LTTR/INK

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.

Comments

  • 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.
  • 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

  • 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. 
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.  :smile:

  • jeremy tribbyjeremy tribby Posts: 212
    edited December 2021
    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!

    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.
  • 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 ...

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