> HalloType = Thom Janssen = font maker, type engineer, programmer, creative coder > typefaces   

Pan is a variable type system. The idea is to slice the glyphs in various ways and draw contours with the slice-data.
Since the drawings are not compatible, featureSubstitutions are needed. Currently five axes [Steps, Angle, Shape, Offset, Inner] controle what glyph is shown. A special set of tools was needed to create the GSUB table that can handle this.

Steps

Angle

Shapes

Offset

Inner

I recommend to view my site in Chrome or Firefox, since it handles Variable Fonts much better than MacOS’ Core Text.

I started creating this font system in 2017. Back then, in MacOS, only one axis was working for featureSubstitutions. Now in 2020, it seems that it is still not fully solved in MacOS.

H:M:S

mouse over

ANGLER



Here is a visualisation of my workflow.

%%{init: {'securityLevel': 'loose','theme': 'base', 'themeVariables': { 'fontFamily':'Source Code Pro', 'primaryColor': '#00CCCC', 'edgeLabelBackground':'#ffffee', 'tertiaryColor': '#fff0f0'}}}%% graph TD; PREF[Parameters and Settings]; SD[Slice Data] DG[Draw Glyphs]; ADDUFO[Add to UFO]; OTFea[Generate OT Features]; DSD[Generate Desingnspace Document]; TTX1[Generate TTX FeatureVariations]; ComVarTT[Compile VarTT]; TTXextract[Extract GSUB table]; MergeTables[Merge GSUB tables]; ParseGSUB[Parse GSUB table]; PREF --> SD; PREF --> DSD; PREF --> TTX1; SD --> DG --> ADDUFO --> OTFea; DSD --> ComVarTT --> TTXextract --> MergeTables --> ParseGSUB; TTX1 --> MergeTables; ComVarTT --> ParseGSUB

PAN DEMO