[Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format

[Raph Levien]

On 10/31/06, Ed Trager <ed.trager at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Raph,
>
> Your project sounds very interesting!  Just a couple of questions :-)
> -- don't feel obligated to answer if you want to keep the rest under
> wraps:

Sure, thanks for your interest!

>  (1) Will your font system include the kinds of things needed for
> complex text layout such as SIL's Graphite has?

Yes, definitely, but I haven't figured out exactly how I want to do this yet.

What I'm leaning towards is a "source format" that encodes pretty much
the same semantics as OpenType, but hopefully is easier to work in.
Then the conversion tool would be responsible for converting this into
the lower-level OpenType tables. The simplest thing to do would just
be to use the Adobe FDK syntax, of which there is already one free
software implementation (Rogier van Dalen's otcomp). I also need to
take a careful look at Microsoft's VOLT, which I understand has had
considerable success in producing Arabic fonts among others.

Very simply, OpenType adoption is happening, and other complex text
layout systems won't, at least in the next 10 years or so.

Something that worked directly in the spline space, for example to
render calligraphic Urdu, is well beyond the capabilities of OpenType,
Graphite, or for that matter any existing font format. It's a
fascinating possibility for a future direction, but simply far too
ambitious for now.

>  (2) What is the anticipated time frame to completion of your PhD /
> patented font  system ?

The PhD is not on the entire font system, it's on the underlying
curves. That work is almost done, and just needs a few more chapters
of writeup. The curve editor with static points is also "good enough"
for me to use to design my fonts, and that will be released under GPL
when the patent is filed. I'm hoping for around the end of the year on
that, but it depends on how busy my other projects and
responsibilities keep me.

The rest of the project, with the variation and so on, I expect to
continue evolving. I guess if I kept my present pace, then I'd expect
it to be reasonably feature complete in a couple of years or so.

Raph