Font Forum

Thank you, Bhikkhu Pesala. That was so easy!

Above the box in which I put this text is a row of buttons: B, i, u, Quote … If I am tempted to use the first button to make text [b]bold[/b] it does not have this effect. Instead it inserts “open-square-bracket b close-square-bracket” before, and “open-square-bracket solidus b close-square-bracket”...

The attached pdf “Bern-cursive.pdf” shows my experiments with making a cursive font with OpenType features. It shows my progress as of today. I made the font using FontCreator 9.1 Professional. At the top I show sample text in the default font (left) and my cursive font (right). The only difference...

If you would like a pernickety comment, I would say that the cyrillic "л" and "д" look a bit modern. I don't think the flat-topped versions appeared until the mid nineteenth century: until then I think they were still triangular. However, if you have a Euro I can't really complai...

Nowadays, with sophisticated graphics programs, we might not need box-drawing glyphs, but in the past they were very useful. In particular, I made heavy use of them in family trees. When you want a fancy family tree for display, then box-drawing glyphs would be too ugly. But if you have a tree with ...

I gave up my search too soon. The replies inspired me to carry on. The result came from searching for “ελληνική γραμματοσειρά χειρόγραφη” and “Images” instead of “All”.

The result was CF Majestic from the Stella project. Similar fonts were Astir and Reclama. The double λλ is an Opentype feature.

Could anyone help me find some Greek script typefaces like these? When I was young I studied classical Greek but the fonts used for classical texts were all quite sober. I am particularly struck by the λ (as in γάλα), double λλ and η that looks like a cyrillic и (both in Ελληνικό) on the carton of m...

Follow the Codex Argenteus. It is 30-odd years since I took the optional Gothic Language paper in finals, so I may have missed discoveries since then, but part of what made Gothic so easy was that there just wasn’t very much material. The Goths simply did not leave much written in Wulfila’s script (...

It’s much easier to scrape these graffiti off my screen than off my wall! The font is effectively cursive, but with multiple lines. In order to look like genuine graffiti that cover the wall (a space-filling font) it is necessary to disguise the change from one letter to the next. The main way this ...

“chromatic.pdf” is my attempt to use colour to show the different surfaces of a three-dimensional shape: a carved letter. There are at least three ways to make a multi-coloured font: (1) use a format that supports colours; (2) use layering; and (3) use glyphs that have an advance width of zero. I ha...

Suppose you want to use a Hebrew font on a web page, and have the letters one colour, and the points another. There are complicated ways to do this but they do not give consistent results across different browsers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to do this by changing the font without any fancy mark-up?

I have added OpenType features to my Visigothic font.

“Visigothic revised.pdf” (48.8 kB) explains what I have tried to do.

“Visigothic sample.pdf” (29.5 kB) shows the original text in my font with and without Opentype features enabled

Alan Bernard Hughes

I think Word 2007 is treating the soft hyphen correctly: most of the time it [i]should[/i] be invisible! If you want a hyphen to show all the time you should use a normal hyphen. If you want a long word to break at the right point at the end of a line, that is when you want to insert the soft hyphen...

I have been waiting for free applications before trying to make any Opentype fonts. I now find that Firefox 21 supports at least ligatures. (I have yet to test which other features are supported. I don’t know in which version of Firefox it started.) I have tried to use VOLT, but there are so many th...

I present a work in progress: Bern-keystrokes.ttf. I started with a free font (Keystrokes) and have modified it and added many extra glyphs. Some of the glyphs can be used for recording procedures at work, but I have used most for representing different keyboards. The list of characters can be seen ...