How would you define/create generative typography ? I thought also of some sort of "intelligent" adaption. For example a font that uses serifs in certain condition or not… Are there some findings in how you could access the vectors of a font in actionscript ?
A:
Unless you write your own TTF/OTF/etc encode/decoder using byteArrays, you don't have this kind of access.
Cory Petosky
2009-12-18 00:48:02
+1
A:
Metafont generates fonts from parameterized descriptions. For instance, the Computer Modern fonts have 70 or so parameters, and all variants (serif, sans, typewriter, bold, italic...) are generated from a single Metapost source. Some fonts, when generated for a funky version of the PostScript format, would even randomize themselves at raster time, so you could not print the exact same page twice.
Douglas Hofstadter also talks about generating fonts in his Metamagical Themas book...
Generally, these ideas have not really taken root, though. There are Multiple Master fonts, and smart ligatures in OpenType fonts, but no real dynamic generation.
Damien Pollet
2010-02-05 14:58:35
Metafont wouldn't help in Actionscript, probably, but it's really the closest thing I can think of to programmatic tweaking of fonts for general-purpose use.
JasonTrue
2010-02-12 21:44:37
Yes, and even then, since Metafont is aimed at bitmap fonts, I doubt it's that useful. But the ideas are there.Another track would be tools like http://superpolator.com/ or http://robofab.org/...
Damien Pollet
2010-02-13 21:28:28