Font Designer

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project.

This project outline is not like the artificial tidy problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project, and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavor.

This is a quite different sort of font designer from the usual tools. This one requires no manual dexterity. Imagine a font as like a strange viscous liquid that flows over frames shaped like letters.

It has very peculiar properties of surface tension that make it form serifs or bulging loops. You tweak the physical properities of the liquid and watch the various letter shapes evolve. Because they are generated from physical properties, all the letters are naturally consistent, without you having to manually tweak them to look the same.

You might specify the thickness, tallness, balloonness, serifiness, stoginess (all strokes same thickness), using sliders, and watch the fonts change before your eyes. Perhaps the typeface literature has some additional adjectives that could be transformed into mathematical transforms.

When you generate a typeface you like, you capture it as a PostScript or TrueType font.

You get to choose alternate stick frameworks for the letters, and possibly the ability to enter your own connecting points on a grid.

Adobe has a similar concept called master fonts for warping a given font in various ways.

A related project would be to take a font and find the characters that tend to look alike and find an easy way to modify them so they look sufficiently different, even at small font sizes, a tool even someone without artistic skill could use. It might even be so crude as substituting in a character from another font entirely. For example it might exaggerate the , in a ;.

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