Variable fonts

Posted Jul 10, 2024 12:55 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Variable fonts by rsidd
Parent article: Esfahbod: State of Text Rendering 2024

But METAFONT could do more: it could actually interpolate between a serif and sans-serif font.

This is probably less to do with METAFONT (which after all is a Turing-complete, if quirky, programming language) and more with the clever and intricate design of Knuth's “Computer Modern” font family, which uses the same (large-ish) set of parameters to tweak bespoke programs which generate letters and other characters. In effect, in Computer Modern, an old-fashioned serif “A” and a modern sans-serif “A” differ only in the specific parameter values used to calculate their appearance from the same abstract program for the letter “A”, and so on, while the same set of parameters applied to all the programs for a whole font will result in a set of glyphs that look reasonably similar and coherent.

This method of specifying fonts via mathematical equations unfortunately (?) doesn't seem to have caught on among font designers …