Cheriton Hand and Martha

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William
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Re: Cheriton Hand and Martha

Post by William »

Lesley Prince wrote:Thank you all for your kind comments and help. I am a bit embarrassed that I uploaded Martha so prematurely - I think I was being a bit too eager :roll: .

Oh, please do not feel embarrassed at all. It was good of you to upload it. I find it interesting to observe how a font is developed by a designer. For most fonts, such as those bundled with Windows or with packages such as Serif PagePlus, one only gets to look at a totally finished commercial product. In this forum one gets to look at a font as it develops and learn of the comments of the designer.

William Overington

7 February 2011
William
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Re: Cheriton Hand and Martha

Post by William »

Lesley Prince wrote:Is there a better way of doing this, or is the solution I propose OK as it is?

I use Serif PagePlus for inserting characters. It works well for plane 0.

I have version X3, which is not the latest version.

If one uses Insert Symbol Other... there is a dialogue panel with a display. On the panel is a checkbox with the caption Show Large Characters.

As well as using Serif PagePlus X3 as a program in its own right, I often use PagePlus X3 as a way to insert a character from a font if I want to use the character in some other application program. That is, I open PagePlus X3, then I use Insert Symbol Other... to insert the character, then I copy the character onto the clipboard and then I paste the character into the other application program.

William Overington

7 February 2011
William
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Re: Cheriton Hand and Martha

Post by William »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:
Lesley Prince wrote:However, once I have worked on the swash letters, and put in a couple of stray flourishes it may become more lively. I would like some advice on the swash letters (and ligatures). I am contemplating using the private use area for these, which will mean having to use Windows character map or similar for insertion.
The best method is to add OpenType Features

Yes, adding Open Type Features is the best method.

Doing that on its own will restrict the use of the swash letters and ligatures to those programs that are OpenType-aware and to those users who have those programs. That could be a lot of users at the present time.

The trend, regarded by some typographers as best practice, is not to map the glyphs for swash letters and ligatures into the Private Use Area.

However, mapping swash letters and ligatures into the Private Use Area does allow access to them from a wider variety of application programs.

The good thing is, that it is possible both to map the swash letters and ligatures to the Private Use Area and also to make them accessible using OpenType methods.

The approach that I would recommend is to insert some extra cells into your font and to add some glyphs for swash letters and ligatures into those cells and then map the cells containing those glyphs into the Private Use Area. That will produce a font that is not an OpenType font, yet would be useable to produce hardcopy printouts and graphics for the web and so on. Then, as a second stage of the whole process of adding swash letters and ligatures, make a copy of that font and add the OpenType facilities.

William Overington

7 February 2011
William
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Re: Cheriton Hand and Martha

Post by William »

Lesley Prince wrote:William, I have just followed up the urls you posted - WOW! :shock: It brought out all my inherent geekyness as I slavered over the charts. Thank you very much.
Best wishes
Lesley

Thank you.

You might also like the following.

http://www.unicode.org/

http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/

William Overington

7 February 2011
William
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Re: Cheriton Hand and Martha

Post by William »

Lesley Prince wrote:Following your advice I have cleaned up the errors, and taken the opportunity to modify some of the letters and adjust spacing and kerning and some of the letter sizes.

Something that I like to do is to keep a record of additions and changes that I make to a font in a text file, writing the text file as I proceed with the fontmaking. I usually use a .rtf file in WordPad.

Doing that enables me to go back to check what I have done, maybe a few minutes after I did it, maybe half an hour after I did it, maybe several days, weeks or months after I did it.

Also, producing the text file allows me to copy and paste transcripts of some or all of it into this forum, so that readers may, if they so choose, study what I have done.

It is a matter of personal choice and I accept that some people would not wish to produce such a text file and some of those people that did choose to produce such a text file would not want to post a transcript to this forum.

However, such a transcript, if you choose to provide one, would enable those readers who chose to do so to study how you had adapted your designs. The transcript could be detailed or could just provide a list of which letters had been altered or maybe something in between.

William Overington

7 February 2011
Lesley Prince
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Re: Cheriton Hand and Martha

Post by Lesley Prince »

I have just spent some (happy?) hours checking spacing and kerning on Martha. I think (hope more like) that the font is now usable in its present form. I still have to work on the swash letters, finials and decorations, but I want to understand how the Open Type modifications work first. As it is I am quite pleased with the results when the font is used; it has precisely the look of something very carefully hand lettered, or at least I think it has, and that was the effect I was after.
Regards
Lesley
Attachments
Martha.ttf
Latest version after spacing and kerning.
(35.88 KiB) Downloaded 518 times
Dr. Lesley Prince

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