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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

is this for someone that doesn't have access to proper typesetting software? i guess that could be cool if along side the font size you have a radius entry for programs that do not have a type-on-path tool. i'm just spoiled and have the proper tools so this causes me to tilt my head and ask why

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It's not just about curving the baseline, the glyphs themselves curve according to the user-specified curve radius. Check out the second image/gif with curve optimizations on/off.

What font features enable this? (curious how it is implemented and which software supports it)

From what I can tell, it's a variable font, where the font developer can declare an axis (in this case "curve," or more likely "CURV") and the font user can control the value of that axis (e.g. via CSS) which controls how the font renders itself.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Font...

This site demonstrates many highly stylized and artistic variable font axes:

https://www.axis-praxis.org/specimens/__DEFAULT__

I use a circular font I made in inkscape for outputting SVGs to GatorCAM for CNC.

Inkscape lets me adjust kern of each letter because the curve can cause letters to touch.

This is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.

FWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.

A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.

I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.

I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.

Because it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.

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