Re: Variable (or variegated) tongue

At 07:17 10/9/2001, Peter_Constable@... wrote:

>I'm still not sure I know what phenomenon you're referring to and am
>waiting to see if you'll provide any examples as John Hudson requested. If
>I knew what you meant, I (or John) might be able to comment on whether
>technologies like OpenType or GX (now reborn as Apple Advance Typography
>and very much alive though not yet well supported by apps).

Gerald wrote to me offlist, and we exchanged a couple of comments:

At 14:47 10/7/2001, Gerald Lange wrote:

>If you had say a lowercase e ending to a word and the design of that e
>allowed its crossbar to continue on as a slight arm extending beyond
>the counter arch (as in some Venetian forms). Ideally that arm could
>be automatically modified to extend outward into the word space a bit
>or vice versa, retracted a bit, as need be.

To which I replied:

I thought you meant something like this. Something like it can certainly be
done with OpenType (as it could with GX) by contextually substituting forms
with slightly different lengths of 'tongue'. The Adobe Caflisch Pro font
(currently in beta) does this sort of thing, notably with the bar of the f,
which extends to the left or to the right, depending on whether the letter
begins or ends a word, and is shortened in other context between letters.


John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.
- Harry Carter