About font production
Font production notes
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OT production
Font production notes
Most of these notes are dedicated to the technical side of type design – font production.
Type design can be regarded as the creative part, the joyful play with letter forms. Font production is the the dark side, the hard work of translating design visions into files. For many, the production side goes unnoticed: Hit your font editor's 'generate' button, done. But it is an activity in its own right, proven by frequently asked questions – how do I fill in this or that dialog in my font editor? what is wrong with my OpenType feature code? where is my kerning? Making fonts is not the same as saving an InDesign document or exporting a PDF file. At the same time, production can be as creative as the design process itself.
But maybe font production is only at the surface of these pieces. What they really are about is, how can I make my type design dreams real? And hopefully they will explain why sometimes things take longer than expected.
The title of this section is an allusion to B.H. Newdigate's series of articles called
Book Production Notes, the compilation in book form is one of my favorite items on my book shelves.
Comments and corrections are always welcome!
Yours, Karsten Luecke
One advantage of XML, even a design goal according to the specification, is that it is human readable as regards data structure. As a consequence, however, data itself turns out to be less readable.
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What does it mean to insert a glyph into a text via a glyph palette like the one InDesign offers? And does Photoshop need a glyph palette too?
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Some of Adam Twardoch's comments to Edo Smitshuijzen's earlier Tasmeem review have been removed from the KHTT website.
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The second Dr Peter Karow Award for Font Technology & Digital Typography goes to Thomas Milo of DecoType and will be presented in November at the Type[&]Design 2009 conference in The Hague.
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Mozilla announces that Firefox 3.6 will be the first browser to support the wOFF font format for use with @font-face.
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@font-face will soon make it possible to use any typeface for web site design, rather than relying on a few 'web-safe' standard fonts which are installed on almost every computer. Discourse currently is centered around the ideal web font format. But there is another aspect which @font-face will inevitably draw attention to.
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Very belated and reluctantly, KLTF has joined
Twitter today ...
On a brief visit to my favorite bookstore, with some hours left before catching my train, I took the chance to read in Edo Smitshuijzen's new
Arabic Font Specimen Book.
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The DTL OTMaster makes it easy to edit CFF-based or TT-based OpenType fonts via user interface.
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Not related to type design or font production, yet:
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FontLab Studio's 'Anchors' are useful for defining mark attachment points (the 'mark' feature will play a more important role in future fonts), yet the interface to deal with them is more than spartanic. Regard
FLS Anchors Feature Request as my personal wishlist.
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During the past months I was a bit involved in a project which I consider to be the most refreshing take on layout and font technology that I have seen in years, DecoType's ACE. ACE is a layout engine for typesetting Arabic. It is available for use in InDesign ME as a plug-in called Tasmeem. But how to produce fonts for ACE?
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One of the questions for which I have not found a good answer yet is this: Imagine that a typographer/designer inserts a glyph directly via a layout application's glyph palette. Also imagine that this glyph is an unencoded alternate variant – usually this is accessed by typing (which inserts an encoded character) plus applying an OT layout feature.
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My TypeTech presentation for ATypI 2007 Conference in Brighton, about connecting different kinds of applications and tools.
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Admittedly, this is not really a font production note. It's about digital typography: about WPF and 'flow documents'.
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Spacing and kerning are essential parts of type design. They are responsible for the rhythm which a typeface's black and white forms creates on the page. Kerning a typeface is hard work, even more so when glyph sets get bigger. Only recently it occurred to me that DTL KernMaster might be a helpful kerning assistant.
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Spacing Issues is an old text on fine typographic spacing and the merits of spacing punctuation marks generously. Since English speaking typographers claim that this may be ok for European but definitely not British or American typography, I try to show that until just a few decades ago, punctuation marks indeed were spaced in both British and American books.
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Designing a typeface is more than drawing a handful of letter forms and filling in the slots offered in the main font window of one's favorite font editor. Even a designer who abhors technology and the things that happen behind the graphical surface of any font editor needs to make up his mind about some fundamental questions.
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All texts, unless noted otherwise:
Copyright © Karsten Luecke
All rights reserved.
All product and company names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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