It’s making a font in much the same way that moving sliders around makes music in Garage band.
Apt critique for Metaflop but not Knuth’s Metafont, which is a legit typeface design language.
Fun and good enough for a lot of people and a lot of use cases?
Apt critique for Metaflop but not Knuth’s Metafont, which is a legit typeface design language.
I don’t agree with Metafont’s first principle of pseudo-pen based behaviour as a basis for creating typographic shapes, but that can be and has been overcome, as Richard Southall’s work with Ladislas Mandel demonstrates.
With Metaflop it seems like you’re adjusting someone else’s design within parameters they’ve defined and I don’t see how those can be circumvented. There doesn’t seem to be a way to make a bold, or fiddle around with the join between the stem and the shoulder of n, let alone design something with an unconventional stress. It feels a narrow sandbox to play in, and that’s a pity.
Fun, sure and if it gets more people interested in design, type or lettering: great
So just like multiple master fonts then?
Highly tangential but a great read: Douglas Hofstadter’s essay on categories and creativity in Metamagical Themas that uses Metafont as a central line of evidence.
Some might not be aware that Adobe Illustrator had its origins as Adobe’s in-house typeface design tool.
I read about this after having used Illustrator to make some crude custom letters for a project.
Let’s give it a try!
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