Hello FontCreator Community.
I have been using FontCreator for some time now, and really love it. Much of the time I use it for amending type for specific design jobs, but I have also produced some fonts of my own which I would like to share. As a rule I don’t sell these fonts; I give them to friends who can use them, but mainly use them for my own purposes. These first two, Cheriton Hand and Martha, were designed for very specific purposes.
Cheriton Hand was designed neither as a text face nor as a headline font, which might sound odd, but specifically for use as captions and labels on historical maps. I produce a lot of maps for the military history and wargaming world and wanted to capture a pseudo ‘hand’ produced look. Most typefaces look too ‘perfect’ for the look I was trying to achieve, so Cheriton Hand is very rough but I think has a ‘neatness’ that looks like someone carefully hand lettering, but without the perfection of a highly skilled calligrapher, if that makes sense. You can see some of the results on my website http://www.lesleyprince.com where I have loaded some of my design work.
Martha is based on my own hand writing, but is not really meant for that purpose. I designed it for my daughter, Martha, who is training as an Interfaith Minister and wanted something that looked hand produced for some of her material. Again the idea was to get away from the over refined look of a typeface based on pen letters, and retain some of the unevenness and imperfection that arises when writing with a pen. So I have not, for example, thickened any of the thin strokes, although I have straightened and made more even the overall texture, I hope. At the moment I am working on a set of swash letters and ligatures for the face, and when finished I will then produce italic and bold versions to complete the family.
I am not claiming these as perfect examples of the type designer’s art, but I am quietly pleased with the results. If anyone has any comments they would like to share I would be happy to hear them.
I am also working on a series of more conventional typefaces: Black Flag, a 1930s inspired face based on the type of the Spanish Civil War; Erasmus, a blunt quill face for use in vaguely historical settings; and a series of faces based on Secretary and Chancery for use by historical re-enactors and living historians. These however are taking a lot more time to complete.
Best regards
Lesley Prince
Martha.ttf (25.3 KB)
OR Cheriton Hand Italic.ttf (71 KB)
OR Cheriton Hand.ttf (69.2 KB)
You will see some clipping in Martha.ttf if you look at the font test window.
The lowercase å ring has the accent way too high, and there are a few other problems with the position of accents on other composites like Ź acute, Ã tilde, and í acute.
Correct those little problems first, then go to Format, Settings, Metrics, Calculate to recalculate the font metrics and prevent the clipping. All glyph contours should lie between WinAscent and WinDescent to prevent clipping (where the top of the accents is cut off).
Thank you, I hadn’t noticed. I am still developing the font and perhaps rushed too hastily into uploading it.
Best wishes
Lesley
Working with Scanahand, I’m impressed! It looks like Font Creator.
I did have a problem downloading the last font. It appears as Unknown in MainType.
Thank you. Actually I used ScanaHand initially, but then spent a long time editing in FontCreator (which I much prefer, for obvious reasons). I’m not sure why one of the fonts wasn’t recognised - I still have a lot of problems figuring out how any software decides what is what. Bikkhu’s comments were very helpful. When I looked at Martha again I realised that I hadn’t done as much work on it as I had thought 
. I know why, I wanted to let the flesh and blood Martha see the progress, and I neglected a lot of housekeeping. I am uploading the slightly more cleaned up version now. I hope you like it.
Best wishes
Lesley
Martha.ttf (29 KB)
The Martha typeface is beautiful, one of the most beautiful typefaces I have seen.
I tried it in 24 point in WordPad. It is so elegant. The thicks and thins, the design of the lowercase f, the lowercase p.
May I ask what type of pen you used to get those thicks and thins please?
I notice that you have some of the special characters needed for the Esperanto language included in the font - you have included nine of the twelve special characters needed for Esperanto.
In relation to the swash letters and ligatures. On the few occasions that I have tried a font direct from handwriting I have tried to do all of the artwork at one sitting even if I do not then use some of it until later. My thinking is that I might not be able to get the same posture, and what might be called artistic frame of mind, and so on the same at a second sitting. That might just be me, it is quite possible that some people might find that they can add a few characters later quite straightforwardly. I like fonts that have swash letters and ligatures. Have you thought of adding a few leaves, so that they can be used as separators between lines on a small poster? Would a glyph for the U+2615 HOT BEVERAGE symbol drawn with the same pen be useful for the font’s intended use?
William Overington
31 January 2011
Dear William
Thank you. I use a fairly cheap Parker pen. I forget the name, because I’ve had it for so long, but it is certainly at the cheap end. Over the years I found that I liked Platignum and Osmiroid fountain pens, but they became difficult to get hold of, so I went exploring. Strangely I found some of the more expensive pens to be the least pleasant to use. I was therefore delighted to find the Parker because it writes so beautifully. When not using a fountain pen I tend to use either quill pens or the range of steel pens that used to be produced by Mitchell’s (of which I have a hoarder’s supply).
Thank you also for your suggestions. I will certainly consider putting in some floral elements for placemarkers, but I’m not sure what the U+2615 hot beverage symbol is.
Best wishes
Lesley
You could run the font validation wizard if you have the Pro version to get rid of some of the intersecting co-ordinates and off-curve extremes. These are rather hard to spot at normal zoom levels. The accent on Ô grave is one of them. I forget where this one was.
The Hot Beverage Symbol is one of many Miscellaneous Symbols in the Unicode character set. I don’t know how many of these your daughter would actually use. There are so many.
The dagger and double-dagger symbols look rather small compared to the other glyphs — almost like punctuation marks.
It is a symbol in the following Unicode block.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf
That and other charts are available from the following page.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/
I do have something of an affection for it as the first font that I ever published was for just the then new to Unicode U+2615 HOT BEVERAGE symbol.
I have included a glyph for U+2615 HOT BEVERAGE in some of my other fonts, in different styles.
I am thinking that a HOT BEVERAGE symbol would be effective at the start of a line saying Refreshments, as in a programme leaflet where there is, say, a morning session with a break for refreshments. Or if, say, there were a meeting, with a refreshment break in the middle, then maybe a HOT BEVERAGE symbol, could be used to indicate the refreshment break as just a symbol on a line on its own, in the same size as used for the text. Also, the HOT BEVERAGE symbol could be used at a larger size as a logo for a “coffee morning” or a “peppermint tea afternoon” or similar.
William Overington
31 January 2011
Dr Lesley, love your web pages. Indeed talented in so many fields.
Your fonts are a delight and when the advice above is heeded should be even better.
Joe.
Double Ditto!Especially for the art work!
http://lesleyprince.webplus.net/page6.html
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 
. I am uploading the latest version. 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. On my test document it looks OK, although a bit stilted, like someone trying very hard to write ‘neat’. 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 trouble is whenever I use character map it always places the glyph at a small size, not reflecting the size of the font in use, and inserts a line break. It’s irritating because it always necessitates a reformat to bring the new glyph into line with the others. Is there a better way of doing this, or is the solution I propose OK as it is?
Best wishes
Lesley Prince
Martha.ttf (30.8 KB)
William, I have just followed up the urls you posted - WOW! 
It brought out all my inherent geekyness as I slavered over the charts. Thank you very much.
Best wishes
Lesley
The best method is to add OpenType Features
I have never encountered this problem when using Babelmap to insert glyphs. Which application are you using to create documents? Word or Writer both have their own built in character map for inserting symbols.
Word 2010, PagePlus X5, or Indesign will let you use OpenType features for this, which is much better.
Dear Bhikku
Thank you once again. I looked up your documents and tutorials on adding Open Type attributes, but it looks very complicated and I don’t completely understand it. I’ll spend some time reading in more detail because I have printed them off, but it looks like it requires some command line knowledge which I don’t have. The last time I used command line was with very early PCDOS, and the last time I did any programming it was in Basic, many years ago.
Best wishes
Lesley
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
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
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
Thank you.
You might also like the following.
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/
William Overington
7 February 2011
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