TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri May 31 13:31:22 EDT 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

FontWorks

I quote Laurence Penney on this old Windows 3 software program made by ElseWare: FontWorks is a parametric font generation system. Using major extensions to the PANOSE concept [the system devised by ElseWare for stylistic font classification and matching] it enabled the re-creation of outline fonts from their parametric descriptions. These sets of parameters were convenently small, so you could afford to have the complete set of 150 fonts installed. When the user selected an ElseWare font in a document, a "synthetic" TrueType font was generated and kept in memory. The first request would take a few seconds to complete, but after that the system was as efficient as standard TrueType. FontWorks ran on Windows 3.1x only. Although not available any more to the public as FontWorks, the same "InfiniFont" technology for font synthesis is now part of Hewlett-Packard's PCL6 printer language (and may soon become important to Web font specification). FontWorks was ultimately of limited interest to the typographer as it gave no control of the parameters to the user: the focus was on font compression. It's interesting to note how close compression and parametrization (i.e., understanding the principles) of type are. ElseWare was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in late 1995: see the press release.

EXTERNAL LINKS
FontWorks
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Truetype font software ⦿