‘We choose to parametrize type design. We choose to parametrize type design in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.’
> are there any automations in use for optical corrections these days or are they implied manually by the designer?
Well, most everything is manual these days. But for at least some things, such as relative thickness of caps and lowercase, vertical vs horizontal in seemingly monoline fonts, you could have intelligent defaults and let the hardcore folks tweak those defaults.
Les Paul attached a couple of “wings” to his solid-body guitar concept, and played it in a band. People thought he sounded great.
For a typographic comparison, consider that the OpenType feature of Contextual Alternates was showcased by the design of Caflisch.
Ofir, you need to commission someone to create a “masterpiece” (in the literal sense) with your new tool and launch it with that typeface. A typeface, the design of which plays to, and demonstrates, the abilities of the tool in a creative way. That’s the kind of thing that would interest me (among others, no doubt).
> Would you give it higher development priority than varied stroke width?
Define "varied stroke width," please"? One of the things I was talking about was the need to have varying stroke width even in apparently monoline typefaces.
If you mean "user control over the contrast between 'thin' and 'thick' strokes," then I would probably say that was more important overall—even though you can make a first-rate typeface that is apparently monoline, and outside of script fonts, you can't make a first-rate typeface without optical compensation of various forms.
By varied stroke width I meant being able to freely control the width of the stroke along the skeleton/spine, this will allow creating serifs at the poles of a path as well as contrast and unparalleled contours with the cross-glyphs synchronization(!). at the moment this is possible only locally to each character independently.
Controlling strokes in different width is supported with us already, as long as the paths are separated, for instance if you draw the H of three separated segments you can define 3 different widths for them and maintain the relation of the thickness while increasing/decreasing the font's weight. (different glyphs thickness is also supported so you can vary the thickness of the capital and lowercase chars, all with the RT-multiple-glyphs editing approach, no classes, no lists or scripts)
Ofir: “Controlling strokes in different width is supported with us already, as long as the paths are separated”
An important option which seems to be lacking, is to be able to independently change [1] the width of the upper and lower part of an “O” (“horizontal”), and [2] the width of the left and right part of this “O” (“vertical”). In many fonts, the top and bottom of an “O”, are thinner than the left and right side of this “O”. In a heavier/lighter weight version of an “O”, the ratio between the “horizontal” and “vertical” width, may be different from that ratio in the original “O”. To complicate things more, the “O” sometimes does not have a vertical stress, where the top and bottom are the thinnest—but an oblique stress, where the thinnest point has been moved counterclockwise. An option to move the thinnest point of an “O” counterclockwise, would be useful. If such manipulations would be possible with an “O”, they would also be useful for many other glyphs.
Ben, thanks for your notice. we're perfectly aware to the morphology complexity involved in all styles of type design (write that down David),. At this stage of it's development Fontark is built to enable what Thomas calls first-rate typeface (monoline) in the Skeleton layer with cross glyphs control, than free editing in the outline layer (as you can see in the video at the top of page2 of this topic) where you can keep on shaping the glyphs, but locally to each glyph at a time. We also know that that's not how Type designers work, and that Skeleton issue is somehow against the mainstream of type design (even though it'll work pretty well with Noordzij's principles) but the skeleton is the basis to our next phase of development where outline modifications will be synced as well.
There is another way to work with fontark, I must admit we didn't yet explore deeply, we call it Icon-mode. Instead of generating a double outline of both sides of the skeleton (drawing a circle in that mode will result with a ring) it generates a single line (a circle in that mode will result with a solid fill circle), you can than draw two independent circles/ellipses/whatever , make them subtract each other and be able to control them independently + connection to the glyphs sync system. (Opened characters like W ,E T, etc' are even simpler to control in that mode obviously) You can see it in the second clip here
I'll create a template font with that mode and see how far it can go (You're also invited and encouraged to explore Fontark freely)
Ofir: “At this stage of it’s development Fontark is built to enable what Thomas calls first-rate typeface (monoline) in the Skeleton layer with cross glyphs control”
A good font which looks to be monoline, never is. (See # 9 in Thomas’ article.) For this reason, even if Fontark is now only supposed to support monoline fonts, Fontark should include the option to independently change the horizontal and vertical stroke widths of glyphs (with cross-glyphs synchronization).
Comments
‘We choose to parametrize type design. We choose to parametrize type design in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.’
Well, most everything is manual these days. But for at least some things, such as relative thickness of caps and lowercase, vertical vs horizontal in seemingly monoline fonts, you could have intelligent defaults and let the hardcore folks tweak those defaults.
See https://www.commarts.com/columns/know-font-sucks.html for some thoughts on these issues.
Would you give it higher development priority than varied stroke width?
For a typographic comparison, consider that the OpenType feature of Contextual Alternates was showcased by the design of Caflisch.
Ofir, you need to commission someone to create a “masterpiece” (in the literal sense) with your new tool and launch it with that typeface. A typeface, the design of which plays to, and demonstrates, the abilities of the tool in a creative way. That’s the kind of thing that would interest me (among others, no doubt).
Define "varied stroke width," please"? One of the things I was talking about was the need to have varying stroke width even in apparently monoline typefaces.
If you mean "user control over the contrast between 'thin' and 'thick' strokes," then I would probably say that was more important overall—even though you can make a first-rate typeface that is apparently monoline, and outside of script fonts, you can't make a first-rate typeface without optical compensation of various forms.
Controlling strokes in different width is supported with us already, as long as the paths are separated, for instance if you draw the H of three separated segments you can define 3 different widths for them and maintain the relation of the thickness while increasing/decreasing the font's weight. (different glyphs thickness is also supported so you can vary the thickness of the capital and lowercase chars, all with the RT-multiple-glyphs editing approach, no classes, no lists or scripts)
At this stage of it's development Fontark is built to enable what Thomas calls first-rate typeface (monoline) in the Skeleton layer with cross glyphs control, than free editing in the outline layer (as you can see in the video at the top of page2 of this topic) where you can keep on shaping the glyphs, but locally to each glyph at a time.
We also know that that's not how Type designers work, and that Skeleton issue is somehow against the mainstream of type design (even though it'll work pretty well with Noordzij's principles) but the skeleton is the basis to our next phase of development where outline modifications will be synced as well.
There is another way to work with fontark, I must admit we didn't yet explore deeply, we call it Icon-mode. Instead of generating a double outline of both sides of the skeleton (drawing a circle in that mode will result with a ring) it generates a single line (a circle in that mode will result with a solid fill circle), you can than draw two independent circles/ellipses/whatever , make them subtract each other and be able to control them independently + connection to the glyphs sync system. (Opened characters like W ,E T, etc' are even simpler to control in that mode obviously)
You can see it in the second clip here
I'll create a template font with that mode and see how far it can go (You're also invited and encouraged to explore Fontark freely)
Till then it eases a lot the design process, leaving you with the good old font finalization methods