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Lettersoup!

Lettersoup is an effort to come up with an alternative model for type design.

Traditional font file formats - PS Type 1, TrueType, OpenType - have been historically constrained to simple point-by-point representations of glyphs. While this approach apparently makes things simpler, it restricts one's creativity to their own skills in point manipulation. These formats, and the software packages that operate on them, offer no straightforward way to apply changes such as "make the serifs wider by 2 points" or "make the shapes a little rounder" without going through a cumbersome process of editing every single glyph. Modern software packages, such as FontLab Studio, offer a few shortcuts for this purpose, but they're still inevitably bound to the point-by-point design paradigm.

Type design software and file formats have historically been closed, proprietary and thus solely oriented towards a technically-savvy group of specialists.

Lettersoup is an attempt to propose a different way to design and manipulate typefaces, away from the conventions of traditional type design software. Some principles (...):

• Glyphs have to be more than simple groups of points or pixels; they should be defined in human terms - a letter is built out of specific components (stems, bars, serifs, etc), and the software as well as the file format should reflect this.
• It's far more efficient to generate a whole group of typefaces out of a set of common elements (again, stems, bars et al) than to trace drawings and manually double-check each glyph's dimensions
• Instead of presenting the user with the full shebang of glyphs, an ideal interface would provide them with several tweakable parameters which would determine the shape and features of the final glyph set.
• The data formats ought to be open and, thus, hackable

Anatomy of a typeface

• Parts - components of a letter - stem, bar, corner, diagonal - Shoebox script
• Blueprint - how parts come together to form each glyph
• Widths - width of each individual glyph
• Variables