When a type design changes some typographic property via interpolation, that property is called a design axis. You can read the details in this introduction from John Hudson, and in the OpenType specification. It is based on Apple’s TrueType GX Variations format and Adobe’s Multiple Master format, which both originated in the 1990s but never became popular at the time. The extension of the OpenType font format that allows this is called OpenType Variations and was introduced in 2016. But with FontLab, in addition to static fonts, you can also export your multiple-master design as one variable OpenType font, so that the end-user of the font can dynamically choose any instance within the font’s design space. They would design the masters, then pick a set of instances, and export them as a family (or part of a family) of traditional static fonts in the OpenType format or older formats such as Type 1. Type designers used variation in font editors like Fontographer and FontLab Studio 5 for more than two decades. You can preview instances dynamically at any axis location, and you can predefine some instances by giving them names.
If the masters match (are geometrically compatible), you can use interpolation to combine your masters at a requested axis location and to to produce instances: intermediate, blended snapshots of the variation.
Masters are like “key frames” of the variation. Each master has a numerical location on each axis. In these “master styles”, you design how each glyph looks when it’s “regular”, “bold”, “condensed”, “wide” etc. In FontLab, you can add multiple masters to your font. But as a type designer, you can fluently change the weight or some other aspect of the design, which is more like using sliders to change the brightness, contrast or volume of the TV.Īn aspect of the font that changes fluently (such as weight, width, slant, contrast, optical size or ascender length) is called a design axis. The users could switch between those two, or perhaps a few more, weights, like you would switch the channel on your TV. In metal type and in traditional digital fonts (“static” fonts), a font with “regular” weight was completely separate from a font with “bold” weight. When you work on a type design in FontLab, you design the shape (look) of each glyph, but you can also design the variation of each glyph. Normalized coordinates in variable OpenType.Normalized coordinates in variable OpenTypeĭetecting Element References or Composites Glyph names, OT features, text, layers, color, files, UI, Python, varia Variation, imported artwork, components, auto layers, elements Metrics, kerning, Font window, Font Info, hints, guides, classes General, editing, anchors, actions, FontAudit, copy-paste