Re: Fonts and optical scaling

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Michael Piotrowski <address@hidden> writes:

> There are size-optimized versions of Times (these are not free, of
> course): Times Ten and Times Eighteen.  Linotype writes:
>
>   Times® Ten is a font version especially designed for smaller point
>   sizes below 12 point. The characters are more widened and the
>   hairlines of the letters are slightly stronger.
>
>   Times® Eighteen is the headline font version for larger point
>   sizes. The letters are subtle condensed and the hairlines finer.
>
> Some foundries, e.g., URW++, offer text and display versions of some
> fonts; however, the display versions are intended for really big sizes
> (posters and signage).  Otherwise I think it's pretty rare to find
> separate designs for different sizes.  The examples above also show
> that there may not be a direct size-to-font mapping.

Right.  OTOH, there are research papers defending algorithms to somehow
automatically produce optically scaled fonts given various hints [0,1]
and my understanding is that MetaFont, for instance, already supports
it.  So there are also reasons to think that such fonts are not (going
to) be rare.

>From a prospective viewpoint, the OpenType format apparently includes
basic information aimed at making it possible to take advantage of
optically scaled fonts [2].

[0] http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume6/issue3/klassen.pdf
[1] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/255467.html
[2] http://www.typophile.com/wiki/Optical%20Scaling

> Certainly a nice feature, but given the few applications, IMHO not
> critical.  The same could be said about Multiple Master fonts ;-)
> Being able to specify the encoding separately from the font would be
> more generally useful, for example.

Well, I'm afraid you are right in that there are higher priority
issues.  :-)

Cheers,
Ludovic.