Home / ATypI Tech Talks 2022

Polish Variable Fonts

Over the years, the OpenType specification has been improved and allows us to make advanced fonts. There are many benefits to all these new additions, like OpenType layout features, color, and support for variation, but this also makes it harder to spot problems.

Many fonts contain issues; most of them are harmless, like incorrect Panose data and superfluous glyphs. However, there are also more serious flaws that are important to detect before releasing a new font. During this presentation, Erwin Denissen will explain how to detect and fix issues in fonts with FontCreator. He will focus on how to detect and fix interpolation issues in variable fonts, and what specific font properties are important for a variable font so you can successfully export them as a variable font or as instances.

Other aspects, like how to make a variable font, how to test fonts within FontCreator and in a web browser, and ways to proof OpenType layout features, will also get some attention. If you try hard to release perfect fonts, you don’t want to miss this presentation.

Speaker

Erwin Denissen

Founder High Logic B.V.

In 1997, Erwin Denissen developed a font editor for Windows as a graduate project at Fontys University Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Over the years, he continued to improve the software, now known as FontCreator, while also working as a software engineer at Capgemini. In 2004, Denissen resigned from his daytime job to entirely focus on his own company. Due to an intuitive user interface and its superior tools for editing and proofing OpenType layout features, FontCreator has become one of the most popular font editors known today. Denissen lives and works in Bilthoven and usually tries to avoid conferences.