Tom Rickner is currently the Director of the Monotype Studio and Bob Taylor Director of Font Technologies at Monotype. Both have been involved in the font industry for about three decades now.

First, Tom Rickner very warmly and gently introduced the topic and how Bob Taylor’s team has solved their design problems at Monotype. Then he gave the stage to Bob Taylor, who talked about not only a technical aspect of the topic but also the business aspect of the variable fonts.
Font business is time-consuming and therefore cost will be bigger and it disturbs the profit of a company. On these grounds, font foundries should reduce their cost but quality cannot be compromised. Production scope, cost, and schedule will determine availability and cost of variable fonts. Although scope and schedule can be controlled, the cost is the big unknown. Taylor claims this is the challenge of his team to produce new variable fonts.

Production workflow:

• Assessment phase

• Preparation phase

• Point compatibility

• Verify point compatibility

• Establish Mutator parameters

• Create variable font (Mutator process)

• Verify glyphs variations

• Normal font engineering

• Validate resulting font

 

If the workflow will be fully automated the cost will be decreased so that variable fonts will be produced very easily. But the biggest cost drivers are converting fonts to point-compatible form and verifying quality assurance for a variable font.

Because variable fonts use interpolation to morph outlines they need point compatibility to realise clean interpolation.

Points should not be exactly the same as the original they should be improved to realise the best result. After multiple harmonise processes, control points should be evenly spaced, balanced flow, and they don’t have too many extra points.

“But sometimes things do go wrong.” Kinks and twists are main problems which are arisen from many reasons. To resolve the problems, Monotype has developed a Kink detector which finds and fixes kinks automatically. Besides, if the different styles are combined (e.g. upright and italics), it doesn’t work. Because the points and forms are so different to each other, interpolation doesn’t have meaning for combining. It should be avoided.

Where are we now?

Monotype has already produced 25 test variable fonts and their automatic harmonisation succeeds between 91% and 100% of the time (very impressive!). But Tylor asserts current harmonisation process is good but not perfect and more automated font QA tools are needed. Furthermore, the final production process is in sight but not there yet.