• David Jones presents a working font with reversed letterforms against a vertically striped background inspired by Schaeffer Versalien but modified from Arugula.
• With this font, the drawn parts are the black parts. For example, in the word SALTY, the kerning between L and T is an issue.
• In traditional metal type, only specific cases like /f projecting outside the body were kerned. Here, repositioning T slightly left without kerning leads to a disaster where black parts overlap and obliterate the reversed out letterforms.
• To kern this font, GSUB lookups are used instead of GPOS lookups. GSUB substitutions replace one sequence of glyphs with another. Here, L and T are split into two pieces each and the middle two pieces are recombined with a joiner.
• The pattern of vertical stripes means kerns can only be a multiple of the stripe repeat. Gaps in the pattern avoid solid black-to-black joins when rasterized. Glyph names used in the rules might affect the PDF.
• For each letter participating in kerning, there are two more glyphs for its .left and .right parts. For each kerned pair, there is a glyph for the joiner. These are created through custom Python scripts using libraries like fontTools and fontFeatures.
• The font is not yet complete, with only L kerned so far and a basic alphabet from A to Z. It has a small repertoire due to kerning and the vertical stripe design adding constraints. Considering accents and diacritics adds more complexity.