I presented a paper titled “Parametric type design in the era of variable and color fonts” in the Grapholinguistics conference 2024. The conference was held in Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice from 23rd to 25th October 2024. The conference was a hybrid event with both physical and virtual participation.
G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, also called /gʁafematik/) is a biennial conference bringing together disciplines concerned with grapholinguistics and, more generally, the study of writing systems and their representation in written communication. The conference aims to reflect on the current state of research in the area and on the role that writing and writing systems play in neighboring disciplines like computer science and information technology, communication, typography, psychology, and pedagogy. In particular it aims to study the effect of the growing importance of Unicode with regard to the future of reading and writing in human societies. Reflecting the richness of perspectives on writing systems, G21C is actively interdisciplinary. It welcomes proposals from researchers from the fields of computer science and information technology, linguistics, communication, pedagogy, psychology, history, and the social sciences.
My paper was about the use of MetaPost for parametric type design. I demonstrated how MetaPost can be used to generate variable fonts and color fonts. Abstract version of my paper is available at here. My slides are available at https://santhoshtr.github.io/grafematik2024-presentation/.
It was an honor to present my work in a conference where Prof Donald Knuth was also present as keynote speaker.
This is my second presentation in the Grapholinguistics conference. I presented my work on Malayalam orthographic reforms: impact on language and popular culture in the Grapholinguistics conference 2018.
Update
The video of my presentation is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWxFZuNVyy0