> I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives ...
> the idea being that there's a "default", boring, generic universal font template that covers all glyphs
> a type designer simply modifies parameters
Have you looked through the Unicode code charts lately and really thought about how many primitives you'd need in order to create glyphs not just for Latin/Cyrillic/Greek, but also for Arabic, Telugu, Thai, Lao, Javanese, Mongolian, etc., etc.? Never mind the miscellaneous symbols and dingbats, and the ever-growing collection of emoji....
I don't think this is a realistic proposition.
Within a closely-related group of scripts -- like Latin/Cyrillic/Greek -- and within a constrained range of styles, yes, it's possible: e.g., see Knuth's METAFONT and the various font families that have been created with it.
But if you want to do the traditional thing (design a separate glyph for every code point), isn't that still a similar amount of work?
I'm not that deep into designing typefaces, but I'd expect that many designer already work in a similar mode like GP suggested. The only difference is that you'd encode the ruleset instead of the outcome.
> the idea being that there's a "default", boring, generic universal font template that covers all glyphs
> a type designer simply modifies parameters
Have you looked through the Unicode code charts lately and really thought about how many primitives you'd need in order to create glyphs not just for Latin/Cyrillic/Greek, but also for Arabic, Telugu, Thai, Lao, Javanese, Mongolian, etc., etc.? Never mind the miscellaneous symbols and dingbats, and the ever-growing collection of emoji....
I don't think this is a realistic proposition.
Within a closely-related group of scripts -- like Latin/Cyrillic/Greek -- and within a constrained range of styles, yes, it's possible: e.g., see Knuth's METAFONT and the various font families that have been created with it.