Creating Variable Fonts from Legacy Families

Tom Rickner, Bob Taylor

Labs 2017

Friday, 7 April 2017 | 12:00 | Cupola

Creating Variable Fonts from Legacy Families

Tom Rickner, Bob Taylor

Labs 2017 | Friday, 7 April 2017 | 12:00 | Cupola |

The dream was to create a tool where you could insert nearly any font family and have a variable font pop out the other end, with virtually no work involved. The reality is not so simple. This talk describes a number of considerations involved in assessing font families for suitability, preparing them for conversion, making the outlines point compatible, and then actually producing high-quality variable fonts that meet the OpenType 1.8.1 standard.

Tom Rickner

Director of Studio at Monotype(Madison)

Tom Rickner’s career in type spans 3 decades. During that time he has mastered nearly every aspect of type design and font production, from his earliest days editing bitmaps, to designing some of the very first Multiple Master fonts for Adobe and TrueType GX Variations fonts for the Font Bureau... Read More

Bob Taylor

Director of Font Technologies at Monotype(Woburn, US)

Bob Taylor is currently Director of Font Technologies at Monotype where he has been for the last 10 years. During that time his team has been involved in developing software to render fonts and implement OpenType layout for a multitude of consumer electronic devices as well as developing tools... Read More