I have added to my fonts web page some pdf documents showing some fonts which I have in development. There are presently pdfs for Galileo Lettering, Invention and Style.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
In the document for the Style font, readers might like to have a look at page 4 at the maximum magnification which Acrobat Reader can provide.
I am wondering whether the Style font could be described as an Art Deco style font.
William Overington
21 February 2005
I have today added some more characters to the Style font, and have now updated the Stylefont.PDF document available on the web so as to include a display of those characters.
William
I have just uploaded a later version of Stylefont.PDF to the web. This version adds the characters produced yesterday and this morning into the display on page 2.
Here is a direct link to the document.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/Stylefont.PDF
The font is now essentially ready for publication, subject to testing. There are all of the characters needed for a display using the usual Windows font viewing program, together with ampersand and hyphen, the additional characters needed for Old English, the four characters for smart quotes and E acute and e acute so that the word café can be set using the Style font.
William
The Style font is now published.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
William Overington
26 February 2005
Here are links to two new documents recently added to the web
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/Stones.PDF
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/design.PDF
The Stones document is available from the following web page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
The design.PDF document is only available by direct link.
The thing is, I tried having the design.PDF document available on the web page. However, it is set to open to fill the window and, whilst it looks fine when downloaded and viewed directly using Adobe Acrobat, it goes strange in places when viewed directly on the web.
I could have done it again so as to open at actual size, yet I feel that I would rather show it here in the hope that someone could perhaps explain please why it shows wrongly.
William
I have now uploaded STONES.TTF to the web.
It is available from the following web page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
It is in the section about fonts in development as there are only twenty-six capitals, and a solid item in the place of the @ symbol. The capitals are also in the places for the lowercase letters.
This is the present state of the font. I have not done anything to it for a month, so I thought that I would upload the present development version to the web.
William
Hi William
I’ve not kept up with your progress on designing fonts, but I tried Stones and had a good time! Nice design. Seems to use up all my black ink however!
Get going William, make us some numbers and special characters!!
Kidding, but I did quickly sketch out numbers using your design and thought it would be very simple. Not sure how a period or comma or ampersand might be constructed, but that’s for you to decide – “The Font Designer” …
Interesting, I’ve never had a font go through the Validation step so quickly – not sure it did two passes it was so fast
Thanks,
Dick Pape
Thank you for your kind comments about my Stones font.
I have managed to spend some time today on the font and earlier this evening I uploaded version 0.02 to the web.
Version 0.02 contains digits, the eleven points shown by the usual Windows font viewing program and some other items, including ampersand.
There are also various other items in the font. Hopefully they will be an interesting collection of discoveries!
My method of proceeding is that I started with STONE001.TTF Stones 001 using Font Creator 5.0. I saved as STONES.TTF version 0.01, deleting those glyphs which are in the basic font produced by Font Creator 5.0 as blank glyphs which I had not used, and then published that on the web. Today I started with STONE001.TTF, saved as STONE002.TTF Stones 002 and designed with STONE002.TTF as the working font. When I had used the available time, I renamed STONES.TTF as STONES001.TTF in the directory and deleted STONES.TTF from the Windows FONTS directory. I then saved as STONES.TTF version 0.02, deleting those glyphs which are in the basic font produced by Font Creator 5.0 as blank glyphs which I had not used, and then published that on the web. Thus the font which I publish has no unused glyphs in it, yet I retain the unused glyphs in my working font series. I used this system of nomenclature with all of my fonts: I find that it has the advantage that I can keep successive versions of a font available for testing, this being because they have different file names and different font names as well.
Version 0.02 of Stones is a superset of version 0.01 in that none of the previously existing glyphs have been altered and none of the metrics have been changed. The comma presented an interesting dilemma as to whether I should change the metric so that the comma could go below the base line or whether I should preserve the close setting capability of version 0.01. In the event I decided not to change the metric, so readers may be interested to study the comma, the semi-colon and the C cedilla.
Incidentally, I added two additional glyph positions into the font.
William
I have been designing a font named Tomatoes Oranges and Limes.
A test of the font is available on the web.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/TOL2.PDF
The file is downloadable from the following page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
An interesting test is to display the file at 100% size and then do a Print Screen and then paste into Microsoft Paint and then display that image at 8x magnification. This shows how the pdf system has approximated round shapes in pixels. That test can be repeated for a 200% display within the Acrobat reader, and so on.
The font file is large for the number of glyphs, as each glyph has many contours, each of which is derived from the sample disc contour in Font Creator 5.0.
A problem which has arisen is that I am trying to add accented characters and lowercase accented characters are fine, yet uppercase accented characters will not fit. I thought of lowering the body size of the font by 512 font units and then lowering each glyph by 512 font units by using a global glyph transformation. However, that would mean that the setting for a file such as TOL2.PDF would be much wider between lines.
I am now thinking of having two versions of the font, namely Tomatoes Oranges and Limes with only a few accented characters, such as é, and then having Tomatoes Oranges et Limes as the version with uppercase accents on a taller type body.
The problem arose because the font uses mathematical pseudo-hinting in order for the font to look reasonable at 12 point in WordPad, where 12 points is represented using 16 pixels.
This font arose serendipitously. I saw a bus with an illuminated route indicator at the front with the letters displayed in orange lights on a grid. This font is inspired by that, together with the idea to use the font in various colours as if constructed of fruits, thus the light highlight on each constituent item. The bus travels on roads and roads have traffic lights, so the idea of red, orange and green fruits arose and the two threads of thought mingled together to produce this font. I did not have a detailed look at the font in the route sign - the bus was moving! Yet I did notice that the y had no descender, it was within the same box as a letter e.
William
The Tomatoes Oranges and Limes version 0.02 font is now available on the web.
Please note that this font is 190 kilobytes due to the large number of contours and points for each glyph.
This font is still in development.
It contains a selection of characters, though hopefully sufficient for stylish displays in, at least, English, Old English and German.
Many lowercase accents are included, yet only a few uppercase accents. Within that limit, display of words using only lowercase accented characters is possible in several other languages as well.
William
At 8.05 pm British Summer Time this evening, about twenty minutes ago, I updated the version of my Chronicle font which is on the web to version 0.12.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
I completed the glyphs for the uppercase alphabet yesterday and made the publication font earlier this evening. It is in a file named CHRONICL.TTF.
The font is still in development yet I thought that I would like to publish the present version.
It will be interesting to know, if people choose to post, how this font spreads around the world, to many countries in hopefully various continents.
Please know that this font is designed for use at 72 point on a PC, using 72 points being represented using 96 pixels. Use at other sizes may give results of various qualities.
Reports of how the font reacts on various platforms and in various packages are welcome please.
William
Readers interested in trying the Chronicle font with some Old English may like to have a look at the New Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk/nasc.htm
I find that copying some text from the New Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and then displaying it using Wordpad with 72 point Chronicle looks good on this PC, which has a Windows 98 system. Sometimes though the font does not have all of the characters for imported words, so not all passages can be displayed well using the Chronicle font at this time.
I have now added the digits and some more punctuation to my working copy of the font and hope to produce and publish a new publication version soon.
William
I have now uploaded version 0.14 of the Chronicle font to the web.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
William
I started a new font last Friday morning (it is Monday as I write this text) and have made good progress.
I have recently uploaded the latest version of my working copy of the font to the web. It is named Pixel Text 007 and is available from the following link.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT007.TTF
The idea is that I will not alter that font. The next stage would be to start FontCreator, open PTEXT007.TTF, Save As PTEXT008.TTF then use Tools | AutoNaming… to rename the font as Pixel Text 008 and then continue from there.
Part of the reason for uploading the font to the web at this stage is as a backup copy in case of local computer problems. However, I am thinking of trying to write an article about developing a font, so this font could be good material for that.
The font has all of the basic lowercase alphabet and some capitals. I have tested it in FontCreator at 24 point using the Lorem Ipsum test provided, with some English text pasted onto the end, having been copied from the first text page of the following document, which uses a handwritten font which I designed some time ago.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/calligraphertest002.PDF
That is a document linked from the following web page.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm
The text used is from “It was …” all the way to “… documents!”.
It was interesting to check the display of the text as I added in each additional character to the font. The original blank glyphs in the new font produced by FontCreator were somewhat wider than the advance widths used in this font, so large gaps gradually disappeared from the test display as the characters were added into the font.
I have tried to produce this font from a combination of ideas in that handwritten font, the idea of producing an almost pixel font that would look clear at small sizes, together with something from the following web page.
http://www.linotype.com/500/goudytext-family.html
That web page is mentioned in the following thread.
http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/interesting-articles-about-specific-fonts/1367/1
The item being the following.
quote
The word “Text” in Goudy Text™ is short for Textura, and textura is the style of blackletter or gothic writing developed in Northern Europe in the middle ages. The use of space in blackletter is quite different from what we know about Roman letterforms. Lowercase forms in blackletter writing and typefaces must be evenly textured with black and white elements, like the texture of weaving or fabric. Capital letters can provide either an integration of the even texture (by the use of decoration in their construction) or, if they are wide and open and filled with white, they provide bright spots of visual emphasis.
end quote
I am trying to think of name for the font. Thus far I have thought of “Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady”, which is 28 characters, which I think is the upper limit. Is that correct?
I have already added in three ligatures, two in the Unicode Private Use Area. The font is not an OpenType font, yet if one day such a version of the font is made, then the glyphs for three ligatures are available. They can currently be accessed directly from the Private Use Area. They are encoded according to the golden ligatures collection code point allocations.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm
Those documents are still current. However, some additional ligatures have been used in various fonts and thus a complete golden ligatures collection needs study of those documents and of the following two fonts.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/QUESTTXT.TTF
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/CHRONTXT.TTF
All of the golden ligatures collection code points are in the range U+E707 to U+E7BF and are intended to be used in conjuction with the ligatures of regular Unicode U+FB00 to U+FB06, which they do not duplicate.
The font contains various unmapped glyphs which are intermediate stages along the way in case I need to recover them or apply them in a later glyph. These would be deleted before a final version of the font is published.
The rotation tool of FontCreator has been a great help in producing various characters for this font, such as x, v and k. I produce the angle contour as a vertical pale and then rotate it about a point. The length of the pale is calculated and the angle through which it is to rotate is calculated. This is straightforward using Microsoft Calculator in the View | Scientific mode. First calculate the tangent of the rotation angle from horizontal divided by vertical, then, using the Degrees setting, use Inv tan to calculate the arctangent of that, thereby producing the angle of rotation.
Divide the length of the vertical by the cosine of that angle so as to produce the initial length of the pale. Then, the pale is drawn to the correct length in a vertical position and then when rotated it fits into place. FontCreator appears only to rotate by whole angles so some compromise needs to be made. However, I used that to advantage to make the leg of the k go a little forward, making the leg a little longer when constructed as a pale, and to make the arm of the k to hold back a little. I calculate it using the centre line of the pale: the width of the pale seems to follow to the correct place when rotated.
Although it may never be published as a single font on a CD I am thinking that nonetheless I might try to design a CD label as if it were to be published on its own CD.
William Overington
I have produced PTEXT008.TTF Pixel Text 008 today by starting FontCreator, opening PTEXT007.TTF, using Save As PTEXT008.TTF then using Tools | AutoNaming… to rename the font as Pixel Text 008 and then continuing from there.
I have added four capitals, namely S, C, P and R. The R was produced by adapting a copy of P. The intention was to add S and R so that the font would be usable for a first attempt at producing a CD label with the prospective name of the font.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT008.TTF
I had a short try at producing a CD label using one of the CD label wizards using Serif PagePlus 10, yet it was comprised of bits, so I am thinking of measuring a CD label and working from drawing a rectangle the size of the whole piece of paper and filling it with colour with the idea that it would be printed and then folded to make the CD label. I am thinking in terms of a title and a graphic on the front and a sonnet inside. This is an interesting project as I have also been reading about sonnets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet
William
The next stage of development is now available on the web.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT009.TTF
I produced it yesterday.
Here is a transcript of the notes which I made as I proceeded.
Thursday 22 June 2006
Use Pixel Text 009 in PTEXT009.TTF as the working font.
Add an F by adapting a copy of E.
Try a B by adapting two copies of P.
Try a W by adapting two copies of U.
Try a G by adapting a copy of O.
Try a Q by adapting a copy of O.
Try an exclamation mark by adapting copies of full stop and lowercase l.
Try a question mark by adapting copies of O and full stop.
Try an H by adapting a copy of E.
Try an fi ligature by adapting copies of f and i.
Try an fl ligature by adapting copies of fi and l.
Try an ff ligature by adapting two copies of f.
Try an fj ligature by adapting copies of fi and j.
Add Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady as the sample text of the font.
I was rather hoping that having added the sample text that the font would be displayed with that text rather than The quick brown fox etc yet that did not happen.
The help facility states as follows.
quote
Sample Text
This can be the font name, or any other text that the designer thinks is the best sample to display the font in.
end quote
So, since I have seen fonts display text other than The quick brown fox etc I am wondering how that is done. Can anyone advise on this please?
Readers may perhaps notice that, apart from J, all of the capitals which remain to be produced use one or more straight lines which are neither horizontal nor vertical. I am hoping to produce them using the calculation method mentioned in an earlier post in this thread.
William
Two later development versions of the Pixel Text font are now on the web.
The latest is PTEXT011.TTF and is available from the following link.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT011.TTF
This version contains five alternate designs for a lowercase g, encoded at U+E421 to U+E425, decimal 58401 to 58405.
This has been influenced by reading about OpenType and thinking that I would add some artwork in case an OpenType version of the font is made at some time in the future.
A different design for n is being tried in this version.
I tested the font in WordPad at 24 point.
This is a test of various endings.
This is a test of various endins.
This is a test of various endins.
This is a test of various endins.
This is a test of various endins.
This is a test of various endins.
Copying and pasting the above text into WordPad and then formatting using the PTEXT011.TTF font should produce a display showing the various versions of g included in the font.
The font also contains a few other extra characters.
William
The PTEXT012.TTF Pixel Text 012 development version of the font is now available on the web.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT012.TTF
The basic designs for the capitals alphabet are now complete, though some ornamentation pen strokes hopefully will be added later.
Thus with capitals and lowercase and some puntuation marks, though no quotation marks or hyphen, the font can be tested using many, though not all, English sentences.
Hopefully some readers will enjoy setting text using this font using both the ligatures and the alternate letters which the font contains. I have found that the WordPad program using text at a 24 point size is a good starting place for tests.
William
Pixel Text 013 in the file PTEXT013.TTF was produced yet is no longer available on the web due to two errors. Please use PTEXT014.TTF instead.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT014.TTF
The text of this post below this sentence has not been altered and refers to the Pixel Text 013 font, though those additions are retained in the Pixel Text 014 font.
The additions to this version include some alternative glyphs in U+E426 to U+E42A, decimal 58406 to 58410.
These are added ready for producing an OpenType version of the font and so that a question about the OpenType specification can be posed in the Specification forum.
Other additions include a hyphen, ffi and ffl ligatures, quotes and smart quotes.
William
Pixel Text 014 in the file PTEXT014.TTF is now available on the web.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/PTEXT014.TTF
The Pixel Text 013 font in PTEXT013.TTF has been deleted from the web due to the errors that the inverted exclamation mark and the inverted question mark were horizontal mirror images of what they should have been.
As well as two corrected glyphs, Pixel Text 014 also includes a few more characters: an equals sign, a thorn, parentheses and square brackets.
William