Metapolator is a web-based parametric font editor.

It provides a GUI for designing with UFO fonts and Metafont – a language for semi-algorithmic specification of typefaces. Metapolator was created out of the need to create large font families efficiently.

For classical interpolation using multiple masters and axes, Metapolator can load normal UFO fonts (without any modifications) load and save into the UFO format and create new instances on the fly.

To use the full potential of parametrising fonts, Metapolator can parse already existing fonts (such as PostScript Type 1 or OpenType). They need to be broken up into separate shapes resembling strokes and provide consistent counterpoints. In this process, a Metafont is produced by specifying the central skeleton of shapes – for which there are "pens" of different angles and widths along the skeleton. As the glyph shapes are defined through equations, they can be parametrised along axes such as aspect ratio, weight, slant, stroke width, contrast and so on.

Furthermore instead of using prepared fonts it will be possible to enhance normal UFO fonts by adding parameters on request and only parametrise certain parts of a glyph.

Metapolator allows the designer to utilise Metafont without have to write any Metafont code.

A now-obsolete tutorial is at http://metapolator.com/tutorial.html

Superness? Overshoot? Instance? We're describing the terminology below to shed some light onto some frequently used terms.

A wordplay referring to Erik van Blokland's Superpolator and Pablo Impallari's Simplepolator interpolation font tools, and the font programming language Metafont

Unified Font Object font format for font-application interchange, used for loading and saving fonts in Metapolator.

A Master can be compared and interpolated with another Master along an axis.

Distance between two masters, for example between A and B: A ----- B

A new font created at a certain position on an axis, or between multiple axes.

Depending on the nature of a point, we can have a control-in and / or a control-out point. The direction of a path defines wheter its an 'in' or 'out' point. In this example we have a curve point (orange) with a control-in (red) and control-out (green) point. The arrow indicates the curve direction. In the UFO its writen like this:

<point x="340" y="65"/>
<point x="340" y="184" type="curve"/>
<point x="340" y="295"/>

A parameter is a characteristic, feature, or measurable factor that can help in defining a particular system. We use parameters on various levels to define fonts: Global parameters are on a font level, for example font size. Glyph parameters are on a glyph level, for example glyph width. Point parameters are on a point and curve level of a glyph shape, for example the position or coordinate of a point.

Point in a two dimensional cartesian coordinate system, defined by x and y coordinates: z=(x,y)

ufo fonts -input-to-> xml2mf.py =outputs=>
mf files -> metapost.c =>
mf files -> mf2pt1.pl =>
pfb fonts -> fontforge.c =>
ufo + otf fonts

Metapolator is built with many libre software components:

• Chromium Canary or Firefox Aurora to run the UI
• git to manage the code
• web.py to run the webserver
• unzip to unzip the ufo.zips
• python to metapolate (convert) the ufos into metafonts
• mysql (and python-mysqldb) to store the parameters (TODO: Confirm this with Simon)
• metapost to apply parameters to metafonts
• mf2pt1 (and Type 1 utilities) to convert the metafont back into a Type 1 font
• FontForge to convert the Type 1 font to UFO and OTF

metapolator#46

The simple way to install and run metapolator is with docker.io

1. Install Docker, perhaps with HomeBrew: brew install docker
2. sudo docker pull metapolator/metapolator
3. sudo docker run -p 80:8080 -t metapolator/metapolator
4. open in browser http://localhost

sudo apt-get install -y unzip git texlive-metapost mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev t1utils libffi-dev libevent-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev;
# Note your mysql root password
sudo apt-get install -y woff-tools
# install fontforge and fontforge-python from source
# git clone https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge.git;
#
sudo apt-get install -y fontforge python-fontforge;
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential autoconf libtool python-dev;
sudo apt-get install -y python-virtualenv python-setuptools python-pip;
mkdir ~/src;
cd ~/src;
git clone https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator.git;
cd metapolator;
make install;
make setup;
make run;
npm install;
bower install;
gulp build;

# Install Homebrew
brew install mysql t1utils libffi libevent libxml2 libxslt;
ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/mysql/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents;
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist;
mkdir src;
cd src;
mkdir sfnt2woff;
cd sfnt2woff;
wget http://people.mozilla.org/~jkew/woff/woff-code-latest.zip;
unzip woff-code-latest.zip;
make;
sudo cp sfnt2woff /usr/local/bin/;
cd ..;
brew install autoconf automake libtool python;
brew install fontforge --with-x --HEAD;
git clone https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator.git;
cd metapolator;
make install;
make setup;
make run;
npm install;
bower install;
gulp build;

This should give you a local web server you can visit with a modern web browser: http://0.0.0.0:8080

Please send a pull request on this file with the steps to run metapolator with docker.io on Mac OS X :)

Deploy metapolator to your own server easily with drone.io

Check out https://drone.io/github.com/metapolator/metapolator to see how we continuously deploy the central metapolator master to http://beta.metapolator.com

To deploy metapolator on a Ubuntu or Debian server...

Install supervisor and nginx

sudo apt-get install supervisor nginx

Create symlinks for configuration file. Notice that your project directory is not different from configs

sudo ln -s /var/www/webpy-app/metapolator/webapp_configs/supervisor.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/metapolator.conf;
sudo ln -s /var/www/webpy-app/metapolator/webapp_configs/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/metapolator.conf;

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 and your contributions are welcome via Github at https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator

HTML templates are in /templates using web.py's native template system.

JS and CSS are in /static

We don't use CoffeeScript because it makes code harder to read and the scoping is global.

TODO: Add Code review youtube video link

We use JSON a lot, so you might like to install JSONview for Firefox or JSONviewer for Chromium.

Core Development Team: Simon Egli, Dave Crossland, Vitaly Volkov, Alex Troush

Contributors: Walter Egli, Nicolas Pauly, Wei Huang, you?

Thanks to the metaflop project and Dave Crossland for inspiring this one!

• http://metaflop.com libre parametric web font editor
• http://prototypo.io libre parametric web font editor
• http://glyphrstudio.com libre web font editor
• http://fontark.net proporietary web font editor
• http://fontforge.github.io impressive font editor
• http://mondrian.io impressive illustration tool
• https://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/ impressive drawing tool
• http://popcornjs.org impressive video editor
• http://plucked.de impressive audio editor

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaFont impressive parametric font system
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaPost impressive parametric graphics system
• http://fontforge.org/python.html impressive font editor Python module
• http://github.com/behdad/fonttools impressive font binary Python module
• http://nodebox.github.io/opentype.js useful canvas library for displaying fonts
• http://paperjs.org useful canvas library
• http://jonobr1.github.io/two.js useful canvas library
• http://www.createjs.com/#!/EaselJS useful canvas library from Adobe
• http://snapsvg.io/ useful SVG library from Adobe