Minor Index Typeface

Fig. 01 Style vectors × character classes Eight style vectors down, twenty-six character classes across. Each row is one declaration of pen, width, slant, hand and seed — the same five numbers the plates use. Drawn in your browser from the skeletons, not sampled from a model.

Fig. 02 A straight line through style space One word carried from a light condensed upright to a heavy extended slant. Every step between two declared vectors is itself a legible font: there is no manifold here to fall off.

Fig. 03The three cut weights Not three drawings — one skeleton and three pens: 0.075, 0.120 and 0.190 of the cap height.

AUTOPHAGIE

Fig. 04 The three dials, and everything between them The three weights above are three settings of a file that holds all of them. Pull the dials: the pen, the width and the slant were parameters of the plates before they were axes of a font, and the axis is bent (avar) so that asking for 300, 400 and 700 lands exactly on the three that were cut.

AUTOPHAGIE

weight 400 width 100 slant 0°

Fig. 05 The same letters, through the press The letters are distance fields, like every body the atelier prints, so a word takes the screen, the flood and the knock-out exactly as a sun does. Drawn here from the skeletons — and cut as three more fonts, one per press, underneath.

AUTOPHAGIE

The copier at 15°, on the letter’s own field: every dot is a contour of its own, at the size a plate is printed at. Screened .ttf

AUTOPHAGIE

The same press run hot: the field grown, the cell coarser, the dots spread until they touch. Over-inked .ttf

AUTOPHAGIE

One slab per advance, so the letters meet into a band, with the word traced out of the ink rather than laid on it. Knocked out .ttf

Fig. 06Set your own line Type into the box: it is the real font file, and lowercase sets the small caps. Change the pass and the same line is drawn, screened or flooded instead, on any of the five inks — or on none of them, which saves the letters with the ground cut away. It leaves as an SVG, which is the drawing, or as a PNG at three times the size on screen, which keeps the transparency and is what a chat window will take.

AUTOPHAGIE

the words — lowercase sets small caps

pass

size72

weightRegular

tracking0.10

groundwhite

inkblack

Black ground with white ink is the knock-out the plates use.

Fig. 07 The capitals, cut small There is no lowercase drawing and there is not going to be one: the film speaks in capitals. So a lowercase letter is the capital cut small — cut, not photographed. Reduce a capital and it arrives thin and narrow beside the one it came from, so the small cap is redrawn: 72% of the height, 7% wider than that reduction, and 86% of the stem — set by eye against an A, because the counters close as a letter comes down and a small cap on the capital's stem prints darker than the capital beside it. The blue rule is the small-cap line.

Fig. 08The whole set Caps, the same twenty-six cut small, figures, the accents French needs, the ampersand and the question mark. Type in lowercase and the small caps come out — in the drawn passes and in the font files alike.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 ÉÈÊËÀÂÇÎÏÔÛÙŒ
éèêëàâçîïôûùœ
& ? ! . , : - · ' / ( ) °

Table 01 What the file is made of Measured in this browser, just now, by building all three weights from the drawing and reading the bytes back. The outline counts do not move between weights: the skeleton is the same drawing, and only the pen laid over it changes.

Weight	Pen	Contours in A	Points in A	Glyphs	Bytes	Build
building…

NoteThe project What this is, and where it sits beside the machine-generated fonts everyone is arguing about.

MINOR INDEX is the visual identity of AUTOPHAGIE, a film about a body that consumes itself. It is not a logo with variations. It is a small machine that prints plates, and this typeface is one of the things it prints.

Nothing here is drawn in an editor and nothing here contains a font. Every shape is code: 131 numbered plates, each written by a generator script, each reproducible byte for byte from its seed. If a plate is wrong you do not retouch it — you change the number that made it and print it again.

A body is a distance field, not a shape. Each form — the sun, the cell, the seed head at 137.5°, the spiral — is a function that answers how far outside am I. That one decision lets any form be cut into any other, lets the halftone dots stop exactly at the join, and lets a word be eaten by the same mouth that eats a sun. The press then does what a press does: coverage becomes dot area on a screen at 15° for the toner and 75° for the blu, and the ink either floods until the forms grow together or is choked back until only a kernel is left.

A lowercase letter is a capital cut small. The face has no lowercase drawing and will not have one, so the twenty-six are cut again at 72% of the cap, opened 7% wider than that reduction and set at 86% of the stem: three numbers, applied to the skeletons, and the small caps come out of the same file at the same seed. Type in lowercase anywhere — this page, the atelier, the .ttf in your own document — and that is what sets.

The type is made of that same material. These letters began as skeletons of lines and arcs with a wobble in the hand, the way a marker is pulled. A font has no pen, only filled outlines, so each stroke is turned into overlapping capsules and discs whose union is the letter, and the TrueType tables are written out by hand. No font editor and no font library: the file that draws a poster writes the .ttf.

Which is why the press is a font too. A screen is not a filter over the type here, it is the type: the same field, through the same copier the plates go through, with every dot written out as its own contour. The knock-out is the one that cannot be a pile of overlapping strokes — inside a slab, two of them over each other wind the ink straight back in — so its letters are traced along the contour instead, and cut out of the ink.

It is generated, and it is not generative in the way that word is used now. Machine font generation — GlyphGAN, and the diffusion and autoregressive models after it — learns a style space from thousands of existing fonts and samples new letters out of it. That work is real, and it is mostly aimed at writing systems where one face is a hundred thousand drawings. This is the other end of the problem: a style vector of five declared numbers — pen, width, slant, hand, seed — over an alphabet somebody actually drew. The same idea of a style space, with no corpus underneath it.

The atelier is the same machine with a handle on it. What comes out of its Code button is the JavaScript that rebuilds the plate on screen, byte for byte, ready to paste into the next batch script. The tool is not a preview of the work; it is the work with the lid off.