Designing glyphs for the K and k characters

Fonts and More Font Related Information
1

When designing a font I often end up having the most difficulty in designing glyphs for the K and k characters.

Any ideas on a good approach to designing these glyphs please?

William Overington

24 October 2008

2

A technique I use a lot to maintain consistent design within a font is to cut and paste contours between glyphs with the knife tool.

  • Cut off the bits you want with the knife
  • Copy them to the clipboard
  • Undo to restore the original glyph before the cut
  • Move to the target glyph and paste in the bits

For the lowercase k, you could combine lowercase l and x like this:
lowercase k.png
For the Uppercase K, you could combine Uppercase I and X like this:
Uppercase K.png
Select the nodes that you wish to move and nudge them with the cursor keys — using control key to move them by 1 funit, and shift to move them by 100 funits. Move a few more nodes to straighten the strokes and serifs, then select all and use “Get Union of Contours.”

3

Thank you for your reply.

I had not thought of adapting a copy of the glyph for x.

My problem relates to what one might call the “flying-join” in your example of lowercase k and what one might call the flying-join in both K and k in the Arial font.

I have often had problems getting a flying-join to look good in my fonts. I have often tried to avoid it in the end. Starting from a copy of X or x is a very helpful idea. I have just tried it with a font which I have been making and have changed the design for K as a result: it looks much better now.

Thank you.

William

4

Arial and Tahoma both use what you call a “flying-join” where the lower leg supports the upper arm some distance from the vertical stem. Times New Roman and Palatino both join the stem at a sharp point. Garava uses a smooth angle bracket connection to the stem.

The arm and leg may also be disconnected from the vertical stem as in Constantia.

Contemplate further while taking your Kellogs cornflakes or Special K for breakfast. :slight_smile:

5

Try “Font Construction Contours.”

6

Thank you both for your comments.

Here are links to the development fonts containing “before” and “after” versions of the K glyph which I mentioned producing in my previous post in this thread.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV004.TTF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV005.TTF

The present latest development version of the font is as follows. The change from version 005 to 006 is the design of the .notdef glyph of the font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV006.TTF

William Overington

27 October 2008