Talapanna - An Experimental Font

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

(233K 7-Zip Archive). Bold and Regular typestyles.

Using a Public Domain version of Goudy Bertham, I added a full set of glyphs, and some Gothic drop capitals. Then I thought, why not add a few fancy ligatures?"

Due to the decorative drop capitals, the default line-spacing for this font is 150% — 18 point for 12 point text. I recommend using proportional line-spacing or fixed line-spacing to reduce it.

This is how the font looks with the Gothic capitals (in the Private Use Area). The font has regular capitals in the usual place.

If.png (25.95 KiB) Viewed 1275 times

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

As well as the common ff, fl, fi ligatures, I added a few more. They are very easy to make with the knife tool and "Get Union of Contours," which is available in the Professional Edition of FontCreator.

Ligatures.png (25.27 KiB) Viewed 1283 times

[Dave Crosby]

A beautiful font! Thank you for sharing.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Version 1.1 corrects some bugs. It seems that Page Plus doesn't like the extended latin characters in the name "Tālapanna" and so refuses to embed the font in PDF files. I also corrected ƒ and the integral sign.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Updated to version 1.2, which adds a bold typestyle and chessboard pieces:

Chessboard.png (17.04 KiB) Viewed 1279 times

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

(233K 7-Zip Archive). Bold and Regular typestyles.

This is basically the same font as Talapanna, but with a different set of Gothic drop capitals in the Private Use Area. This pair of fonts only took about an hour to create as all the hard work was done.

I aligned the Drop Caps differently, due to their different design. They align at top of caps and bottom of descenders, instead of with the baseline.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I added OpenType features to both Talapanna and Talapatta, and a few more ligatures to complete the set. I remapped the Gothic capitals to a different position in the PUA for greater consistency.

The Gothic Drop Capitals can be accessed in programs that support OpenType features by using the "Initial Capitals" feature.

The ligatures are now divided into two groups — ffi, ffl, fft, ffy, fty, ff, fi, fj, fl, fr, ft, fy, ky, tr, tt, ty, and longst are Standard Ligatures — cky, ck, ct, sp, st, tz, Qu, Th, AV, HE, LA, ME, NK, NT, OC, OG, OO, TL, TYcaps, TW, TTcaps, UB, and UD are discretionary ligatures.

The fonts include glyph substitions for superscripts and scientific inferiors (which bisect the baseline).

See this tutorial on Adding OpenType Features to learn how to do this.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Updated to version 2.2 to fix a mapping problem and a problem with OpenType tags.