Typophile - OpenType Pioneers and Best of - Comments

Opentype firsts from P22: (I

kegler — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:48:23 -0800

Opentype firsts from P22:
(I believe these to be firsts)
Mystic Pro - First font with fortune telling capability
Operina Pro - First auto roman numeral feature
Music font - First text to music notation chord assembler (not yet released)
Vale Pro - First Olde Englishe feature
Declaration Pro - First “Signers of Declaration of Independence names to actual signatures” feature

...and David Lemon questioned the usefulness of some of these features!

What do you think is the

Nick Shinn — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:43:28 -0800

What do you think is the best way to teach a graphic designer that he has a powerful tool included in his app?

Clone Ilene.

Looking at the font in

Eben Sorkin — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:27:57 -0800

Looking at the font in question; I see that my question about Bickham Script was pretty silly. Sorry about that.

Ale, Karsten. Well put.

Very true! There are OT

k.l. — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:28:33 -0800

Very true!
There are OT features. And then there is the real world: “I cannot find the small caps font in the font menu!” Layout applications, including InDesign, don’t make it easy for designers to even find OpenType features, and it is not much helpful if Small Caps are in one menu while All Small Caps are in another one ...
How to teach designers is a good question. Currently I like Adobe’s short how-to videos. I fear that designers who by definition should be creative and ahead of their time, are pretty conservative when it comes to the tools they use.

So my attempt is to make things work as automatic as possible. The differently aligning fractions are part of the Oldstyle/Lining numeral features. And I still hope that the punctuation spacing functionality which Nick mentions one day will be an option in layout applications — it is part of the typographer’s and not of the type designer’s domain, and should allow the typographer some adjustments. (With this in mind it is located in a Stylistic Set feature and thus is optional.)

> Tiptoe offers its users

Ale Paul — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:34:40 -0800

> Tiptoe offers its users the Stylistic Set of “Typographic Spacing”, which increases space between word and punctuation, word and guillemet, word and index numeral, currency symbol and numeral. That’s like alternate kerning.

Anyway, still, I could see some problems. OpenType everywhere but the users still dont know too much about it and amazing graphic designers never listened about what OT means....

What do you think is the best way to teach a graphic designer that he has a powerful tool included in his app? I doubt that the pdfs any designer could do to include with the font are enough... ok... maybe should be another topic...

Both Thomas (Hypatia) and

Nick Shinn — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:18:44 -0800

Both Thomas (Hypatia) and Karsten (Tiptoe) have done interesting, dare one say pioneering, work with Stylistic Sets, pushing the notion of what constitutes a typeface (as if OpenType itself didn’t call that into question).

Stylistic Sets is the youngest OpenType feature, a proliferation of the initial Stylistic Alternate feature, and it appears to be turning into the conceptual key that a type designer can use to manage the multiple potentialities of an emerging type design.

I’m developing Stylistic Sets in the Modern Suite to manage varying degrees of historicism in the Greek characters as defined by Unicode. Thomas has done a similar thing enabling the Hypatia user to pick a point on the axis between old style and modern, by applying overlays of Stylistic Sets.

Tiptoe offers its users the Stylistic Set of “Typographic Spacing”, which increases space between word and punctuation, word and guillemet, word and index numeral, currency symbol and numeral. That’s like alternate kerning.

In some ways, Stylistic Sets are like the axes of the Multiple Master format, but the infinitely variable nature of that technology always bothered me. With the alternates in Stylistic Sets, each glyph is carefully considered by its designer, and the typography consequently more purposeful.

TipToe also has fractions that align differently in oldstyle and lining context. It seems to me that this kind of nuancing, of the way that a large font can be organized by its designer into different groups of characters, and alternates made which optimize the relationships between members of different groups, is a great and subtle potential of OpenType.

The Case feature is a prime example of this: initially it was implemented to allow different punctuation for all-caps (e.g. raised parentheses). But now a designer can add typeface-specific content to this feature. For instance, a font with default “three-quarter” lining figures, for use in U&lc and general setting, may be equipped with a cap-height set of lining figures weighted to the capitals. And these figures are deployed seamlessly when “All Caps” is selected by the typographer.

Caflisch Script Pro was

Thomas Phinney — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:19:18 -0800

Caflisch Script Pro was indeed the first *OpenType* typeface to make significant use of contextual alternates, contextual ligatures, and big multi-letter ligatures (like “offi”). It was bundled with InDesign 2.0, which was the first significant application to support such features. Bickham Script Pro shipped a year and a half later, with InDesign CS(1).

(Of course, the GX version of Zapfino may pre-date even Caflisch Script Pro, but the question was about OpenType pioneers.)

Regards,

Thomas Phinney — Caflisch

k.l. — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:07:10 -0800

Thomas Phinney — Caflisch Script Pro is great, too, but nowhere near as cool (albeit more of a pioneer).

Speaking of best-of, Bickham Pro may be the choice. (And as regards technical solutions one can always learn from Adobe.)
Speaking of pioneers, I consider Caflisch Script as more important. Not so much because it was first in terms of publication date, but because it was the first* typeface where contextual alternates and ligatures are really essential — it would not be the same design without them. (Apple Zapfino and even Bickham Pro may do without contextual alternates and still be Apple Zapfino and Bickham Pro.)

* The first? One of the first? I don’t know exact dates.

To what extent do you think

Eben Sorkin — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:51:53 -0800

To what extent do you think looking at Bickham Script Pro would be relevant to roman text face design? Why?

> Stephen said “Of

Ale Paul — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:56:49 -0800

> Stephen said “Of course, Alejandro Paul’s scripts came later, breaking records as far as number of glyphs”.

No way. Bickham was there. I added the 3 or 4 glyphs ligatures with Ministry...lol, does it counts?

> Shinn says “I don’t think you can say that any one face makes the best use of OpenType, because by now the technology has been subsumed into the design process...”

Ii think that is the key. The type as part of graphic design. Is not a change of format, it’s a new thinking. I m designing fonts as a graphic designer not as a type designer. I design some fonts only possible at OT. Without OT there are no font.

> emenninga said “...but I’m not sure (since I’m not a font developer) what faces inspired Tal Leming’s work, Alejandro Paul’s work, etc”.

At least to me, the lettering people from the 30’s working in New York before photolettering. I like the idea to mix the times and methods. I enjoy the words not the glyphs and I love to experiment that with OT technology.

This following quote is from

dezcom — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:47:19 -0800

This following quote is from an interview I did with Tal Leming last Summer:

“One great thing about OpenType fonts is that they can be programmed with sophisticated pattern matching routines that can be used as “rules” that govern when glyph substitutions should occur. … When a series of these rules are used in combination, a glyph can flip from its alternate state and back any number of times before the algorithm is finished processing. This makes it very difficult to predict which glyph state will be output, thus effectively creating the illusion that the glyphs are being randomly selected.
After sitting on this idea for a while, I finally got a chance to use it in the OpenType version of Christian Schwartz’s typeface Local Gothic. The idea behind that typeface is that there is a set number of alternate forms for each character, and these alternates should be used in an arbitrary way. The randomization algorithm takes in the string of characters that the user has entered, pushes it through the various test filters and uses some cipher-like routines to create a sequence of glyphs that appear to be chosen in an unpredictable way.”

ChrisL

> I’m still waiting for

Stephen Coles — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:14:26 -0800

> I’m still waiting for the release of a roman face which uses contextual alternates to simulate the vagaries of letterpress

It’s not exactly letterpress emulation, but FF Beowolf OT has as many as 9 slightly different contextual alternates of each character to simulate the randomness of the original FF Beowolf and FF BeoSans.

Caflisch was certainly the

Nick Shinn — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:39:59 -0800

Caflisch was certainly the face that I noticed first, suggesting the design potential of contextual alternates, which is particulalry pertinent to scripts.

It inspired me to produce Handsome Pro, released in early 2005, about the same time as Christian Robertson’s Dear Sarah.

The idea is to use a system of alternates rather than precomposed ligatures, which I demonstrated in a TypeCon 2005 workshop, along with Adam and Thomas. There’s still a lot of unexplored territory in this area, for instance, enough already with the fancy retro scripts, where are the fonts that look like real contemporary handwriting? A second generation is no doubt in the works.

Also, I’m still waiting for the release of a roman face which uses contextual alternates to simulate the vagaries of letterpress — or did I miss that?

Arial (v 5.0) Vista and

sii — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:25:10 -0800

Arial (v 5.0) Vista and Leopard version - 3381 glyphs

Oops, there goes the glyph count argument ;-)

I can’t imagine not

Thomas Phinney — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:19:46 -0800

I can’t imagine not selecting Bickham Script Pro as one of the couple of typefaces. It was one of the first script typefaces to do *really* complicated ligature/alternate stuff in OpenType, and it is still one of the most complex, and with very few bugs in its implementation. Caflisch Script Pro is great, too, but nowhere near as cool (albeit more of a pioneer).

I don’t find glyph count very convincing by itself, even though it makes our (Adobe’s) fonts look “better.” First, there are more or equally important things to sheer glyph count. Second, our practice of duplicating certain glyphs inflates the glyph count relative to other fonts. (Note that thanks to subroutines, it doesn’t have much impact on file size.) But if you were to count that way, either Arno or Hypatia Sans would come out “on top”:

Arno Pro Regular: 2845
Hypatia Sans Regular: 3057
Hypatia Sans Italic (coming soon): ~3092
Arno Pro Italic: 3222

Not that I’d pick Hypatia Sans as either a pioneer or best of, myself. I agree that one of Robert’s text faces such as Arno makes a great representative for OpenType.

Cheers,

OpenType Pioneers and Best of

armin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:08:34 -0800

I’m working on a book (which you can read more about here) that devotes one chapter to the “Best of...”. And I want to feature one or two of the very best and pioneering OpenType typefaces created to this point. Which ones make the best use of technology? Which existing typeface benefited the most from being ported into OpenType? All opinions welcome.