Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

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William
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Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by William »

There is a continuing discussion in the Unicode mailing list about emoji.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... index.html

Some of the emoji are animated whereas font format specifications do not have animation.

The present trend seems to be to encode static glyphs. However, there seems to me no reason why animated glyphs should not be specified for some code points, perhaps they could all be placed in a plane to be known as the animation plane.

I am wondering, should it become desired to have fonts which can have animated glyphs within them, whether the TrueType and OpenType specifications could be extended to have animation capabilities and, if so, how could it best be done?

My own view is that Unicode has lots of spare character codes in many planes and so why not use some of them to provide for new ideas. Traditional metal type printing used one colour at a time and Unicode seems to have got locked-in to that way of thinking. Why not have a whole plane reserved for multicolour non-animated glyphs? Why not have a whole plane reserved for animated symbols? Why not have a portable object code expressible as characters included in one of the higher planes of Unicode? Why not? I feel that what is needed is progress and new ideas.

Even doing all of the above would still leave lots of planes unused.

William Overington

30 December 2008
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Erwin Denissen
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William
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Re: Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by William »

Thank you for the link. The http://www.shapeways.com/ webspace is fascinating.

I was thinking of the idea of using fonts which support animated coloured glyphs being used for animated emoji in interactive television systems, such as the Multimedia Home Platform system. The http://www.mhp.org webspace is a webspace specifically for MHP, MHP being but part of the Digital Video Broadcasting project which has the http://www.dvb.org webspace.

There is also the forum for Java TV at the following web page.

http://forums.sun.com/forum.jspa?forumID=36

William Overington

30 December 2008
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Re: Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by William »

I have thought further on this matter and am wondering whether a two-table system would be suitable for inclusion in fonts for the purpose of controlling animation.

The first table, the Animation Control Indexing Table, would have a list of pairs of values, each pair consisting of a glyph index and an index to an Animation Control Information Array. The second table, the Animation Control Information Array, would have records, each record consisting of a number of pairs of values. The number of pairs of values in a record could vary from record to record.

The first pair would state how many pairs of values are in the record (including the first pair) and the number of times the animation should be repeated, with zero indicating infinite repetition.

All other pairs of values would state a glyph index and a time in milliseconds for which that glyph should be displayed.

The idea is that a rendering system equipped for animation would make a request to the font using a Unicode code point. A glyph index would be obtained. A check would be made in the Animation Control Indexing Table. If the glyph index were not in the Animation Control Indexing Table then no animation would be indicated and a static display would be produced. If the glyph index were in the Animation Control Indexing Table then animation would be indicated and the rendering system would receive the information from the appropriate record of the Animation Control Information Array together with the glyph contour information for each glyph mentioned in the record.

I do not know whether such a two-table structure would fit in with the OpenType specification.

Could anyone comment on this please?

In addition, if a method for having colour contours in glyphs were introduced, then coloured animated displays could be produced from fonts.

William Overington

31 December 2008
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by Erwin Denissen »

I think it's possible but very very unlikely it will ever be included and supported by font rendering engines (in Windows, Mac, Flash, etc.).
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Re: Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by William »

Erwin Denissen wrote:I think it's possible but very very unlikely it will ever be included and supported by font rendering engines (in Windows, Mac, Flash, etc.).
Thank you for your reply.

Could the font rendering engine be in a Java application, so that the rendering engine of the operating system is not used? Or would that make the Java application unreasonably large? I am thinking in terms of Java as that is used for broadcasting software in the MHP system. However, for use on a PC perhaps the application could be written in whatever language were both suitable and chosen, having its own rendering system independent of the operating system?

As for the animation information for the font, maybe at present, in order to get things started, the animation information could be structured as XML and included in the Description section of the font. For first experiments the XML could be coded manually: for later experiments perhaps the XML could be coded automatically by a specially enhanced version of FontCreator which would have a dialogue panel for entering animation commands.

So, if a .exe program which reads both a text file and a font file as data into the program could be produced, maybe black and white animations could be produced without needing any alterations to the OpenType specification. This could be an important proof of concept experiment.

Although colour animation would be a good goal, the provision of chromatic glyph technology and the provision of animation technology are orthogonal processes as the animation control method which I am suggesting references glyphs by glyph index alone, so if the font were to have chromatic glyphs the animation control method would be the same.

William Overington

31 December 2008
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Discussion about the possibility of animation in fonts

Post by Erwin Denissen »

It might work if Sun is willing to implement such extension in the T2K font rasterizer used by Java 2D. But again I don't think they see a benefit in implementing an extension that is not part of the OpenType specification. If you are really serious about this, you should post a proposal on the OpenType mailing list as that is your best chance to get it into a future version of the specs. I honestly don't think it will be even considered, but I'm not there to judge proposals :wink:

To subscribe to the OpenType mailing list send a message to opentype-migration-sub@indx.co.uk and explain why you want to join the list.

Do watch and read the messages on the list for a couple of weeks or months to get familiar with it.
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