Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xophmeister | Hacker News Reader

This may not be in the 'spirit' of typography, but to me it seems like font creation ought to be automatable, to some degree. Artistic flourishes may have to be added in post-production, but the basic shapes (whether Latin or Chinese or whatever) with maybe some constraint engine or machine learning to get the kerning, etc. right could be bulk generated, parameterised by brush style and dynamics and anything else that can be simulated.

View on HN

It is automated. Also a lot of fonts are basically built off of other fonts. There are automation tools to systematically alter them. To do quality work, a lot of manual adjustment is necessary.

http://doc.robofont.com/documentation/welcome-to-robofont/

Chinese typesetting software had traditionally included a glyph editor so that one could add a character that isn't supported by a font. However, that's not something people want to do very often. It also involves re-inventing the wheel. Its better if one team spends years making the font comprehensive and well designed.

> To do quality work, a lot of manual adjustment is necessary.

But should that adjustment result in manual one-off changes, or should it result in a new tweak being taught to a system that can then apply it anywhere else that problem happens?

In other words, why can't we build fonts the way we build Text-to-Speech voices?

Text-to-speech voices sound pretty awkward. To make them sound less awkward, you have to either tweak the software for all sorts of special cases or pre-record a bunch of phrases. Both of these take a lot of manpower.

Fonts are the same, except they're used by many more people and last much longer than that brief moment when your text-to-speech software stumbles on an uncommon combination of words.

I'm sure that the technology will rapidly improve as more and more Chinese fonts are needed, but as long as AI remains inferior to humans in some way, I don't see it getting all automated.

This is what Knuth's METAFONT does. It was used to create the Computer Modern typeface. However, overall the results are not very pleasing IMHO.

I believe that kerning is already done that way. Basically you use your glyphs (and popular letter pairs), feed them to an app, it gives you approximate good kerning based on visible gray and possible line crossings. Then the creator adjusts anything that doesn't look completely fine, adds ligatures, etc.

Youtube seems to have a lot of examples. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCVx9L90ac ?)

You might enjoy http://genekogan.com/works/a-book-from-the-sky.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750252 as a perspective on automated font construction.

Yeah, you're a barbarian, but there is some recent work which tries to find regularities in the dimensioning of Latin typefaces and make them parametric. I saw a relevant talk by this guy: http://www.lettermodel.org/ at a typography conference in Dublin last weekend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com