What’s not boring about the Boring Expansion of OpenType
This 45 minute talk walks the audience through what the next generation of font format technology includes. They will see new font editor and font previewer apps used to showcase advanced axis mappings, variation at the glyph level as well as the style level with variable components, and how to make single fonts that contain 100,000 characters. This connects to both the theme of “Unicode as global public infrastructure” because these new font format technologies are specifically intended to make fonts that support non-Latin writing systems better, and to the theme of “opening doors to new audiences” because the apps shown are libre and cross-platform, and therefore accessible to people who are not typical font designers using Apple hardware. This workshop should also resonate more to the “designers, educators, typographers, linguists, digital humanities researchers, and others” that this edition is appealing to, because it addresses the fonts that carry writing systems as typeface designs. What people will leave with (in addition to some fond memories) is a clear understanding of the benefits of new font format technologies and how these enable fonts with more Unicode characters than ever before, at a smaller file sizes cost than ever before.