And some pairs will even tilt the opposite way in order to make a curve fit. On the other hand, you will have pairings with a more severe tilt, perhaps due to an optical correction. Take for instance the bottom two nodes on the baseline: since the style of this typeface demands a horizontal ending on the baseline, the two nodes will have to be completely horizontal. Some pairings will be normalized more than others. That means that we have a certain degree of freedom, so take this with a grain of salt. Of course, type design is not calligraphy. For other tools, the tilt may be the other way around. Because we assume continutity of tool usage, it is always the same tilt we can expect: in this case we always get a bottom left to top right tilt, no matter whether it is a vertical or horizontal node pair. For the classic Latin broad-nib pen held in the right hand at an angle of 20 to 40 degrees, however abstracted your design may be, you will get these tilts between pairs of extremum points or pairs of transition points. This deviation is due to the writing tool we are imitating. However, they are not exactly perpendicular: the top pair (extremum points) is almost vertical, but with a slight tilt from bottom left to top right and the pair between the straight and curvy parts of the shape (transition points) is almost horizontal, but with a slight tilt from bottom left to top right. If you connect them, the pairs appear to be more or less perpendicular to the center line. You can see that they always come in opposing pairs on either side of an imaginary center stroke. ‘nodes’, adheres to the logic of the writing tool you are trying to imitate. The placement of the green and blue on-curve points, a.k.a. Let’s take a look at a stroke, e.g., the shoulder of a Latin n or h: Segment-to-segment harmonization: transition from a curve segment to an adjacent curve or line segment.

outside curve fitting: inside curve segments have a higher relative handle length than opposing segments on the outside Point placement: opposing on-curves nodes relate to each other, opposing off-curve handles point more or less in the same direction.

Here is one method that continues from what we discussed about good path-drawing practices, and will work for most scenarios.Įstablishing harmony across all segments of a shape has three steps, and each step builds upon the previous step: Theoretically, there are many ways to get your outlines to be in harmony. The takeaway is that harmonization is only an issue because we work with outlines. And establishing these relationships is called ‘harmonization’. So it is our tough job as type designers to establish the proper relationship between all the outline segments, the way they would have come out automatically if the shape had been drawn with the stroke of a tool. In our outline formats, each part of the edge, each segment, is completely independent from any other part. The trouble is now that we do not have this luxury of automatic harmonization when we describe the outline. Because, well, they stem from the same stroke with the same tool, how could they not harmonize? Or, as we say, they ‘harmonize’ with each other. And, what’s even better, they all fit to each other consistently.

The good thing about these tools is that by a single stroke of your arm, you automatically create all edges of the shape in one go. Each script has its own history, but each has one or more typical writing tools that influenced its letter shapes: all kinds of pens, brushes, pencils, chalks, needles, you name it. No matter which script you look at, the shapes we need most in type design are strokes. Yes, there are a few edge cases that are a bit more difficult to master, but generally, outlines are a fantastically flexible way to get any job done. We can pretty much describe any shape with an outline. The good thing is that we have an incredibly large degree of freedom. That has an advantage and a disadvantage. That means that if you want build any shape with such paths, you describe the edges (the ‘outline’) of the shape with on-curve points (nodes) and off-curve points (handles). PostScript and TrueType paths have one thing in common: they are outline formats.

Free script font with glyphs