Magic of OpenType Advanced Features

Event Details

Yes, the event details, but first...

Home Again

Now back to our regularly scheduled meetings.

As you know, the Los Angeles InDesign User Group meets six times a year on the third Thursday of the odd months: January, March, May, July, September and November. The meeting last month with Terry White was an extra one.

So how do you follow a superstar like Terry White? With another superstar, of course. Although Travis Kochel might not have Terry’s name recognition, click here and see what Travis created to make our work easier. Sweet, right? So at the November meeting, we won’t just be seeing a demonstration of this incredible solution. We'll be hearing from the man who actually wrote the code. (Bowing and scraping is permitted.)

Free Parking

PLUS...this meeting is being held at and sponsored by Glendale Community College with free parking. Yay!

Meeting Topic: The Magic of OpenType Advanced Features

Our fonts are getting smarter. They can magically replace letter combinations with ligatures. Our text can be converted to small caps at the click of a button. Fractions can be created dynamically, without having to look through the glyphs panel. Advanced OpenType fonts are dramatically speeding up some of the tedious tasks of typesetting, but like any good tool, it comes with responsibility. Knowing why to use tabular numerals is just as important as knowing how. This talk will detail InDesign’s OpenType features and how they can improve your typography.

Along the way, we’ll also take a look at some experimental uses of OpenType technology. Fonts can display more than letters and punctuation. Some can transform your numbers into graphs, words into pictures, or times into a analog clocks. It could be argued that they have more in common with interfaces that typefaces. Regardless of how you categorize them, they are greatly expanding the capabilities of our design applications, and could be a worthy addition to your toolbox.

Agenda

7:00 p.m. - Meet and Greet

7:15 p.m. - Presentation and Tour (with mid-presentation break)

9:30 p.m. - Raffles

10:00 p.m. - Goodbyes

Meeting Notes

Travis Kochel traveled from Portland, Oregon to Glendale, California to give the members of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group a treatise on the advanced features of OpenType. One key feature of OpenType fonts are their ability to replace character combinations with ligatures automatically. For instance, when you type one f followed by another f, an OpenType font knows –- automatically –- that it should replace the two individual fs with a single ff ligature. Now imagine that concept on steroids. In script, for example, an f (or another character) preceded by a space could be replaced with a special initial f character, an f followed by a space would be replaced with a special ending f character, while an f in the middle of a word would be a third f character altogether. That is, unless that f is followed by another f -- or maybe by an i. Got it?

Taken to the extreme, you could have a whole matrix of character combinations that the font would substitute if it detected a particular character combination. It means that you could type the letters b u l l e t and have the font automatically substitute a bullet character. Now one needs to be careful how far to go down this road, since when you type the letters b u l l e t you might in fact want the world bullet and not a bullet character.

Travis not only explained the advanced features of OpenType, but he explained and demonstrated how be used those feature to create Chartwell, a font that makes charts. The concept is identical -– something is substituted when the font sees a certain combination of characters –- but in this case what is substituted is a piece of a chart. Confused? Well, some things are easier shown than described on the printed page –- which is why we have Los Angeles InDesign User Group meetings in the first place. (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.) But fortunately someone invented the Internet so here's a link to a demonstration of Chartwell. Published by FontFont in 2012, Chartwell has received awards and accolades from Fast Company, Communication Arts, Typographica and ATypI.

Travis, by the way, is a partner at Portlandia-based Scribble Tone, a design studio. Their work explores intersections of typeface design, interactive experiences and branding. He currently teaches Typography, Typeface Design, and Interactive Design at Portland State University.

As usual, we had a full slate of raffle prizes to hand out. Lea Frechette won a subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud for a year. She also won Font Agent Pro 6 from Insider Software. Tony Truong won eDocker Tablet Publisher. Mark Harvey won Blacklining for InDesign. Heidi Okuhara and Pedro Venzor both won subscriptions to Fotolia for three months. Mark Harvey won a subscription to Stock Layouts for three months. Rick Torres won FlightCheck 7 for Mac from Markzware. Wayne Deselle won TypeDNA. Amy Garland won Rasterino for Illustrator and Fabricio Rojas won ColliderScribe for Illustrator, both from Astute Graphics. Roderick Burkhardt won IDML iPad App for iPad from DTP Tools. Amy Garland, Mauro Medina-Susarrey, Greg Saunders and Chris English, all won free admission to the next LA Web Professionals meeting. Mauro also won a subscription to InDesign Magazine for one year for being the person who traveled the farthest to attend the meeting. And finally, to bring things full circle, Marty Safir won the font Chartwell, which was designed by the evening’s presenter, Travis Kochel.

Free Parking

You can park free on the Glendale Community College campus in Lot C. Go here to print out the parking permit. Place it face up on your dashboard. This permit is only valid on November 21 beginning at 6 p.m..

Farthest Attendee

The person who travels the farthest to attend the meeting will receive a one-year subscription to InDesign Magazine. This prize has a $69 value. If everyone is kinda sorta in the area, then this prize will go the person who just had or is about to have a birthday.

Raffles

SOFTWARE: one eDocker product. Value to $995.00

Your choice of: eDocker2, eDocker Tablet Publisher

SOFTWARE: Blacklining for InDesign. Value $760.00

1-YEAR SUBSCRIPTION: Adobe Creative Cloud. Value $599.88

Full access to a CC applications

3-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION: Fotolia. Value $349.00

50 high resolution photos or vector images per month for three months. (two raffles)

3-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION: Stock Layouts. Value $299.00

Full access to the entire Stock Layout template library for three months.

1-YEAR SUBSCRIPTION: FlightCheck Version 7 for Mac from Markzware. Value $199.00

SOFTWARE: FF Chartwell, including Bars, Bars Vertical, Lines, Pies, Radar, Rings and Rose from Font Font. Value $129.00

SOFTWARE: Font Agent Pro 6 for Mac from Insider Software. Value $99.95

SOFTWARE: TypeDNA. Value $49.00

SOFTWARE: Rasterino for Illustrator CS4 to CC from Astute Graphics. Value $46.24

SOFTWARE: iDML iPad App for iPad from DTP Tools. Value $19.00

SOFTWARE: ColliderScribe for Illustrator CS4 to CC from Astute Graphics. Value $15.00

TICKETS: LA Web Professionals Meeting. Value $7.99 (four raffles)

Thank You to our Sponsors

Event Sponsor

Glendale Community College

Corporate Sponsors

Adobe
Astute Graphics
DTP Tools
eDocker
Font Font
Fotolia
InDesign Magazine
LA Web Professionals
Markzware
Mogo Media
O’Reilly Press
Peachpit Press
Stock Layouts
ThePowerXChange
TypeDNA