Following up on quality fonts and meta-fonts

washburn — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:39:50 +0000

In response to my post on quality fonts, mbana provided a pointer to a Typophile discussion on the Tex Gyre fonts. In particular, Thomas Phinney described their quality as "wildly variable". I suppose at the time I was using "quality" to more describe whether the fonts provided all the features I would expect to need, rather than only aesthetic quality. I have to admit when I did skim the specimens that they didn't look too bad to me. He did say that the glyphs based on the original URW designs were quite good, while the Greek and Cyrillic "range from mediocre to poor to largely useless". Phinney most certainly has more experience with Cyrillic and type design than me, and arguably he probably just has a much better eye than me.

Leon recommended Junicode, which provides the most important features I discussed. I do think its stems are a bit thinner than I prefer, but it seems very well done.

In my discussion of METATYPE1 and meta-fonts, Till pointed out the existence of the meta-font Antykwa Półtawskiego. At the time I told him that I thought he was misinformed because Antykwa Toruńska seemed to have been created by tracing scanned specimens. A few days ago, Peter Backes pointed out this rather egregious error in reading comprehension on my part. Currently, only the generated Type 1 font files are available for Antykwa Półtawskiego. However, it sounds like it was prepared using a rather early version of METATYPE1 and therefore the sources could possibly be incompatible with the newer versions of METATYPE1.

Peter also noted that he has also created a font with METATYPE1 called OCEANIA. It is perhaps not as "meta" as he thinks would be ideal, but during the time I've spent working with METAFONT and METATYPE1, I've definitely found that it is often quite difficult to come up with a reasonable declarative specification of a glyph.

∃xistential Type » OCEANIA

Following up on quality fonts and meta-fonts