Dave & Ben:
I think that's the long term plan, yes.
Great, it is comforting to be in conceptual synch :-)
Emma:
I was completely delighted that this topic came up.
Thanks! &That delighted me, recursive delight
Aaron:
I pretty much just had the same idea. If we could create the font
on the fly a user could mix, match, subset, or apply effects to the
font from a web interface. Then the user could save the derived
version to their account. If the original version is updated the
derivatives could be regenerated automatically.
Wow, yes, exactly
For me these are the promises of digital type in general, and liberal
licenses in particular—
get away from the model of the one precious artefact
towards the contrary, embracing the costumisation the digital world
allows
I was thinking, what role does that give the typeface, or the type
designer, then…
But I think you could see it as the type designer (whether he or she
is one person, or a project) is the one who makes prototypes
in the cognitive sense of the word;
models.
The typeface as a model for type
Dave:
I had thought of scripting Fontforge but it seemed a bit
heavyweight for
hosted solutions,
Um, really? Where is the weight?
It is a compiled C binary, no, with dependencies and everything?
So maybe not necessarily heavyweight, but just not as portable as,
say, a python script by itself?
I could imagine writing something like a plugin for something like
Launchpad would be hindered by that.
Technical question:
Fontforge can also generate OTF’s, no? Because you give an example
with a TTF, but than you can’t get the contextual alternates etc IIRC
Eric
