Getting a feel for Metapolator and Cascading Parameter Values

Metapolator is a new project for working on font families. It allows you to generate many fonts in a family from a few "master" cases. For example, you could have a normal font, modify it to create a rather bold version and then use metapolator to generate 10 shades on the line between normal and bold.

I have recently been reading up on metapolator and how to hack on it. So this post describes my limited understanding of what is a fairly young project. So warnings inline with that are in place; errors are my own, the code is the final arbitrator etc.

Much of the documentation of Metapolator involves the word Meta, so I'm going to drop it off this post as seeing it all the time removes its value in terms of semantic add.

At the core of all of this polating are parameters. For example, after importing a font and calling it "normal" you might assign a value of 100 to xheight. I am assuming that many of the spline points in the glyph (skeleton) can then be defined in terms of this xheight. So the top of the 'n' might be 0.95*xheight.

A system using much the same syntax as Cascading Style Sheets is available to allow parameter values to be set or updated. Because its parameters, its called CPS instead of CSS. So you might select a glyph like 'glyph#n' and then set its xheight to be 105 instead.It seems these selectors go right down to the individual point if that's interesting.

In order to understand the CPS system I decided to start modifying a basic example and trying to get specific values back out of the CPS system. The description of this is mainly to see if my playing around was somewhat along the lines of the intended use of the CPS system.

For this I use a very basic CPS

$ cat /tmp/basic.cps
 
* {
     label : 1234;
     xx    : 5;
}

glyph#y penstroke:i(0) point:i(0) {
     xx    : 6;
}

$ metapolator dev-playground-cps /tmp/basic.cps

The existing dev-playground-cps command makes its own fonts up so all you need is a CPS file that you want to apply to those fonts. In my case I'm using two new properties, the label and 'xx' which are of type string and number respectively.

A default value of 3 is assigned to xx for all points and each point and glyph get a unique label during setup.

I found it insightful to test the below with and without selectors that modify the 'xx' property in the CPS, and at both levels. That is, changing the xx:5 and xx:6 in the above CPS to be xxno1:5 and xxno2:6 and seeing what the below printed out. The xx.value makes the most sense to me, show me the default value (3) if nothing is set in any CPS to override it or show me what the CPS has set if it did any override for the point.

element = controller.query('master#heidi glyph#y penstroke:i(0) point:i(0)')
console.log('element:', element.particulars);
console.log('element:', element.label);
console.log('element:', element.xx);
computed = controller.getComputedStyle(element)
console.log('label: ' + computed.get('label'));
console.log('xx.base   : ' + computed.getCPSValue('xx'));
console.log('xx.updated: ' + computed.getCPS('xx'));
console.log('xx.value  : ' + (computed.getCPS('xx') ? computed.getCPS('xx') : computed.getCPSValue('xx')));

The above code is also pushed to a branch of my mp fork at cps.js#L213

I found that a little tinkering in StyleDict.js was needed to get things to operate how I'd expected which is most likely because I'm using it wrong^tm.
The main thing was changing getCPSValue to test for a local entry for a parameter before using the global default StyleDict.js#L93.

I might look at adding a way to apply a CPS to a named font and showing the resulting font as pretty json. For reference this will likely have value and valuebase showing the possibly CPS updated value and the value from the original font respectively.