{"id":686,"date":"2008-07-22T22:56:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T21:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=686"},"modified":"2008-07-22T22:56:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T21:56:00","slug":"font-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/font-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Font design"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Normally when you design a font these days, you use a program like FontForge<\/a>, which is basically a glorified drawing program.<\/p>\n

You can do anything you want, but it’s basically up to you to make the individual characters looks similar so that they combine to form a unified and beautiful font.<\/p>\n

If you use a program like METAFONT<\/a> instead, you have more options. You can define a “pen”, for instance a rotated oval, that you can draw shapes with, and you can define functions, for instance to produce serifs in a given location. However, you have to sacrifice drawing the basic shape with your mouse and have to use mathematical expressions instead.<\/p>\n

So I’ve been wondering for some years whether it would be possible\/feasible to write a font design program that lets you define a sophisticated “pen” that not only has a shape, but also comes with serifs to leave at the start and end points of a line. The serifs and the shape could depend on the direction of the stroke.<\/p>\n

So with such a pen defined, you could then draw the basic shape in your drawing program and all the sophisticated bits would appear automagically.<\/p>\n

In other words, I suggest drawing the top character on the right manually in the drawing program, but using fancy “pens” to turn that basic shape into all the variants beneath.<\/p>\n

The resulting font could then be loaded into FontForge for fine-tuning, but it should be much faster than drawing an entire font by hand.<\/p>\n

Has something like this ever been done yet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Normally when you design a font these days, you use a program like FontForge, which is basically a glorified drawing program. You can do anything you want, but it’s basically up to you to make the individual characters looks similar so that they combine to form a unified and beautiful font. If you use a program like METAFONT instead, you have more options. You can define a “pen”, for instance a rotated oval, that you can draw shapes with, and you can define functions, for instance to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-typography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}