the abstractions to a skeleton form do capture the essence of the letters […] The concept of an essential linear form is not unknown in the lettering pedagogy of this century. It is mentioned by Edward Johnston in Formal Penmanship, and was used extensively by the Austrian lettering teacher Rudolf Von Larisch and his student Friedrich Neugebauer. Father Catich also used it in his teaching of letterforms.’*



Monolinear letterforms preceded the ones written with a flat-ended reed pen. The Phoenician alphabet was monolineair and so were the letters made with a stilus in waxed tablets. The lapidary capitals of the ancient Greeks were constructed out of lines without any contrast. The Roman imperial capitals find their origin in skeleton line forms of the inscribed Greek capitals, which were treated as heart lines when vectored.
        The flat-ended reed pen, i.e., broad nib, was used for formal writing in the Roman period, such as for the uncial book-hand. The shape of the broad nib added the factor contrast to the letterforms and the factor friction to the movements (the latter partly determined the pen angle). The broad nib translates the movement into a vectored shape and it canalizes (partly because of the friction) and formalizes letterforms. For instance the Latin cursive alphabets were formalized by the use of the broad nib in the Middle Ages.

The application of the broad nib using a certain nib angle (i.e., vector angle, which is not the angle of the pen-holder) in relation to the ‘baseline’, results in a fixation of the contrast flow. For instance the arches of the Humanistic minuscule are connected with their thinnest part (intersection point) to the stems. This standardization automatically implies that the broad nib is not applied on a more or less arbitrary skeleton construction, but that the skeleton construction itself is the result of the movement made using a certain nib/vector angle.



The illustration above shows the application of vector angles of respectively 15 and 30 degrees on a skeleton form of a lower-case n (left). The 15 degrees angle results in a shift of the intersection point away from the stem. The resulting cluttering stem-arch connection has a destructive effect on the shape of the counter.



The derived heart lines show that the shapes of the letters are the result of the applied vector angle and not vice versa. A change of the vector angle while maintaining the same construction results in different heart lines.

The flexible pointed pen can be applied on any heart line and it has not the canalizing effect on the letterforms like a broad nib. The flexible pointed pen letters written since the end of the seventeenth century faithfully followed the conventions, i.e., proportions and emphasis on strokes, of the preceding broad-nib based letterforms. The distilled heart line from the preceding broad nib ones defined the shape of the flexible-pointed pen letters.



The LetterModeller combines the primary harmonic model (or PHM: more info on this) with heart (skeleton) lines for constructing letters (see also Notes on the construction of letterforms). Heart lines are used to define the proportions of capitals, and a vector can be applied for tracing these lines. The Humanistic minuscule is the result of the canalization of letterforms by (angle and shape of) the broad nib, so with exception of the letters k, s, v–z, which find their origin in the capitals, these letters are constructed using the PHM. Also the ‘spectacle-shaped’ g is not part of the PHM.
        The capital-derived letters can be either constructed using the secondary harmonic model, which is a tweaked form of the PHM, or by implementing heart-line constructions for these letters.

Support for the flexible pointed pen is not implemented yet.

*Sumner Stone, ‘Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax-Antiqua’, Fine Print On Type (London, 1989) pp.22–25 (p.22)

Craig Eliason

Hypothesis: skeleton tracing is the "paleo diet" of type design.

James Puckett

And coding is type design’s Crossfit.

Chris Lozos

Ah shit, I just want'a draw letters.

Ofir Shavit

And what are sneakers, bicycles, cars, airplanes and spaceships to man movement...

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Ofir Shavit

If so, I'm wondering what are the scraped shins and torn hands.

These must be slice-copy-paste-union. These actions has nothing to do with type design yet I guess these are of the most repeated actions of any type designer.

We're very proud that with Fontark (even though in early stages) there's almost no need at all for these actions, in most cases the parts you wish to resemble (exactly or relatively) are being transformed simultaneously.

Deleted Account

"These actions has nothing to do with type design...the parts you wish to resemble (exactly or relatively) are being transformed simultaneously."

I know you mean manual copy and paste has nothing to do with class-based one and two dimensional parametric feature control, but as an integral part of reading, parts have become a permanent part of type design, no pun intended.

When you can you show a complete BL set of skeletons covering basic Latin for regular and italic postures of some range of weights and widths of your sans, I'd love to see it at work.

Ofir Shavit

I'd love to see it at work

I'd love to demonstrate it to you and anyone here at any time. (Sending you a private message)
In 10-15min screen-sharing I can show you all there is to know about the tool and you'll have a full picture of what can be done with it and how (without copy-pasting, promise!)

Deleted Account

That's not really what I meant. I'm not interested in taking a tool and making it do any basic stuff you haven't shown yourself to have done. You should complete a BL set of skeletons covering basic Latin for regular and italic postures of some range of weights and widths of your sans, so we can see typography, not tools or movies or glyphs or fonts, or typing.

If you want people to use this stuff, you should prove it works beyond the obvious class-based one and two dimensional parametric feature control. There's a lot more to typography than that trick.

Ofir Shavit

Fontark is a tool, I can show you how it works, you can tell me what You can or can't do with it.
We have many Skeletons ready. Anyone can create his own skeleton.
You want a range of weights of a skeleton I can show you 120, plus how to adjust when needed (and there's a need to adjust, since weights 10 and 90 don't share the exact skeleton, nor do italics)
You want italic of any skel? quite easy, but not without further adjustments! no "magics" just time saving. a lot of it. (up to 3600! times faster in many cases (and soon to much more than just BL))

We're talking about a full vector editor not a narrow set of controlled parameters.

you can see here several font families made with the tool, but these mostly testify about the skills of their creators, not necessarily of the tool's capabilities in the hands of a pro)

I suggest a demo

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland

After a second look at the tables the idea dawned to the experts that it was easier to distill a skeleton than to build something around it.

Ofir Shavit

That's true for certain cases

In which a skeleton could help as well

James Puckett

There is a big type convention coming up. Maybe you should come out and discuss Fontark with type designers. http://typecon.com

Ofir Shavit

Good idea.
Even though we live and act in the cyber world where time-space has less impact on;)

Thomas Phinney

Ofir, I am curious whether FontArk yet addresses assorted important issues of optical correction. See items 5–9 in my article here: https://www.commarts.com/columns/know-font-sucks.html

Are these currently addressed by FontArk?

Ofir Shavit

Fontark won't do it for you (maybe later on)

but, since the skeletons are connected and synced (user defined sync) any correction done in the skeleton level to one glyph will effect the corresponding parts in all the other glyphs.
That means a great deal of time saving.
You can have a sense of it in this animation:


All Outline level details corrections and fine tuning at the moment (can and) should be done manually to each glyph on it's own like in any other tool (this is true to this post date's public version of Fontark). At the moment Fontark lets you get to this stage of the font's completion much easier and faster.

We put a lot of effort developing a special (Unique to Fontark as far as I know) outline generation algorithm that builds the outline in equivalence to the skeleton (Node's wise), see attached image, so Fontark's Skeleton is 1. a mean to sync glyphs 2. a significant shortcut to the outline buildup. You can shrink and manipulate it (and the entire char set in real time) creating variations without the distortion of the outline width. So the design process is technically (and a strong emphasis on Technically!) very easy and fast to a decent resolution of the design, when satisfied with the general outcome you get into details and fine tuning.

Eris Alar

Sorry for my ignorance here, but does a system like this work for variable width strokes, or only mono linear ones? And how to serifs etc function with it?

Ofir Shavit

At the moment (June 12 2014) we have a full synchronization in the Skeleton level (mono linear) and free (not synced) edit in the outline level, with the common vector editing tools you can "go wild", but to each character independently.

Ofir Shavit

Frode, I'm afraid you assume that I'm assuming this it type design.
What I show you here is type design tools development. My task as I see it is to make your life easier, not to teach you how to design type or what is type design.

Deleted Account

Oh, I may be assuming the assumption within an assumption is assuming too much, but, if you are not assuming this is type design, what are you assuming it is?

Ofir Shavit

Type design tools development

Robin Mientjes

So, let’s unwrap that. You’re developing a tool for type design. Are we talking about what you’re doing, or what your work empowers? I think we care about the latter. If you want to discuss how the app works, fine, but I think the end results of the tool are what make this a multi-page topic.

Show us type then. Let’s discuss what it can create. How it helps create those things is, to be frank, relatively unimportant.

Deleted Account

"...ways to impress the Berlowian Oracle"

That guys ornamented beard is still lingering in my impressmobile!

This is an interesting discussion, but it's getting much deeper. The idea of parametric font scaling to me, is to put a font in the User's Hands, that does things automatically, e.g. in the interest of typographic rightness, (like scaling oddly for size, condensing heads for line fits, and wiggling for rendering), or doing things according to the user's whim, like emboldening to accompany an illustration, shortening a Q's tail for pleasantness with descender in a headline, or changing the slope of the italic.

To be tooling to make a stop, in the midst of that process, to start tearing into the contours on the way to an horde of puny human format TT or CFFs is not in my realm of expertise.

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland

David: ‘To be tooling to make a stop, in the midst of that process, to start tearing into the contours on the way to an horde of puny human format TT or CFFs is not in my realm of expertise.’

Basically I agree. I even think that the enduser should be able to create and modify complete typefaces on the fly, based on a set of parameters, more parameters or even more parameters. Also I believe that to come so far one should have a solid description of all patterns and elements involved, which IMHO requires a thorough study of what I discuss here. I also know that a lot of people disagree with me. Darn!

( A D V E R T O R I A L )

With LeMo I hope to contribute a bit to this development. I think that LeMo has a lot of potential and is a nice educational tool as it currently is. Theoretically I’m convinced that the ‘organic’ inside-outside approach is the correct one. I also think the LeMo-approach is the best way to counter the ‘interpolation-argument’, i.e., the criticism on making parametrized variations of a pre-fixed type design. But I can imagine that (younger) type designers are not very much impressed by what LeMo currently visually offers; it definitely needs revamping and an elevation to the next level. I’m working on that.

Thomas Phinney

Until it gets at least basic optical corrections, this will mostly end up streamlining the development of really crappy fonts. So I hope you get at least some of those capabilities soon!

Chris Lozos

There is no great shortage of fonts. They seem to be coming to market at an astonishingly fast rate. If your tool adds speed without adding more quality than is possible now, what good is it?

Chris Lozos

Also, if what your tool does is to smoosh differing fonts together in to in between stages, all you are doing is muddying up the selection process.

Ofir Shavit

Rob, I've answered you here , and for the matter of something I'll be talking Fontark in details in the Fontark thread and clear this one to general and theorethical matters.

@thomas phinney Thanks! we'll be getting to it as fast as possible. are there any automations in use for optical corrections these days or are they implied manually by the designer?

@Chris L as I see it the quality should come from the designer's side and he should get it from his education and talent, aspects we as tools developers has less to offer in.
Things are speeding up for sure, not only the whole world becomes one big market, techniques and tools get better and faster as well, that's the natural direction. Normally the selection process evolves as well.
Typography is typography and there's quite a lot of it that can't be shorten, maybe 80% of it, but these are mostly the non technical aspects of typography. As for the technical aspects (within the 20%) I think there's quite a lot to improve in. For the matter of fact I think that type design didn't yet really adapted to the computers world and in many aspects still unnecessarily imitates precomputing techniques with computers.

We build fontark for designers, not for technicians or hobbiers. The leading rule behind our development philosophy is that the designer sets the rules and the tool is there for his aid.
The utopian level we aspire to is that there's No technical barriers between what you'd like to create and creating it, you might think this will fill the world with junk, but I don't think this is how things works. I think it'll help designers get a better result much faster and most importantly... face the designer/creator mainly with the essential design issues over less essential technical aspects and by that make him a better designer.