generative typography?

Question

How would you define/create generative typography ? I thought also of some sort of "intelligent" adaption. For example a font that uses serifs in certain condition or not… Are there some findings in how you could access the vectors of a font in actionscript ?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 05 '10 at 14:58

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Metafont generates fonts from parameterized descriptions. For instance, the Computer Modern fonts have 70 or so parameters, and all variants (serif, sans, typewriter, bold, italic...) are generated from a single Metapost source. Some fonts, when generated for a funky version of the PostScript format, would even randomize themselves at raster time, so you could not print the exact same page twice.

Douglas Hofstadter also talks about generating fonts in his Metamagical Themas book...

Generally, these ideas have not really taken root, though. There are Multiple Master fonts, and smart ligatures in OpenType fonts, but no real dynamic generation.

answered Feb 05 '10 at 14:58

Damien Pollet

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Metafont wouldn't help in Actionscript, probably, but it's really the closest thing I can think of to programmatic tweaking of fonts for general-purpose use. – JasonTrue Feb 12 '10 at 21:44
Yes, and even then, since Metafont is aimed at bitmap fonts, I doubt it's that useful. But the ideas are there. Another track would be tools like http://superpolator.com/ or http://robofab.org/... – Damien Pollet Feb 13 '10 at 21:28
The sources of the Computer Modern fonts should still be very useful ([Knuth documented them at length in this book](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0201134462/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=playingtenu0f-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0201134462)) – Damien Pollet Mar 13 '11 at 17:30

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 24 '12 at 12:05

Another possibility is to use the open source programming environment Processing with the library Geomerative. There are functions to access all vector points of the font and play with them. From there you could save the newly generated font as images and use them in actionscript.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 18 '09 at 00:48

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Unless you write your own TTF/OTF/etc encode/decoder using byteArrays, you don't have this kind of access.

answered Dec 18 '09 at 00:48

Cory Petosky

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generative typography?

3 Answers3