I've been making fonts on the Mac since 1987 (with Fontographer) and I was thinking about the technical advances that have been made the most difference for me:
- PostScript and Fontographer. Practically goes without saying.
- Larger screens. The 512 x 342 pixel 9" Macintosh display was a real problem. It was like designing through a keyhole.
- Affordable PostScript laser printers. Early PostScript laser printers were beyond my budget. Until I had one, I relied on others who did, such as Kinko's or service bureaus, which was a big bottleneck in the design process.
- Flat screens. Large CRTs were better than small ones, but they often had inconsistent geometry, and the curvature could be misleading. With flat screens, all these problems vanished.
- Anti-aliasing in font editors. Short of higher resolution displays, this made it easier to judge the shapes of curves.
- "Retina" displays. This has significantly reduced the need for making printouts and brought true WYSIWYG to font editors.
The speed of processors has also been a factor, but that's been more of a gradual thing.
I'd be curious to hear what advances have been significant for other type designers, including those on Windows and other platforms. Also, I might be forgetting things. Finally, what future advances might be on the horizon or do you wish for?
Comments
As for Unicode, it definitely deserves to be included. Doing away with the old character encodings has made things easier and better.
Just thought of another one:
Future advances?
Displays - it would be great to have a display with very dark black color but less shiny lights. Something like an E-ink displays. There is definitly a lot of room for improvement in this regard.
Some drawbacks I can think of:
- It's difficult to get the smartphone camera perfectly oriented toward the subject in terms of angle and distance. Some kind of tripod or stand can help.
- You have to be careful with the lighting.
Depending on what you're "scanning" these may not be problems.
In particular, the Typophile site was a great place to learn and share information, and hash things out, rather than through the RW of printed documents, classes, talks, workshops, conferences and seminars.
And now Typedrawers.
Two things, at least, that I’ve explored.
Certainly, alternate glyphs are nothing new, but they were previously manually set by typographers, not massively embedded in fonts, and capable of informing their raison d’être. In Duffy Script, I created a pseudo-random effect with four versions of each character.
With phototype, the same gylph artwork was used for different sizes of setting, but sharpness was lost in the many reproductions involved during the pre-press process, and also in sizes larger than the original glyph art. Now it’s only the resolution of the rendering device which determines the sharpness of fine details, at any size. Compare Beaufort with a similar, slightly earlier type design, Novarese’s Symbol, which had serifs beefed up to maintain a sharp effect at text size, but becoming progressively chunkier in appearance with increasing size.
Once he got a high resolution color laser printer, he did recognize it as a 'game changer', which I was very glad about, since I had wondered if indeed it was going to be a let-down, and he was going to cuss me for wasting his money, haha
I think the big change for me since 2008 (which was already well underway by then) is the now dominance of reading-on-screen. Even in 2008, pre-iPhone, paper was the dominant medium.
This relates to retina/laser proofing, in that, now, the on-screen proof is the "real" one, and paper proofing is something to improve the design process, but in a way secondary.
Overall, I agree with all those discussed so far, especially Unicode, Smart Fonts, and Open Formats... in addition to UFO for that, and despite the inability to fully express OpenType Layout, I'd suggest "FDK text source" for authoring smart font features as a separate advance to smart font formats themselves, since the binary-only formats of earlier tools for authoring those features were also painful.
And then, separate again in my mind, is the availability of "pro level" libre font compiler code - both AFDKO and fontmake - which supplanted FontForge. That's been essential for the later development of variable fonts and color fonts advances.
Finally, another big change from 2008 is more formal standardization processes for font technology, at W3C and ISO, with WOFF, WOFF2 and MPEG Open Font Format.
By ‘binary-only’, I presume you mean reliant on a particular application for compiling? The VOLT project format is plain text—and admirably suited to hacking, as we’ve shown with our FL7–to-VOLT and VOLT-to-FDK tools, but yes, relies on being opened in VOLT to compile. I have been trying to get MS to release the VOLT compiler or sufficient documentation to clone it for a long time, but as you know they had some unhappy experiences open sourcing font tools.
https://readcoop.eu/scantent/
This is maybe an option to scan specimen in libraries:
https://www.czur.com/product/aura
If you're making libre fonts targeting Google Fonts, then I kind of did that - it's called googlefonts-project-template, which runs all the fontmakey/fonttoolsy things automatically on GitHub Actions for you and puts the results onto a web page. You can watch a one minute video about it.
I've updated the official contribution docs to clarify that and address this barrier to contribution.
https://github.com/google/fonts/pull/4574/files