TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Wed Nov 20 11:39:23 EST 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

Making MM fonts

Yuri Yarmola (the Fontlab developer) writes on the topic of making multiple master fonts: " It is possible to create Mac or PC MMs with Mac version of Fontlab. PC version creates only PC MM fonts. We planned to add support for MM fonts to next major release of TransType, but currently it is not clear will we do that or not. I think I'll eventually do the following: 1. Add some MM-related design-oriented functions to FL, like horizontal/vectical-only interpolation and extrapolation beyond design limits. 2. Create small program that will create single-instance T1 fonts out of MM fonts. I had this program in 1995 *before* I started to work on FL3, but it is lost somewhere. Anyway, it is easy to build using current FL3 codebase (for Mac and PC). I have no plans [yet] to *remove* MM support from FL. Personally I don't understand why MM support is removed from OT specification. Implementation in CFF was very flexible, completely based on PS code, so everything was possible: extrapolation, effects, MM-style interpolation, non-linear interpolation, intermediate designs and many more interesting things. Adobe can stop produce MM fonts, but why kill this technology? It shouldn't be too complex to support in ATM driver and it is relatively easy to develop some simple interface to applications. It looks that they were very close to perfection of this idea but instead of making small final step they moved back."

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