Re: Variable (or variegated) tongue

Dear Peter

Very much familiar with metal type and did some beta testing on
Multiple Masters typefaces for Adobe and on the QuickDraw GX format
for Apple (still have The Golden Master CD!). But not exactly the same
thing. I don't know that GX had the line management capabilites for
this. Though it could have been done manually from an extended
character set. The Adobe "Extras" are hardly this, only stylistic
variants.

My suspicions are that Macintosh System X and perhaps OpenType could
lead to this. But I'm not sure we have yet had it in mechanical form,
since perhaps Fust and Schöffer. That is actually what I am trying to
find out. If there have been any real prior attempts made or is this
just a pipe dream for some future layout program. Guess I'm looking to
find the right turn for Type Road.

Gerald

--- In qalam@..., "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
> Well, sure, calligraphers do it all the time. If you want to see it in
> type, look at the styles Adobe sometimes calls "Extras" -- or the
> "Swash" varieties of italics, and so on.
>
> You won't see it much in metal type because each little variant has to
> be cut individually (in all the sizes), and you won't see it in Linotype
> or Monotype because there's a limited number of slots in each batch of
> matrices (just like electronic fonts are generally limited to 255
> characters).
>
> For about two weeks some years ago, there was something called "GX" that
> was going to use more-than-8-bit characters to get lots of variety, and
> I heard that a Dutch team made an Arabic GX font that could do almost as
> much as a street-corner scribe in Cairo. But we don't hear much about GX
> any more ...
>
> Macintosh System X has a capacity something like that. I saw a bit of a
> demonstration back in April....

> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...