When Fonts Fall
Really cool article.<p>But over the past few years/decades, as glyphs have <i>exploded</i> in number, I've been finding myself wanting a totally different system of font definition.<p>I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc.<p>An entire Latin alphabet can easily be extrapolated from that -- but also Cyrillic, for example. And then you can go further, and specify elements used only in Greek, and so on...<p>But the idea being that there's a "default", boring, generic universal font template that covers <i>all</i> glyphs. And that a type designer simply modifies <i>parameters</i> as desired.<p>Now the designer can go as far as they want, with individual glyph adjustments overriding the automatically-generated ones, custom kerning pairs and whatnot.<p>But the benefit would be that, even if they <i>don't</i>, then for a Latin alphabet you already get Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. characters that match well (in x-height, stroke width, etc. as needed).<p>The more I work with typography, the more I think static font outlines for each glyph are the wrong way to represent things. Smart parametized outlines are what we need.