Erik van Blokland designed a new file format which describes the relation between masters into a design space.
.designspace files are supported by the following tools:
- Superpolator3
- MutatorMath
- fontTools (and fontmake)
- AFDKO
- Robofont (through MutatorMath module and erik’s extension)
Erik explained also the differences between the MutatorMath, which is the original Superpolator mathematical core (retro-engineered from Apple GX) and VariationModel which was designed by Behdad Esfahbod specifically for variable fonts. The demonstration was made with Drawbot and it should soon be available online.
MutatorMath extrapolates in all directions and the masters project their effect. VariationModel does not extrapolate beyond masters and it is more efficient with non-aligned master.
If you want to dig more into Erik’s research and experiments you should definitely look at these two projects hosted on github:
