SVG has specific support for fonts and glyphs that is pretty easy to understand. It supports moves, lines, arcs, beziers and splines
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Hi Willem,
got a bit further this week with this project. We added support for primary and secondary stencil points directly into the font spec. Primary points are topological necessities, secondary points can be used to strengthen the connections between islands and the surrounding sheet. See my blog for further details.
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Hi David.
Thanks for the heads up. Interesting read especially the friction curve approach for automated kerning.
Did you consider automating the stenciling as well? For a font designer to decide on the points is good from an aesthetic perspective.
Yet suppose one is laser-cutting thin fabrics: The example of the ‘g’ with both primary and secondary connections would still end up with the ‘island’ hanging down like a pancake being poured out of a frying pan. I can imagine being able to auto create connection points based on curve angles, much like how splines are converted to polylines based on max angle. Polyline vertices would be the connection point incidents.
Cheers
Willem
I did consider automating the stencilling, and I figure I’ll have to write something eventually in case the human font designer messes up and doesn’t include stencil points where they need to be.
As for fabric and other weak material, I figured it’d make more sense to be able to represent the symbols as dashed lines instead of solid ones. That at least is something that can fairly easily be provided as a post-process.
That would indeed suffice IMO to cover for weak materials. Even be a solution for fonts without set connection points.
-Willem
That’s pretty cool. In your example with the text “abc” in sequence, my eye seems to want more space between “a” and “b”, and less between “b” and “c”. Though I imagine I wouldn’t really care that much if I weren’t nit-picking a discussion on kerning.
Century Gothic was one of the only fonts I could find on my system that had a vertical back to the “a”:
It is kerned nicely to my eye. In fact, it looks like a very well-designed single-stroke font. Perhaps it would be worth borrowing design ideas from.
Here’s an interesting (at least to typography geeks) article I read the other day:
Yeah I know, kerning based solely on shortest distance between glyphs is a bit naive. Ideally I’d measure the area left over in between adjacent glyphs. That sounds like a lot of difficult work though… so maybe for GeoFonts* 2.0
As that article you linked makes clear, it’s just too easy to keep perfecting a typeface forever. I need to somehow tear myself away from it and call it ready for Beta 1.
- That’s not what this project is actually called. Haven’t really got a name for it yet.