Generating the Alphabet

"Additionally, I don’t want a visual element of the project to be something I didn’t create myself."

Like many other approaches to font design it falls for what I like to call the "Metafont Fallacy".

When we approach the shapes of a typeface it is very natural to think of them as created by a writing implement like a brush or a pen. That is how characters were reified for the better part of 5000 years after all. Even the Romans used pen and ink despite being better known for carving into stone.

It is no surprise that Knuth designed Metafont as simulation of pen and brush.

It turned out, however, to be completely impractical to produce a typeface that looks similar to what we are used to. Similarity is crucial for legibility.

The reason for this is, that the stroke width of any contemporary typeface varies in a much more complex way than can be produced by an oblique pen. There are at least three causes for that:

- Printed letterforms have never been produced by a pen or brush

- Letterforms include sophisticated optical corrections

- Letterforms account for the flow of ink in the printing process, also known as ink traps

This is why most real Metafont fonts do not use all the polished pen and brush machinery at all, but use a very thin pen to draw the complex outline and then fill it.

Modern letter shapes are just like that and nothing that pen and brush strokes could directly reproduce.

Nice to see an example of how us mere mortal engineers can "design" a font, using a few rough dots, and a whole lot of arguably hacky (but also arguably quite clever) scripts. No doubt there are those who would cringe at the results; personally, I applaud them.

https://github.com/thestumbler/alpha

I get so much junk mail that tries to fool me into thinking it's addressed to me personally with script-style fonts. Some of the fonts are very nicely done, but all I have to do to dispel the illusion is to compare two instances of the same glyph and observe that they are identical.