Variations fonts and OpenType 1.8

Posted Sep 26, 2016 11:51 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Variations fonts and OpenType 1.8 by anton
Parent article: Variations fonts and OpenType 1.8

The main problems with METAFONT are that (a) it was ahead of its time by 50 years or so, and (b) type designers have apparently not bought in any great way into the idea of designing fonts by coming up with equations for the computer to solve rather than drawing stuff – something which a genius-level computer scientist like Donald E. Knuth would take in his stride but there aren't too many of those around who are also into typeface design. METAFONT gives us a great way of generating font variations by twiddling mathematical parameters that are built into the font design, but the problem is to come up with font designs that incorporate the right parameters to twiddle such that twiddling them leads to useful results. Knuth's Computer Modern fonts are quite interesting in that respect, and there have been a few more experiments in that area, but for the most part the idea hasn't caught on.

In practical terms, the difference between METAFONT and the type rendering systems we use today is that METAFONT is based on “pens” on the design side and pixels on the output side (a consequence of Knuth's mathematical acumen and early-1980s technology, respectively) , while today's systems are based on scalable outlines at both ends. In effect, METAFONT produces pixel-based representations of glyphs at “compile time” while OpenType and friends do it at “run time” (i.e., when stuff is being displayed). This has various ramifications for things that are reasonable to do with either systems such that we end up with basically different worlds.