From the webpage:
Metaflop is an easy to use web application for modulating your own fonts. Metaflop uses Metafont, which allows you to easily customize a font within the given parameters and generate a large range of font families with very little effort.
With the Modulator it is possible to use Metafont without dealing with the programming language and coding by yourself, but simply by changing sliders or numeric values of the font parameter set. This enables you to focus on the visual output – adjusting the parameters of the typeface to your own taste. All the repetitive tasks are automated in the background.
The unique results can be downloaded as a webfont package for embedding on your homepage or an OpenType PostScript font (.otf) which can be used on any system in any application supporting otf.
Various Metafonts can be chosen from our type library. They all come along with a small showcase and a preset of type derivations.
Metaflop is open source – you can find us on Github, both for the source code of the platform and for all the fonts.
If metafont rings any bells, congratulations! Metafont was invented by Don Knuth for TeX.
Metaflop provides a web interface to the Metafont program and with parameters that can be adjusted.
Only A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 are available for font creation.
In the FAQ, the improvement over Metafont is said to be:
- font creators are mostly designers, not engineers. so metafont is rather complicated to use, you need to learn programming.
- it has no gui (graphical user interface).
- the native export is to bitmap fonts which is a severe limitation compared to outline fonts.
Our contribution to metafont is to address these issues. we are aware that it is difficult to produce subtle and refined typographical fonts (in the classical meaning). Nevertheless we believe there is a undeniable quality in parametric font design and we try to bring it closer to the world of the designers.
While Metaflop lacks the full generality of Metafont, it is a big step in the right direction to bring Metafont to a broader audience.
With different underlying character sets, certainly of interest to anyone interested in pre-printing press texts. Glyphs can transliterate to the same characters but which glyph was used can be important information to both capture and display.
“Only A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 are available for font creation.”
— Yes, the preview mode has a reduced glyph range in order to render faster. But if you download the fonts as OTF or webfont package it supports T1 encoding (256 glyphs = many european languages with latin writings). MF Bespoke is also on its way to T1 completion.
Comment by metaflop — May 9, 2015 @ 11:41 am