In my last post I mentioned a set of macros that I wrote this week to help in tweeking Doublewide. I thought I'd throw the code out there, just in case someone else finds it useful.

The idea is pretty simple. Wouldn't it be nice to move a node while keeping the tension in the curve? When tweeking, bolding and making fonts wider, I prefer to use the keyboard to 'nudge' the points around. It makes it easy to keep track of measurements, to make sure that the new stroke weight/character widths are consistent.

For example, if I have a light weight with a 70 unit stem weight, and I want to make the new stem weight 270, all I have to do is command+shift+right+arrow on each of the stems. Unfortunately, this flattens the curves, as the off curve control points stay in the same place.

The answer: Interpolated Nudge. The macros simply move the control points proportionally with the anchor points. If you move an anchor 10 units to the right, and the control point is 50 percent of the distance to the next anchor, the control point will move 5 units, preserving the tension in the curve. The algorithm is super simple, but it helps.

The next trick is to map the macros to keys. Fontlab allows macros to be assigned to 0-9+shift+option. I mapped NudgeLeft10 to 4, right to 6, up to 8 and down to 5. This way I can use the number pad like directional keys. I also mapped NudgeRight100 t0 3 and NudgeLeft100 to 1, so I can move big distances more quickly.

Of course my preference would be for nudge to be worked into Fontlab's interpolation tool, but in the mean time, this is a quick and easy way to make extended and bold versions of fonts.

To install:

1. Download the attachment from this post. Copy the "InterpolatedNudge" folder into the FontLab Macros directory.
2. Copy "InterpolatePoint.py" into the Macros/system/modules/ folder. (On a mac the macro directory is found at ~/Library/Application Support/Fontlab/Studio 5/Macros/).
3. Press the "reload" button on the Fontlab macro toolbar. You should see InterpolatedNudge show up as a folder in the macro toolbar.
4. To map the keys, select each macro (eg NudgeLeft10) and then use the "assign to keyboard" drop down menu on the right of the macro toolbar.

For the last couple days I spent my lunch and bart time unbolding Doublewide. Making close parallel lines is always a pain with beziers. There are still a few lumps here an there.

While I was doing this, I used FontLab's interpolate tool on a few of the characters. Unfortunately, the tool is pretty unwieldy. It makes you control click on each point, if you want any kind of numeric control.

There comes a point at which another extended, expert, [explative] font in a family doesn't help any more. WIth simple interpolation, and the even more dangerous superpolation, font families are getting out of control. But it's so fun to make more weights!

I'll probably take this down in a couple of days, but here is the result of my super wide sketching. Take a look at the font and tell me what you think. If I ever make this into a family, it will be called Double. This is the wide weight. As a warning, this is a rough cut, so nothing has really been measured for consistency. The spacing is rough, and there are only 20 or so kern pairs, so if you use it for anything, make sure you kern it by hand. [Edit: I've taken down the beta in anticipation of an actual release]

It seems like there are a great many condensed fonts out there, and not many extended ones. I was thinking about this yesterday, and realized that I very rarely use extended fonts in my work. I can think of a lot of reasons why this might be the case, but still, could there be an opportunity here?

After my foray into Photoshop texuring, I started to think that there should be a better way to texture a font, or even a font family. Enter TextureFont, a little java app that I hacked out last week. It takes any installed font, and two images as inputs (one for the inner texture, and one for the edge displacement), and outputs a photofont. Right now it's only configurable by editing the java source, so it's not quite fit for public consumption, but this is what the output looks like so far:

As much as it would be great to meticulously arrange every little thing by hand, sometimes you just have to automate. Here's a FontLab script that I use a lot for adding anchors to the tops/bottoms of common letters. As soon as all the anchors are automatically inserted, you might want to move them around a little, depending on the font. Then simply select the diacritics you want to create, chose "Glyph > Create Glyphs" from the menu, and voila, instant diacritics.

I've been doing some more experiments with auto-tracing. The challenge is to make the curves look good even when the type is scaled up. Sad experience shows that no matter how much you might want people to use your fonts at the sizes they were designed for, you will always see them as tall as you are on the side of a bus. (Note: I am working on a version of Dear Sarah that scales a little better)

Texture is overlooked in typography. This is ironic because the type itself will always create a texture on the page. If type is about creating texture, why must all types have smooth outlines? Type designers look down on types with texture calling them all "grunge fonts" no matter how the texture is executed.

Part of the problem is that bezier curves are really bad at doing anything other than smooth lines. Here is a first pass at texturing this font in all its bitmapped glory. A good candidate for a pixel font possibly? Maybe it will work as a super high resolution TrueType.

Everyone likes interpolation. I generally prefer the precision of RoboFab's glyph math, but for a quick and dirty look at what some intermediate weights might look like, you can't beat the "Blend Fonts" command in FontLab. Usually I'll do some throw away middle weights with blend fonts. Then I'll do a more serious cut with glyph math. Of course, after all of the magic comes the hand tuning.