generative typography?

Question

How would you define/create generative typography ? I thought also of some sort of "intelligent" adaption. For example a font that uses serifs in certain condition or not… Are there some findings in how you could access the vectors of a font in actionscript ?

Answer 1

Metafont generates fonts from parameterized descriptions. For instance, the Computer Modern fonts have 70 or so parameters, and all variants (serif, sans, typewriter, bold, italic...) are generated from a single Metapost source. Some fonts, when generated for a funky version of the PostScript format, would even randomize themselves at raster time, so you could not print the exact same page twice.

Douglas Hofstadter also talks about generating fonts in his Metamagical Themas book...

Generally, these ideas have not really taken root, though. There are Multiple Master fonts, and smart ligatures in OpenType fonts, but no real dynamic generation.

Answer 2

Unless you write your own TTF/OTF/etc encode/decoder using byteArrays, you don't have this kind of access.

Answer 3

Another possibility is to use the open source programming environment Processing with the library Geomerative. There are functions to access all vector points of the font and play with them. From there you could save the newly generated font as images and use them in actionscript.