heikki
mastodon
4.5.8
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins.
tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Posts
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
No, that's another editor I made recently. I'll try to put it out this week though!
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Some features:
— Design type & typeset at the same time
— Pixel (PNG), vector (SVG), and font (OTF) exports
— Specialized in single stroke vector fonts (OTF export just reverses the paths and closes them)
— Two curves not found in any other program (afaik): polycentric arcs and g-conics (rational beziérs)
The UI still needs work!
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Hah glad to hear that! If you make anything cool, please share! I haven't even used it myself much yet, so its latent potentials are still very much unknown.
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/
Let me know what you think!
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
That's true, still thinking what's the best solution to that. Maybe some kind of adaptive tracking based on how occupied the edge area is or something.
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
I forgot to ask, what browser were you using when taking the screencast? The spacing is bugging out, but it looks as intended in my testing with Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Mac.
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
That's true! Forgot about bubblekern. So mine is like bubblekern but fully automatic.
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
Hmm, I've never noticed anything like that in any font data I've inspected, but maybe I haven't dug deep enough. Do you remember where you've seen something like that? Kerning pairs, bearings and advance widths is how I understand kerning typically works.
But anyway, I made this because it works with any vector shape, wheter it is a font or not. I already use a version of it in my experimental font editor and text layout tools to skip the manual kerning process.
Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins. tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography
It's based on a simple idea: fit glyphs as close to each other as possible based on the actual vector shape, so they're just about touching, but don't collide. Then add tracking.
But, depending on the desired effect, this can create too much overlap in combinations like "C-" where the dash would go completely inside the C shape. This is fixed by add a big bounding box that's some percentage of the original shape, and acts as a minimum bounding box size. This works quite nicely, so that combinations like AT, LY, etc. are not overkerned.
Here's debug images showing how the collision is actually detected. I parse the SVG path and create a binary tree of bounding boxes based on it. Then just do simple rectangle collision checks.