Font Forum

Earlier this morning I received a publicity email from Fonts dot com (I am subscribed to their email distribution list at my own request) and was invited to look at the following web page.

http://www.fonts.com/SpecialOffers/_Cur ... adcampaign

On the page is an item for the Madame font, which includes the following.

Linotype has upgraded a favorite display face, Madame™ to OpenType format. This “wild west” style was inspired by typographic developments in 19th Century France. Madame is a delightful design in large point sizes because with just the press of a button, you can overlap layer elements to achieve display type with multiple colors!

Does anyone know anything about this development please?

William Overington

15 January 2008

Madame is an interesting font. I have a 2002 Adobe version (not Pro) which has 3 extra fonts: Accents, Letters, Numericals which are composed of letter pieces. I have no idea how these would be used. Seem like alternates, but are parts of whole glyphs. Possibly you select a part and overlay the letter to add embellishment. Can't do that easily in MS Word I'm sure!

Probably have to buy the font and read the manual.

They talk about color at the following very long web site:

http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/_tryfont ... %20Regular

I should have tried the Color before posting. Page does nothing except color the whole letter or color the entire background. No multiple colors. You can do that in MS Word.... (Possibly the pieces can be separately colored to arrive at multihued word.)

Thank you for your replies.

I was thinking about all of this and wondered whether it might be the case that an OpenType font could have encoded within it, say, a solid background only version glyph of each character as a discretionary ligature of just one character. Can an OpenType font encode a purported ligature of just one character? If so, clicking on a "use discretionary ligatures" button on within a software application which has such a facility would then display the solid background only versions of the characters. If so, then two layers could be used to produce a display of two-colour lettering. I wonder if this is how the Madame font works.

I found the following on the web.

http://carousel-rides.com/

One then needs to click Carousel on the menu bar on the page. The Cakewalk page also has pictures with some lettering.

Clicking on a picture shows an enlarged version.

William Overington

16 January 2008