Introducing OpenType Font Variations
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
I'd like to know how this will make web pages faster, since I don't think it results in less downloaded data in total. Is it just because there are fewer separate font requests?
Apple in 1995 released QuickDraw GX, which included a new font architecture called TrueType GX, a complete reworking of font architecture. As well as including MM-style font variations, it also decoupled glyphs from characters, such that multiple characters could use the same glyph, or multiple glyphs could be available for the same character.[1] While GX was a market failure, many of these technologies resurfaced in OpenType, though variations specifically did not.
Microsoft acknowledge that OpenType Font Variations is directly based off Apple's work in QuickDraw GX font variations.
[0] http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/30/the-adobe-originals-silve...
From the other linked article, this is different from Multiple Master fonts in that Multiple Masters needed multiple sets of glyphs and was an interpolation between them, while this is fully parameterized.
https://medium.com/@tiro/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-o...
Also, given a small set of glyphs, would a NN be able to "design" the remainder of the glyphs?
At least there is plenty of training data available :)
It should be easy enough to train N neural nets, each of which would output one of the glyphs by inputting the rest of them: So a NN for "a", another for "b", etc.
Then a consistent font would be one that outputs itself when fed to the N nets. And a way to create consistent fonts would be to start from anything and iterate until input and outputs converge.
previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10801712