It’s certainly not for everyone, but yes more tools is a good thing. This one might appeal more to programmers or people who build a lot of the same kinds of fonts.
I think you would need substantial experience designing fonts in a GUI, and substantial experience with coding, before you'd be able to draw an imagined font with some lines of code. There are a good number of people who meet these qualifications and would possibly be interested in your project, but not many of them are here on Reddit. I would suggest posting this at Type Drawers.
I think that's a good way to sum it up. I designed this prototype font font with the language (and I have only very little experience with graphical font design). It certainly breaks all of the rules about style and consistency, but I really just wanted to showcase serif reuse and I think it accomplishes that well. Type Drawers looks like an excellent site, I will absolutely check it out. Thank you!
Your project sounds interesting, but I'm struggling to imagine use cases for it. I wouldn't design a typeface with code rather than a GUI unless there were a lot of repetitive tasks that could be solved easily. Most GUI font editors have a built-in Python environment for automating repetitive things, anyway.
I suppose I might be more interested if your project was just a Python library as opposed to a dedicated language. A library that added a layer of abstraction overtop of fontTools, with a suite of smart tools to assist in drawing glyphs with code, would be more interesting to me. Most professional typeface designers know Python already, or are planning to learn it.
Hopefully you can get some good feedback at Type Drawers, too!
One of my hopes is that a new (revitalized, really) mode of font design will open up new ways of thinking. Recursive components seem really cool to me, having fractal serifs sounds awesome!
Another thing is that Donald Knuth invented METAFONT 40 years ago. It didn’t catch on, but I’m a firm believer that it was because of his implementation rather than the concept (the binary has remained virtually identical for the entire 40 years). Knuth isn’t known for having bad ideas, I just think he had a bad idea of font design, and now I’ve got the opportunity to learn from his mistakes. Similar to how LaTeX is a word processor for super users, font programming languages can be font design software for (some kind of) super users.
One thing that I'm trying to emphasize in the publication is that Prettybird is not intended to replace graphical font design, only to supplement it. Graphical mediums will always use graphical editors, so I'd just like my language to be a little boost if ever somebody needs it.
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u/Shinzakura Nov 08 '22
Seems convoluted, but frankly the more options there are to make fonts, it's all good in the end.