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Post PostScript pleaseJason E. Lewisa; Bruno Nadeaua

a Concordia University, Montréal, Canada

Online publication date: 26 May 2010

To cite this Article Lewis, Jason E. and Nadeau, Bruno(2010) 'Post PostScript please', Digital Creativity, 21: 1, 18 — 29To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14626261003654632URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626261003654632

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Post PostScript pleaseJason E. Lewis and Bruno Nadeau

Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

[email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract

Writing practices that integrate dynamic and interactivestrategies into the making and reading of digital texts areproliferating as more of our reading experiences aremediated through the screen. We argue that rarely docurrent approaches to creating digital texts operate atthe basic textual level of the letterform itself, and thatthis neglect is partially due to the fact that current fonttechnology is based on print paradigms that make it dif-ficult to work programmatically at the level of individualletters. Work produced in our lab suggests the creativepossibilities in being able to easily specify behavioursat such a level, and leads us to propose that writers,typographers and programmers start thinking beyondPostscript-like formats such as OpenType or TrueTypeto collaboratively develop a new ComplexType format(or formats) that is designed for the twenty-firstcentury as opposed to a simulation of the fifteenth.

Keywords: typography, electronic literature, computergraphics, textuality, ComplexType

1 Introduction

As people spend more time reading from screens,authors are spending more effort experimentingwith methods for writing in the digital environ-ment. Electronic literature, new media poetryand writing for programmable media are three ofthe many terms currently in use to describe suchtexts (Morris 2006). The ongoing proliferation oflabels used to describe acts of creative writingthat are in some way essentially digital points tothe newness of the field and uncertainty aboutthe relationship of digital texts to their printpredecessors.

What all such efforts share is an interest inunderstanding how the qualities unique to thedigital environment can be discovered, developedand employed to create engaging, perhaps eveninnovative, literature (Funkhouser 2007). Thuswe have seen writing that, among other strategies,uses hyperlinks to create non-linear readingexperiences (Joyce 1990), that combines author-composed texts with texts generated by algorithm(Seaman 1996), that integrates various othermedia (image, video, audio) to present a multime-dia text (Amerika 1993), that incorporates textualmovement and transformation in response to thereader’s actions (Andrews 2003), and that exploresthe third dimension to create architectural readingspaces (Shaw 1989).

What very few of these explorations do,however, is experiment with the letterform itself.We argue that this is at least partially a consequenceof the material available with which digital writerscan work. More precisely, all of us writing in digitalmedia are working within a paradigm for repre-senting letters that was developed for print. Themismatch between tools and currently available

Digital Creativity2010, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 18–29

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techniques makes it difficult to use letterforms inways that, ultimately, are not that far removedfrom their print use. A promising way to overcomethis difficulty and more fully exploit the rich oppor-tunities that working within a digital environmentcan offer to authors is to reconceptualise text ren-dering as a computational process that assumesthe screen as its primary display.

We propose the development of ComplexType,a new font format designed and programmedspecifically for digital environments. The neces-sity for this proposal is grounded in a review ofrecent history of experimentation in type format.We anticipate that implementing ComplexTypewill open up new avenues of experimentation forthe writer of digital texts.

2 Moving beyond print

2.1 Print biasThe current font formats used by most personalcomputing systems are TrueType, OpenType andApple Advanced Typography (AAT), all three ofwhich were developed in the nineties from thePostScript template developed in the eighties.PostScript is a powerful technology (Warnockand Geschke 1992), but it was developed withina print paradigm which prioritised features basedon their usefulness in transferring type from thescreen to paper with high fidelity.

In the move to digital letterpresses, varioustechniques had to be developed in order toaddress the gap between what the renderingengine understands is aesthetically pleasing to areader and what humans will actually accept(Spiekermann and Ginger 1993). One set of suchtechniques involved kerning, or the process ofadjusting the white space between letterforms. Totypographers, creating a font in which all viableletter pairs appear well-spaced is centrally impor-tant to whether a text set in the font will not haveany unsightly gaps or jambs and, as a whole, willbe pleasing to the eye (Figure 1). Presently—almost fifty years after the development of digitalfonts—an extraordinary amount of a typedesigner’s time is spent performing this task manu-ally. Modern formats implement various strategies

to assist with this process, and all of these strategiesare clearly engineered with a typesetting mentality.To kern a TrueType font, for instance, a tableappropriately named ‘kern’ stores glyph pairsand a kerning value, a positive or negative valueindicating the number of units that the secondglyph of the pair should be moved by when thepair is typed contiguously. The font creation soft-ware employs an algorithm to provide a first-order pass at specifying these tables, and then thetype designer will address problem combinationsmanually.

The kerning table provides a series of flags, oneof which indicates the direction, horizontal or verti-cal, in which rendering engines should adjust theglyph. The binary option is evidence of how theformat is optimised for the linearity of typeset text,favouring the grid-like aesthetic of centuries ofmaterial printed within the movable type paradigm.

2.2 Wrestling with PostScriptIn the late eighties, some computer scientists andtypographers experimented with PostScript tocreate dynamic fonts that exploited seldom-usedproperties of the language to produce differencesevery time a character was generated. Andre andBorghi’s interpretation of Knuth’s Punk font(Knuth 1988, Andre and Ostromoukhov 1989),Scrabble (Andre 1990) and Beowolf (Van Blok-land and Van Rossum 1990) are the pioneeringexemplars of dynamic fonts that harness the

Figure 1. ‘War’ in the Kari typeface (top) without kerning and(bottom) with kerning. #2009 Bruno Nadeau. Reproducedwith the permission of the copyright holder.

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programmatic possibilities of digital media byexploiting features of the PostScript Type 3format (Figure 2), a version of PostScript Type 1that Adobe made available to other type foundries.However, the Type 3 format was generally neg-lected in favour of TrueType, which was consider-ably better at the task of high-fidelity reproductionbut did not incorporate the computationally prom-ising features of the Type 3 format.

The Punk, Scrabble and Beowolf fonts offer anearly, tantalising glimpse of what might have beenthe future of digital typography. Though theyfocused on randomness, Andre and Borghi(1989) in particular were already envisioning amore advanced notion of dynamic type aware ofand capable of altering context.

Another example that pushed standard typo-graphic technology beyond the assumptions ofits engineers was Lucas de Groot’s typefaceMove Me MM (1994). This font exploited thecharacteristics of Adobe’s PostScript-based Mul-tiple Master (MM) format, which allowed typo-graphers to design the extremes of a typefacebetween which the system could perform interpo-lations to generate an infinite number of styles.Move me MM used this feature, which was ordi-narily used to quickly produce a wide range ofweights (e.g. light, regular, bold), to createglyphs that could be animated by manipulatingthe sliders in MM-supporting font design soft-ware (Figure 3). While this exploit did notallow authors to write with the animated type-face, it did demonstrate what might be possiblegiven the right support. Unfortunately, the MM

technology suffered the same fate as the Type 3format, left behind in favour of the resolutelyprint-oriented TrueType.

The experiments of Andre, Van Blokland andVan Rossum’s, and De Groot’s are three of thefew explorations made into using extensions ofPostScript as a dynamic language for drawingletterforms. Their work hinted at avenues of devel-opment that never fully matured.

Though not focused on the computational infra-structure behind Postscript technology, anotherresearch trajectory worth discussing is embodiedby the Neville Brody-directed Fuse CD-ROMjournal. Fuse encouraged those interested in typedesign to push, hard, on the limits of the still rela-tively new Type 1 format using standard fontdesign tools. Every issue of the journal featuredseveral fonts, each one custom designed for Fuseby a leading typographer or designer. Over eighteenissues the project accumulated a diverse array ofexperiments that envisioned a much greater rangeof font use than that which finally settled into thestatus quo. Tobias Frere-Jones’s Reactor (1993),in which each successive character slowly fuzzesup earlier characters with visual noise as you con-tinue typing, is a prototypical example of how theFuse work anticipated some of our concerns withthe letterform exceeding its standard printerly con-straints by altering its context (Figure 4).

A third avenue of exploration was opened up inthe late nineties, when Lewis began working withstandard PostScript fonts as the basis for SoftTypes(Lewis and Weyers 1999). SoftTypes were beha-viours that controlled the dynamic and interactivevisualisation of PostScript-based letterforms, andcould be used in combination to create arbitrarilycomplex composite behaviours (Figure 5). Soft-Types were designed to be applied by an authorwithout programming intervention, using menus

Figure 2. Beowolf. # 1990 Erik Van Blokland and Just VanRossum. Reproduced with the permission of the copyrightholder.

Figure 3. Letter ‘A’ from Move Me MM. # 1994 Lucas deGroot. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Figure 4. Reactor. # 1993 Tobias Frere-Jones. Reproducedwith the permission of the copyright holder.

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in the same way that she might change fonts orapply a bold style. Several years later Lee et al.(2002), proposed a kinetic typography enginethat took a similar approach, establishing a primi-tive set of behaviours that could be combinedtogether to form complex behaviours. Both theseefforts established interesting software architec-tures for treating such fonts dynamically, but ulti-mately, even though both relied on standardOpen/TrueType fonts, they proved to be dead-ends because their architectures could not easilybe imported into standard word processing orvisual effects software.

2.3 Post PostScriptAt the same time that Lewis was developingSoftTypes, Cho was taking a different approach

to addressing the issue of typographic interactivityand dynamics (Cho 1999). His work followed inthe footsteps of researchers at the MIT MediaLab—such as Cooper (1994), Maeda et al.(1996) and Soo (1997)—who explored kinetictypography starting in the mid-eighties. Cho putaside PostScript and its descendents, abandoningthe whole concept of a universal system fordigital type. He offered instead multiple customcomputational models open for adaptation instatic, dynamic and interactive media (Figure 6).

Ten years later, Hillner continued this ‘cleanroom’ approach with his experiments in ‘virtualtypography’ (Hillner 2007). Cho and Hillner’slow-level, build-it-from-scratch approachtowards letterforms added greatly to our under-standing of how diverse the notion of a ‘font’could be in the digital context while severely high-lighting the limitations of standard PostScript-likeformats in supporting such diversity.

3 From complex surfaces to complextype

3.1 Start with the screenIn his paper ‘Writing on Complex Surfaces’, JohnCayley (2005) asks how we could develop anapproach to text-based work that is ‘faithful tographics, typography, visuality and textuality allat once’. A central concern of his paper is tograsp the creative and phenomenological conse-quences of texts that are constructed to have anactive, real-time interplay between text, visual aes-thetics and structure. He focuses his answer on theincreasing richness of reading surfaces and theopportunities their spatial and computational com-plexity afford for creative exploitation. We areinterested in answering the same question byfocusing instead on the letterform itself, in particu-lar by moving away from a three-decade-old typetechnology designed for print and towards aborn-digital format. We call such a formatComplexType.

ComplexType will allow a common means ofemploying letterforms that can exploit severalunique characteristics of digital media. Examplesinclude spatial letterforms that function as virtual

Figure 5. ‘Pull’ deformed with SoftTypes in It’s Alive! # 2001Jason E. Lewis. Reproduced with the permission of the copy-right holder.


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objects with volume and/or which can move inthree-dimensional space such as those proposedby Miller (1996); interactive letterforms that canrespond to the actions of the reader, other glyphsand other media within the same display environ-ment, such as with Lewis and Weyers’ ActiveText(1999); variable letterforms that change, evolveand mutate (Cho 1999); and letterforms designedto take advantage of network connectivity likeTwin’s use of meteorological data to specifyappearance (Littlejohn 2004).

3.2 Possible frameworksThe complexity and diversity of typographicspaces offered by computational media make itunlikely that we can devise a universal fontformat that would allow writing on any complexsurface with the same facility and quality. Standardtypographic technology like Open/TrueType areuniversal in that they facilitate the distributionand exact reproduction of type on any devices

for which the typographic space is limited to asimulation of print. ComplexType would use amodular approach, taking inspiration from moreflexible formats like Unified Font Object (UFO)(Leming et al. 2003) and Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG) fonts (Eisenberg 2002), where basicmodules necessary for all fonts would be combinedwith modules that target writing in specificenvironments.

Typically, a ComplexType font would includea general font information module and a charactermap, two modules required by all fonts. If the type-face was designed for a 3-D environment, it couldinclude a module of glyph definitions representedas 3-D geometry (e.g. list of triangles). The fontcould also include a module indicating thedynamic properties affecting the glyphs or theirconstituents. Furthermore, a separate interactivemodule could be included to indicate actions trig-gered by different input mechanisms. An appli-cation that supports ComplexType fonts would

Figure 6. Type me, Type me not. # 1999 Peter Cho. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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check which modules were present in eachinstalled font and make the ones it supports avail-able to the user. It is clear that a certain level ofstandardisation is required if ComplexType fontsare to be supported in a range of applications thatadvance beyond the experimental stage, but thisprocess should take place through collaborationwith authors and designers to address the varioustypographic spaces of interest to these groups.

3.3 Potential ComplexType fontsLooking at the history of recent experimentation inthis area suggests, even at this early stage, severalpossible ComplexType font designs.

A notable genre of typeface, which was a sig-nificant part of the early experiments conductedby Maeda and later Cho, is type with letters con-stituted of multiple graphical elements or par-ticles that arrange together to form the glyphsof a typeface. The flexibility inherent in the frag-mentation of the glyph provides interestingoptions to an author. Cho’s Type me, Type menot (Figure 6) exploits the adaptability ofglyphs made of similar circle sections to createtype that smoothly transforms from one letter toanother. In the same way that kerning is anactivity that targets the flat surface of typesettext, in a ComplexType font it would be possible

Figure 7. Hydre. # 2009 Bruno Nadeau. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.


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to define the ‘spanning’, or the transitioning fromone glyph state to another.

Typefaces made of particles also offer interest-ing possibilities for interactivity. Nadeau’s Hydretypeface (2009a) combines a common outline oflines and curves with a large number of smalldynamic circular particles to form each letter.The particles, which can appear anywhere in thetypographic space, are attracted by certain lettersand move continuously once trapped in anoutline. The particles are always subject to dislod-ging forces applied by interacting readers whohave a certain control over the formation andbreaking apart of the text (Figure 7).

ComplexType fonts would also include fea-tures that provide a fine degree of control overthe rendering process. Nadeau’s Origin typeface(2009b) combines several particles that appear dif-ferently over the formation of each glyph. Startingas animated spermatozoa, the particles reach theglyph to which they belong and become specksleaving subtle traces around the letter, slowlyrevealing it in the negative space (Figure 8).

Another approach towards type design, whichwas central to the experiments of Miller (1996)and also present in Cho’s work, is type built for3-D virtual environments (Figure 9). Although itis possible to integrate standard outline fonts intothe third dimension, the expensive process of

converting the glyphs of these fonts to a formatsupported by 3-D virtual environments addsconsiderable friction to writing practices thatdo not assume the immutability of the letterform.In addition, a glyph definition that specificallytargets these environments would lead to innova-tive typeface designs as type designers adapt tothe new material from which to build letterforms.

Stroke-based fonts are another approach, onethat defines the glyphs of a typeface as a seriesof strokes, simulating a pen or brush applyingink on paper. This technique dates back toDonald Knuth’s pioneering mathematical typo-graphy research of the mid-seventies, which ledto the implementation of the METAFONTsystem (Knuth 1999). In addition to META-FONT, stroke-based fonts are commonly usedto minimise the number of vertices required torepresent the complex ideograms of East Asianlanguages. A stroke-based ComplexType fontwould extend Knuth’s method in order to incor-porate properties specific to dynamic and interac-tive environments. This, in turn, would facilitate

Figure 8. Origin, based on the Haettenschweiler typeface. #2009 Bruno Nadeau. Reproduced with the permission of thecopyright holder. Figure 9. Polymorphous font ‘f’. J. Abbot Miller.

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the manipulation of the letterform over time andby the reader.

A ComplexType specification would involve acore font specification that would allow the use ofComplexType fonts in various types of appli-cations. In the same way that you now specify atypeface (Helvetica, Times, etc.), a style (bold,italic, etc.) and a point size, a ComplexType fontwould allow you to specify how its glyphsbehaved (movement, lifespan, interaction, etc.)The individual glyphs in such a font would inte-grate capabilities for recognising and using tem-poral change, handling interaction with the useras well as other letterforms and media elements,processing external data sources and communicat-ing across the network. All these characteristicscan be used to determine, in real time, howglyphs appear and evolve over time. The inte-gration of dynamic and interactive behavioursinto the ComplexType format would providewriters (and typographers and designers) with ahigh degree of control over reasonably complexbehaviours.

4 Writing with complex type

In order for ComplexType to be useful to writers,writers need to be involved in the process of devel-

oping the specification. Previous experiments withactive glyphs rarely engaged writers centrally,more often being the products of investigationsinto design and typographic form (cf. Maeda,Cho, LettError) or the computational propertiesof PostScript (cf. Andre et al.). They have notbeen investigations into creative language use.

In the NextText project we proposed a tightintegration of writing, designing and program-ming in order to more deeply explore the pro-duction of innovative digital texts (Lewis 2007).Among the conclusions we reached three yearsinto the project was that making work which pro-vides a reading experience as rich as its dynamicand interactive experience (and vice versa)requires that the author be able to directlyengage temporal change, interactivity, networkconnectivity, etc. as part of a conscious strategyof meaning making within the writing process(as opposed to the post-writing process.) Suchcomplex writing will benefit enormously ifevery aspect of the technology through which itis realised has been rethought in terms of thedigital.

The ongoing development of our Mr. Softieapplication has served as a test-bed to experimentwith rudimentary forms of complex writing. In theSoftSketches series (Lewis and Nadeau 2006), we

Figure 10. Dependency. Bruno Nadeau.


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wrote poems specifically with Mr. Softie in mindand then used the application to manipulate theappearance and further edit the texts. The resultingworks take part in the concrete poetry traditionof intensive focus on the presentation of the text.The text of Dependency, which can be summedup in the line ‘an / electric thread ties and bondsthe / agglomerated mind’, evolved into a mass ofletterforms intertwining in two knotted massesgrasping at each other across the canvas (Figures10 and 11).

In History, a poem about how the past becomesabstract and flattened the further away we get, weworked the letterforms to the point where theybecame a collection of abstract geometrieslayered one on top of another (Figure 12). In bothcases, the ease with which Mr. Softie allowed usto apply complex behaviours promoted an abilityto work intensely and deeply with the visual rep-resentation to the poems, allowing us to shapethem however the text demanded.

In 2008, we invited poet David Jhave Johnstonto collaborate on the Mr. Softie developmentprocess by creating text works with the applicationand providing us with his critique of the tool. Heproduced Softies, a series of media and motionworks for the web that employed Mr. Softie tocreate the texts (Johnston 2009). One of the series,

Stand Under, contains the lines ‘Develop an under-standing/Stand under/Humility understands’, and isrepresented (at first) by a strange, elongated towerof text in which parts of ‘understand’ are crushingthe rest of the poem (Figure 13).

As the piece progresses, the remaining textreasserts itself, pushing up against the ‘understand’and causing the whole text to wobble from side-to-side and distort drastically as it expands to take

Figure 11. Dependency (detail). Bruno Nadeau.

Figure 12. History. Jason Lewis.

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up a normal amount of space. The text, manipu-lated algorithmically and by hand, possesses a live-liness that would be difficult—and significantlymore time-consuming—to achieve using standardtools for word processing or motion typography.

We find it encouraging that Johnston and ourworks provide initial indication that supportingComplexType-like capabilities as part of acomplex writing process can produce texts thatbegin to tap into the full power of the compu-tational environment.

5 Conclusion

In this paper we have shown how the print bias ofcurrent technology impedes our ability to exploitthe full potential of digital text. We have discussedvarious early efforts to get beyond the print para-digm, and have used our current research as thebasis for articulating several trajectories offurther exploration into ComplexType technologythat should prove fruitful in producing toolsand techniques useful to writers of any kind ofdigital texts.

We believe that such efforts will helpanswer some of the more significant questionsinvolved in the evolution of writing in the digitalenvironment: can digital technology foster new,

substantive modes of writing in the same waythat the printing press provided a technical foun-dation for the rise of the novel, the essay and thepamphlet? What techniques can be developed forallowing creators to write a text, design its appear-ance and program its behaviour in an integratedmanner? How can these techniques be configuredas tools that allow creators to easily draft, sketchand prototype without losing focus on thecontent of the work? And, finally, how mightaccess to such tools expand the pool of individualswriting innovative digital texts, and consequentlyextend the role such texts can play in everydaylife?

We are generally interested in considering howqualities unique to media presented via computingmachinery can be articulated—both conceptuallyand technically—in support of new techniques forincorporating meaning into the presentation oftexts. The more time people spend reading text onone form of screen or another, the less sense itmakes to rely on a technology developed in manycore aspects to address challenges related to display-ing text on the printed page. Correspondingly, it alsomakes sense for the writers of those texts to haveavailable to them technology developed specificallyfor the screen in order to fully exploit the creativepossibilities for displaying text on it.

Figures 13a, 13b and 13c Stand Under. David Jhave Johnston.


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Acknowledgements

We thank the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council, the Fonds de recherche sur lasociete et la culture and the Hexagram Institute forResearch/Creation in Media Arts and Technologiesfor their support of this research.

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Warnock, J. and Geschke, C., 1992. PostScriptlanguage reference manual. Menlo Park, CA:Adobe Systems.

Jason E. Lewis is an associate professor ofComputation Arts at Concordia University. Hisresearch/creation practice revolves around exper-iments in visual language, text and typography,with a core interest in how the deep structure ofdigital media can be used to create innovative

forms of expression. He founded Obx Laboratoryfor Experimental Media (http://www.obxlabs.net),where he directs projects devising new means ofcreating and reading digital texts, developingsystems for creative use of mobile technology,designing alternative interfaces for live per-formance, and using game and virtual environmentsto assist aboriginal communities in preserving,interpreting and communicating cultural histories.

Bruno Nadeau is a Research Associate at the ObxLaboratory for Experimental Media at ConcordiaUniversity. He is a computation artist with aspecial interest in technologies to thinker with,unusual interactive interfaces and typography.His interactive artwork was shown in new mediaart galleries like Oboro in Montreal and the BeallCenter for Arts and Technology in Irvine. His pub-lications were presented as part of internationalconferences such as Digital Arts and Culture(DAC) and Tangible and Embedded Interactions(TEI). Bruno received a MS in Information andComputer Sciences with a concentration in Arts,Computation and Engineering (ACE) from theUniversity of California, Irvine, and holds a BScwith a major in Computations Arts from Concor-dia University in Montreal.


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