Werner Lemberg is developing a novel auto-hinter for TrueType fonts. It is based on the FreeType rasterizer.
To make it easy for typeface designers to test the capabilities of ttfautohint I have created a self-contained Service for OS X. Please note that ttfautohint is pre-release software and should not be used for production purposes. Please note that ttfautohint is released under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2.
Just un-zip and double-click the ttfautohint file. OS X will prompt you to either edit or install the Service; choose install. Done.
Use it by right-clicking on one or more TTFs, then choose ttfautohint from within the Services menu-item. The Service will now start auto-hinting the fonts and save them in the same folder under new names in the style of foo.AH.ttf.
There have been some reports of problems installing and running this Service in versions of OS X earlier than 10.7. If you run into trouble try manually placing the Service in ~/Library/Services/, and if that folder does not exist, create it first.
Download ttfautohint 0.7 as Service
I’m pleased to announce that the first font of the Playfair family is now published on the Google Web Fonts service. The font is the regular weight of the display family, and the italic font is soon to follow. You are free to download and use the font on your computer. Using the font as a webfont is very easy – just grab the code from here and start using Playfair on your web pages.
Should you have comments or discover bugs, I would encourage you to comment on this article or contact me directly.
I have been given financial support by the Google Web Fonts team to design a typeface family. In fact you are looking at this design right now. This website uses Playfair Display (as the typeface is named) as a webfont to display the text.
Playfair is a transitional design. From the time of enlightenment in the late 18th century, the broad nib quills were replaced by pointed steel pens. This influenced typographical letterforms to become increasingly detached from the written ones. Developments in printing technology, ink and paper making, made it possible to print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines.
This design lends itself to this period, and while it is not a revival of any particular design, it takes influence from the designs of printer and typeface designer John Baskerville, the punchcutter William Martin’s typeface for the ‘Boydell Shakspeare’ (sic) edition, and from the ‘Scotch Roman’ designs that followed thereafter.
As the name indicates, Playfair Display is well suited for titling and headlines. It has an extra large x-height and short descenders. It can be set with no leading if space is tight, for instance in news headlines, or for stylistic effect in titles. Capitals are extra short, and only very slightly heavier than the lowercase characters. This helps achieve a more even typographical colour when typesetting proper nouns and initialisms. Languages, like German, where nouns are capitalized, particularly benefit from this lower contrast between lower and upper case glyphs. In German, with it’s many capitalized words, and other European languages that use many diacritical characters, it is advised to use more leading.
Being a transitional design, stylistically Playfair can accompany Georgia, where Georgia is used for body text.
Playfair includes a full set of SMALL CAPS (currently only supported by the Firefox 4 or newer browser), common ligatures, and discretionary ligatures. For Polish, a set of alternate diacritical characters designed with ‘kreska’s are included. All European languages using the latin script are supported. →A set of eight arrow devices are also included←.
Once the latin script part is finished, I will expand the fonts to cover the Cyrillic script.
Once the regular weight is released I will announce it here. Watch this website for further information on Playfair.
