Merz

Merz is a lightweight wrapper around Apple’s CoreAnimation framework with a Pythonic API that allows for ergonomic, declarative and performant object drawing within RoboFont. The library has been built specifically to make typeface design data visualization rich and engaging with a minimum amount of programming. In practical terms, Merz allows for creating visual layers of data, relating them to each other, nesting them within one another and changing their properties either statically or with animation. The data structures are basic Python value types and the complexities of timing, updating and optimization are handled behind the scenes. Merz is designed to make it very easy to make very nice visualizations that work very well.

The examples in this documentation are self-contained demos that can be executed in RoboFont 4.0+ in the Merz Playground extension.

Concepts

Layer Types

Views

Thanks

Huge thanks to Erik van Blokland, Just van Rossum, Ben Kiel, the type designers at Apple, Antonio Cavedoni, Frank Grießhammer, Black[Foundry] and the RoboFont beta testers for invaluable advice, assistance and testing.