We wanted to know if there is any usefulness to generate custom fonts whose glyphs are a combination of bold and italic typeface. We call these glyphs “Hybrid Glyphs”. So, to say, each glyph is segmented into regions and each region may have a different typeface replicated .
In terms of workflow, the user selects the font, say regular, and defines the segment marks in terms of how low it is from the font ascender line. Let say he marks two points at 20% and 50% above from the fonts descender (total font height=ascender-descender). This will generate three segments. For each segment he then may choose a different typeface to be replicated. For example, he may choose Bold-Italic-Bold. This will even be possible if the designer does not have the bold and italic typefaces of the font. In such cases, it will replicate a false bold in the first segment, a false italic in the middle segment and a false bold in the third segment. In case the user has the required typefaces of the font family, then that portion of the glyph will be taken from the corresponding font. The user may choose any typeface like semi-bold, semi-italic, condensed etc
Some key aspects:
We primarily want to know…
Comments
2. Personally: probably never.
3. The people who will be intrigued by this are almost entirely not the people who license high-end pro apps such as InDesign and Illustrator.
4. Not immediately.
5. SVG fonts and variable fonts provide exciting capabilities that interest professional typographers. This does not.
This is part of an experimental work I am involved in and wanted to know if this is something in any form be useful for typographers.
Also I have created a small demo video to showcase a glimpse of how this is implemented in InDesign CC. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/aDGYcCs3wfg