Italify – now available

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Comments

  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    edited July 29
    Try it and see for yourself. Honestly :)

    I don't want to trash-talk the Slanter, but... it's just the old Cursivy algorithm with a few extra knobs to control it more in detail. Nothing more. The results are the same. Have a look at Inter's italics (made with Glyph's Cursivy) and see whether you think that that is a good result.

    Then compare other fonts where the obliques were made (at least as a basis) with Italify:
    Neurath Mono by René Bieder
    Mae Soft by Lettermin
    ...some others that I can't share (yet). Some people in this thread are apparently working on publishing projects run through Italify.
    I have a public pull request for Instrument Sans, with four new italic masters generated with Italify (no manual touch-up): https://github.com/Instrument/instrument-sans/pull/8
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,731
    Do you know if anyone is yet using Italify with non-European scripts and with higher contrast styles?

    I am wondering about things like this slanted Devanagari. The mask layer was produced by our current tool choice, which does a good job managing curves (including nodes at extrema, which is still important for us), but requires manual adjustment of diagonal stroke weight and stroke terminal angles. Do you think Italify might be able to get us closer in terms of diagonals and/or stroke terminals?


  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    edited July 29
    Hi John, please get in touch with me with some sample paths and I can see what Italify delivers.

    In general: it doesn't care about script. It only sees curve and line segments, nothing else. You can run it on icons or a script font for all I care – whether it makes sense is up to you.

    I tried it on Noto Sinhala:


    I have also done a high-contrast project. I sadly can't mention it, but it worked very well. There is an example of something similar on the Italify website (the section "Tested on real fonts", one of the last examples).

    Nodes on extremes are on my mind. Not foremost, but I'm thinking about it.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,156
    Nice!
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,045
    FWIW, I will add an upvote for nodes on extremes. Solvable with other tools/routines, of course. But if you were able to incorporate it in your curves from the get-go, I suspect results would be slightly better, not to mention the production convenience.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    I still disagree that this is a production convenience and results definitely won't be better, but fine. Let's not start that discussion again :)

    Working on it now!
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    edited July 30
    Like this? Turned out easier than expected :)

    Edit: Released as 0.22.0 and available from the plugin manager.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,045
    I only meant quality of results of the conversion to extrema points during your curve calculation versus post-Italify conversion using Glyphs Add Extremes command. I wasn’t intending to reopen the debate about the value, necessity, or quality of having those extrema. 🙂
    Just that if one wants them, having your tool calculate as part of it’s routine might have more curve fidelity than a later interpretation. But maybe the math is all the same and it wouldn’t be any different.
    Thanks for acceding to the request. I don’t have a project for this right now, but I am very interested for future. And personally I am amenable to the per-master pricing now, which I think would fit reasonably with my workflow.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,731
    Just that if one wants them, having your tool calculate as part of it’s routine might have more curve fidelity than a later interpretation. But maybe the math is all the same and it wouldn’t be any different.
    Getting the nodes at the extrema is the easy part of that calculation. Removing the non-extrema nodes while preserving the curve is the tricky part and where font editors tend to run into trouble. Performing this operation within a tool that is already performing curve correction operations definitely seems preferable.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,511
    "Performing this operation within a tool that is already performing curve correction operations definitely seems preferable."
    Exactly, @John!
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 83
    edited July 31
    I have it implemented with a threshold above which a curve is deemed too divergent if the original slanted nodes are discarded, in which case it just keeps those. Let me know if it feels too tight, but most of my tests worked well. Some cases really need manual readjustment if new extrema are wanted.

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