Increasingly, professional typeface designers working today are coders as well. The OpenType format for fonts allows designers to program font behaviour, often

Increasingly, professional typeface designers working today are coders as well. The OpenType format for fonts allows designers to program font behaviour, often in pretty sophisticated ways. These range from standard typographic niceties like automatic substitution of a pre-defined sequence of glyphs with a ligature, to contextual substitutions of alternates to make a handwriting font more natural-looking, to even more creative explorations of the possibilities of the OpenType format. In addition, many designers are taking advantage of scripting to automate parts of the design process. For example, Mark Simonson, the designer of the Anonymous Pro featured here, wrote a script to help you in generating pangrams: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/pangrammer-helper-robofont-style http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/pangrammer-helper-... This example is only tangentially related to the typeface design process, but if you're interested about the intersection of typeface design and technology, you can look up videos from the Robothon conferences to see what the possibilities are.