Vectors

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William
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Vectors

Post by William »

Yesterday I made a small font named Vectors for use in producing diagrams of vector flow in a plane: for example, basic diagrams about convection currents in a heated beaker of water.

Some readers might be interested in the font, both for itself for producing diagrams and also due to the use of the Glyph Transformer of FontCreator 5.6 in producing the font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VECTORS.TTF

Here is a transcript of the notes which I made as I proceeded.

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Wednesday 24 September 2008

8:22 am

Start a new font without outlines using FontCreator 5.6.

Save as Vectors in VECTORS.TTF.

Set the metrics as 2048, 0, 0.

Set the advance width of space, nonmarkingreturn and A as 2048 font units,

Use the Tools AutoNaming... facility.

Try a glyph for a vector in the A cell.

Copy A to uppercase I.

Rotate I by 180 degrees about 1024, 1024.

Copy A and I to E and M.

Rotate E and M by -90 degrees about 1024, 1024.

Copy A, E, I, M to C, G, K, O.

Rotate C, G, K, O by -45 degrees about 1024, 1024.

Copy A, C, E, G, I, K, M, O to B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P.

Rotate B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P by -22.5 degrees about 1024, 1024.

Copy A..P to a..p.

Rotate a..p by -11.25 degrees about 1024, 1024.

Add a .notdef glyph with advance width of 2048 font units.

Copy the space glyph into Q..Z and q..z.

Select incompletes and make them all have an advance width of 2048 font units.

Validate.

Install.

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Some ways of using the font are to construct diagrams using the font within the Microsoft Paint program and to use the font within the Serif PagePlus program (version 9 and later) to produce a diagram within a pdf document.

Please note that each vector arrow starts at the centre of the cell, so, except for a few cases, vector arrows do not follow each other in a head-to-tail fashion: the tails of the vector arrows are based at points within a grid.

William Overington

25 September 2008
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