Here’s the font!

1. Make some really nice demo videos of working in Fontlab
2. Expand Christoffel’s character set
3. Create optical-size-specific versions
4. Possibly do a “smooth” version

I will be working at Darden Studio, crafting fonts with my man Josh Darden, typographer and thesis adviser extraordinaire. Greenpoint, represent!

Here’s Christoffel being used at 12 points in Word, no extra formatting done:

Notice how the extenders are getting lopped off like somebody was after them with the Slap Chop:

Not good.

One naturally wonders if this is universal. Certainly I haven’t had any problem using Christoffel in Keynote for my recent presentation. What about other apps? For the time being I resolved to see what would happen with TextEdit and Firefox. Here’s a side-by side comparison:

I’ve tried to keep as many variables constant: 12 point text, default leading, same paragraphs. The text, incidentally, was ripped off from a recent James Mosely blog post.

There is good news here: although the leading is certainly an issue, neither TextEdit nor Firefox see fit to go at my text like a drunken pirate with a cutlass thirsty for blood (or ink, I suppose). Even better, Firefox is making use of the ligatures! Happy day.

I’ll have to do some more testing and tweaking to figure this one out, but the bottom line is: more proof that MS Word is a typographically inferior product to, well, pretty much anything. Perhaps excepting Notepad.

Indeed, the conference was a treat. Of special note to me were talks by John Hudson, James Mosely and Will Hill. Hudson’s talk wasn’t as much about revival as about dealing with multiple scripts, but still interesting. James Mosely did a nice overview of revival techniques, and gave Mrs. Eaves a good drubbing. Will Hill recently completed the Typeface Design program at Reading, where his dissertation dealt with historical revivals. Adrienne and I agreed that his talk was frustratingly short, giving us a taste of what we’d loved to had spent the entire conference discussing. I got to chat with him a bit, really lovely chap. He’s interested in a lot of the same stuff I am, and he speaks about it much more eloquently. He’s going to be in Atlanta for Typecon, and hopefully I can meet up there and pick his brain some more about this stuff.

Aside from the conference, I had a nice time visiting my parents (who are in London for the year, on sabbatical) and my mom’s cousins (visiting for a spell). I wish I had a few more days before I go back to spend with them.

Download christoffel-rough-2009_04_18_1750.otf

With limited time ad hand and a presentation to put together, I put together four character sets from the proofs: upper and lowercase letters plus numbers and ampersand. I grafted in the punctuation from Christoffel Atlas, and programmed in auto ligatures and contextual alternates. I was able to get a behavior where the alts cycle through regardless of what letter is following: if it sees a preceding letter from set 1, it’ll use a letter from set 2, etc. This ended up mucking with my ligature code, for which I had to create classes instead of simple substitution. In plain English:

Fontlab lets you define classes when you’re programming OT features. Class in this context just means a group of characters (set, list, whatever you wanna call it). It looks something like this:

@Vowels.lc = [a e i o u];
@Vowels.uc = [A E I O U];
@Vowels = [@Vowels.lc @Vowels.uc y Y];

The @ symbol here is the syntax for defining a class, with the members of the class listed in the brackets. As you can see, a class can be composed of other classes for convenience. Set theory at its finest!

For doing contextual alternates, you create a class for each set of alternate characters. I have the sets @default, @calt1, @calt2 and @calt3. I write the calt (as in contextual alternate) feature so that whenever a character is encounters from @default, the next character will come from @calt1.the ‘ in the code means this is the anchor or target character, the one to be substituted depending on the context of those around it. So if two consecutive characters from @default show up, change the second one to the corresponding character from @calt1. If a character from @default is preceded by one from @calt1, change the target to @calt2. Finally, if a character from default it followed by one from @calt2, change the target to @calt3. You can do this for as many character sets as you have handy.

feature calt {
lookup rotate {
sub @default @default' by @calt1;
sub @calt1 @default' by @calt2;
sub @calt2 @default' by @calt3;
} rotate;

lookup rotate;
lookup rotate;
lookup rotate;
lookup rotate;
lookup rotate;

} calt;

For ligatures, you use a slightly different substitution scheme. You’re swapping two characters for one, regardless of the context. Simple ligature code looks like this:

feature liga {
sub f i by fi;
sub f l by fl;
sub f f by f_f;
sub f f i by f_f_i;
sub f f l by f_f_l;
} liga;

Simple enough. But when the calt routine has been swapping around your characters, it will break the above code. The solution is to define classes for ligatures:

@f = [f f.alt1 f.alt2 f.alt3];
@i = [i i.alt1 i.alt2 i.alt3];
@l = [l l.alt1 l.alt2 l.alt3];
@fi = [fi fi.alt1 fi.alt2 fi.alt3];
@fl = [fl fl.alt1 fl.alt2 fl.alt3];
@f_f = [f_f f_f.alt1 f_f.alt2 f_f.alt3];
@f_f_i = [f_f_i f_f_i.alt1 f_f_i.alt2 f_f_i.alt3];
@f_f_l = [f_f_l f_f_l.alt1 f_f_l.alt2 f_f_l.alt3];

Then modify the code:

feature liga {
sub @f @i by fi;
sub @f @l by fl;
sub @f @f by f_f;
sub @f @f @i by f_f_i;
sub @f @f @l by f_f_l;
} liga;

Now, instead of looking for the characters f and i when you want an fi ligature, you look for classes that contain them and all their relevant alternates. Problem solved.

Having all that in place, I used the resulting typeface to put together my presentation. I went for brevity whenever possible, but I knew there would be at least one critic who hasn’t seen my work before. When the slides were all assembled I did a run-through, timed it at 9 minutes (we were allotted 10) and went looking for my index cards.

The presentation itself, I’m happy to say, went off without a hitch. I brought along some books, the iRex iLiad reader I’ve been using, and the Bixler proofs as props. I think they complemented the presentation nicely, and the proofs especially were nice for getting across the tactility and physicality of letterpress that I’m trying to emulate. I got some good feedback from the critics, especially from Ethan, my writing instructor from last semester. He had very high praise for the work I’ve done, which meant an awful lot to me. My friend and classmate Alpay was kind enough to video the presentation for me, and I’ll be posting that as soon as I can convert it to a web-friendly format (as it is, I have a 1.58GB AVI file that’s too big for Vimeo). Also to come, the latest beta of Christoffel, with alt character sets.