Font axis

[William F. Adams]

 On Tuesday, April 16, 2024 at 08:04:40 AM EDT, Didier Verna <didier at didierverna.net> wrote:
 
 >do any of you know if there's a font format out there that has a
>standardized way to store the axis ?
>>I mean the font's axis in the typographic sense (the orientation of a
>pen that would have been used to draw the curve), not in the sense of a
>variable font's design parameter axis.

Another word for this might be "ductus".
METAFONT is the only program which has an option for that.
There are single-stroke fonts such as ""Modern" and the serif equivalent in Windows, but they're not really supported anymore, and the "Hershey Fonts" require a special plug-in to be made use of in Inkscape.
Apparently Courier was initially set up as such a stroke font, but since has bee regularized as an outline font.
That's another term which may aid in your searching.
They tend to be spindle an unattractive though.
>I suppose that the Open Type format is flexible enought to let you do
>that, but I couldn't find any reference to a standardized way of doing
>so (and looking for "axis" irrevocably points to the variable font
>parameters information).

OpenType (like TrueType) pretty much require an outline describing the perimeter of the font.
I believe there was some work in FontForge for this sort of thing (the name "Spiro" sticks in my mind).
I'd love to see a graphical/interactive tool for METAFONT/POST which would allow assigning pen outlines to a stroke --- maybe one of these days I'll learn enough about programming to write such a tool. Currently bogged down on "Design into 3D".
William
-- Sphnix of black quartz, judge my vowhttps://designinto3d.com/



  
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