Re: Fonts and optical scaling

[Michael Piotrowski]

Hi,

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

>> [...] Otherwise I think it's pretty rare to find separate designs
>> for different sizes.  The examples above also show that there may
>> not be a direct size-to-font mapping.
>
> Right.  OTOH, there are research papers defending algorithms to somehow
> automatically produce optically scaled fonts given various hints [0,1]
> and my understanding is that MetaFont, for instance, already supports
> it.  So there are also reasons to think that such fonts are not (going
> to) be rare.

Yes, you can do it with Metafont [1] and you can do it with Multiple
Master Fonts.  Even though the technology is available, there are very
few designs available which use it: There's only a handful of MM
fonts.  It's unlikely that there'll be new MM fonts, and OpenType
doesn't support MM fonts.

> From a prospective viewpoint, the OpenType format apparently includes
> basic information aimed at making it possible to take advantage of
> optically scaled fonts [2].

Well, according to that page, OpenType fonts contain information about
the design size, i.e. the size at which the font is supposed to be
used.  This helps typesetting applications to select the right design
*if* there are different designs available, but it's got nothing to do
with optical scaling: You'd still need to have separate designs for
different sizes.

Adobe also offers a number of fonts in various design sizes in their
"Opticals" collection.  In most cases they were probably derived from
earlier MM fonts.  Instead of an MM font, which you could scale any
way you wanted, they're now selling pre-scaled sizes ("Caption",
"Subhead", etc.).

>> Certainly a nice feature, but given the few applications, IMHO not
>> critical.  The same could be said about Multiple Master fonts ;-)
>> Being able to specify the encoding separately from the font would be
>> more generally useful, for example.
>
> Well, I'm afraid you are right in that there are higher priority
> issues.  :-)

I'm sorry if I sounded too negative ;-)

Greetings


Footnotes: 
[1]  Richard Southall: "Metafont in the Rockies"
     <http://www.springerlink.com/link.asp?id=x47hdaeblntcba0h>
     describes the design of fonts which use this feature.  I think
     there are very few others.

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                               <address@hidden>
Public key at <http://www.dynalabs.de/mxp/pubkey.txt>