For images, https://same.energy is a nice option that, being abandoned but still functioning since a few years, seems to naturally not have crawled any AI images. And it’s all around a great product.
IMO, higher order continuity is a red herring. You can make something approximately high order continuous (say, to 10+ digits, or whatever you like) piecewise much more easily than enforcing mathematically exact high order continuity. Once you think of continuity as something to achieve approximately, standard methods from classical approximation theory suffice.
No, "honor system" is very frequently used and understood to refer to a system where there are explicit rules but where the rules are not enforced via active surveillance.
It sounds like you want to make a judgement call: "they're too small to enforce this license agreement," so you get to pretend it's an honor system and not a license agreement.
This is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.
FWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.
A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.
I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.
I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.
Because it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.
As a complete layman, it seems obvious that it should be hard? Like, text is a type of graphic that needs to be coherent both in its detail and its large structure, and there’s a very small amount of variation that we don’t immediately notice as strange or flat out incorrect. That’s not true of most types of imagery.
