Munson

Gallery
1

This is a work in progress. It isn’t finished and there are virtually no open type features on anything except the roman font except for what was copied from an earlier version of roman and I am still experimenting with Chaining Contexts and what can be done with them.

There is no kerning and all the bearings are exactly as they come out of optical metrics so some of them need tweaking.

However this is a preview of what it will look like, the outlines are finished.

Munson is a Clarendon style font.

Any comments or critique is welcome.

Files removed, new files added in a later post.

2

I had a look at the Regular type style, and noticed a few issues:

  1. Run the Font Validation wizard to find intersecting contours
  2. Some composites are different advance width, e.g. ú ü etc.
  3. The Fraction feature does not work properly, e.g. 1/4 works, but 0/00, 1/2, 1/3, etc., do not. Take a look at the frac feature in one of my fonts and see if that would work better for your font.
  4. The glyph outlines are excellent, but the long descending arms on the T will cause issues with kerning of pairs like Ta, Te, To, Tu, Tw, Ty. Perhaps it would work better if they were shorter to allow lowercase glyphs to kern more tightly?

Tw.png

3

This is a font that was hastily put together from one of my early attempts with Font Forge. When I look back on my work from 3½ years ago it looks abysmal. :unamused: It was supposed to be a slab serif something like Rockwell but it didn’t turn out as good and was abandoned with barely enough glyphs finished to call it a font.

I needed a font for a beta test of some font related software because I didn’t want to comit my prime development font (‘Tobias’ the son of ‘Kelvinch’) to it because at the end of the beta test I would then have to upgrade to the new software whether I wanted to or not.

At the same time I needed a Clarendon style of font, something to evoke the spirit of Victorian printing and there wasn’t a good free Clarendon so I revived the old Rockwell and started turning it into a Clarendon.

That graphic design job has passed but may well arise again in the future. If it does I will be ready.

  1. The validation picks up all the overlapping composite members, as far as I know this is not and error.

  2. I will look at the composites to even out their bearings where appropriate, thanks for the heads up. The bearings at the moment are what came out of Optical Metrics and so may need a little tweaking. Optical Metrics is a starting point not an end point.

  3. This is a work in progress and the Open Type features are a mess, they aren’t finished yet. Many are just placeholders for what will come and the open type features in the bold, italic and bold-italic are just cut and pasted from an earlier version of the Roman, I think something got lost in the transfer. Many features don’t work yet, I will address this issue.

  4. I don’t know what to do about the long descending arms of the ‘T’. On the one hand, it was designed like this because I like the way it looks, it fits in well with the way a Clarendon should look and harmonises well with the ‘E’ and the ‘F’. On the other hand it does interfere with the kerning and if left will create extra white holes in the text. I will leave it as it is for now and if the result looks ugly to my eyes then I will change it.

P.S. I took three weeks off work at the end of march for the test and got an awful lot of work done on ‘Munson’ in that time, the screen shots were all carefully contrived so as not to show all the gaps and empty glyphs (placeholders). The outlines are all finished now but there is still an awful lot to do.

4

I have been looking at the Roman and the Italic.

I remember Monotype Modern Roman from metal type. Munson Roman has the upward hook lower right on both a lowercase a and on an uppercase R and that looks good.

Modern Roman and Modern Italic were often used for typesetting of mathematical text books, due to the clarity of the typefaces.

The lowercase x of Modern Italic is the well-known way that people write x in algebra. Munson Italic has that look. Very good.

I noticed the glyph for U+2055 FLOWER PUNCTUATION MARK.

I found the Unicode code chart.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf

I like your very English glyph design for that glyph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_rose

I like your design of the interrobang. I have never seen an interrobang glyph like that before. A good design solution.

I notice that the font supports Esperanto. Excellent.

William Overington

Tuesday 18 April 2017

5

Turn of the century Maths Textbook equation italic is exactly the look I was going for.

That isn’t a Tudor Rose, it’s the Whie Rose of Yorkshire ! :angry:

and it was in Kelvinch albeit at a different codepoint, and it will be in the next font at the same code point as in Munson.

6

On the other hand why don’t I just make them a lot longer so no kerning is possible, end of problem. :smiley:

7

The possibilities are endless; the art is in making the right choices.

Clarendon Light BT does make the arms longer, but still kerns Tw. This does not work well IMO.
Tw Clarendon Light BT.png

8

The lower case italics were ripped out of Bhikkhu Pesala’s Acariya font and then horribly mutilated to make them look the way I wanted them to look, so I cheated.

9

Does anyone still use Esperanto for actual communication rather than just as a novelty ?

Esperanto was supposed to be a pan european language so that all europeans could speak with each other in a common language but it was not widely adopted or taught. People preferred their own native tounges and so it never really caught on and I thought it had largely fallen into obscurity.

Maybe I am wrong and there are a large cohort of people out there using it on a daily basis rather than speaking to each other in their own native tounge.

10

This is the latest version of Munson.

Virtually all done apart from adjusting the spacing and kerning (which is always the time consuming bit).

The Kerning and spacing in these files are straight out of AutoKern and Optical Metrics.

Any comments or constructive criticism are welcome.

Files deleted, replaced by latest versions in a later post.

11

The first thing I would do is delete all of the kerning classes that use subscripts. (Sort the classes alphabetically to make them easier to spot in the Class Manager after reading their name in the pair adjustments list).

Then, I would look through the Positive Kerning Pairs (the blue ones) and clear any that are inappropriate, like AA, VV, TT, etc., before Trimming any pairs under 21 funits.

12

http://www.esperanto.org.uk/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_Zamenhof

Not congruently so. Esperanto was intended to be a second language for everyone. There was never any intention to replace existing languages. Esperanto was intended as an auxiliary language.

I think that is like a lot of things in life, for example, say, bird watching, chess, making pottery, playing jazz, quilt making, making musical instruments, icing cakes, steam locomotives, where many people have heard of it, for some people it is a central part of their lives and for some other people it is something that they take an interest in to a greater or lesser extent from time to time.

There are cases of people who have met at Esperanto conferences and have had no mutual language other than Esperanto, got married and had children and the children have grown up speaking Esperanto as well as a natural language because Esperanto is the everyday language of the family home.

I have produced a couple of web pages that have some Esperanto in them.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/song1023.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/lingvo_de_paco.htm

I needed to learn how to include the accented characters.

You might like to try a copy and paste of the Esperanto from those pages into https://translate.google.com/ and while the translation is not perfect it gives a good start. One thing I quite like is the way some things rhyme in Esperanto that do not rhyme in English. For example, please note how boaco rhymes with erinaco, producing imagery in Esperanto that is directly in Esperanto and not translated from some other language.

Where Esperanto is of great relevance in relation to typography and fontmaking is that the language uses some characters that are beyond 8-bit ASCII, so in a way it is a useful insight into the problems of font supply for people whose own language uses Latin characters yet also needs one or more characters that are beyond 8-bit ASCII. For example, some type companies charge more for fonts that can support such languages. Also, are there fancy fonts that include Esperanto accents? Hopefully so, yet all that I have seen stop at Western Europe at the most, though I have not looked hard to find such a font, it is just something that I notice when I look at a font.

William

13

Are there any characters which are needed for Esperanto which are not present in Munson ?

Give me a list and they will appear in the next iteration.

14

Are there any characters which are needed for Esperanto which are not present in Munson ?

Give me a list and they will appear in the next iteration.

That is kind of you, thank you.

I have checked only the Roman and you have all of the twelve needed.

Ĉ ĉ Ĝ ĝ Ĥ ĥ Ĵ ĵ Ŝ ŝ Ŭ ŭ

However, I did notice that there does not seem to be a small capital version of Ĵ, namely J Circumflex.

I also checked to see if you have all the characters needed for Welsh.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_welsh_accented_characters.pdf

It seems that you have the accented A, E, I, O, U characters needed but not all of the accented W and Y characters.

If you choose to support Welsh then more characters are needed.

Something that I did not know before I just tried it now, and it works, is that if one copies onto the clipboard a single character from that PDF document and then uses the Edit Search facility in FontCreator then one can find the code point of the character direct from the typecase PDF document.

One can then manually copy the hexadecimal code into the search box on the following web page so as to find the code chart that contains that character.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Please note that to get back to a view of all of the glyphs after the search in FontCreator one needs to click on Glyphs near the top of the left sidepanel (well on the version that I am using, I do not know about other versions).

William

15

OK the Welsh characters are in, but I can feel mission creep starting to happen, just like it did with ‘Kelvinch’ where I was very insecure about what characters to include and what to exclude.

And look what happened, it turned into an unwieldy monster. :open_mouth:

The J circumflex small cap was an oversight, that has now been corrected.

16

But I forgot, this font has anchors so the combination of any base character with any combining diacritic should come out correct so you don’t need all these Welsh characters because you can make them. :smiley:

But you’ve now got them anyway. :wink:

17

These are the latest versions of ‘Munson’.

I think it’s just about finished now.

Unless anyone can find a problem I’ve overlooked.
Munson_BoldItalic.otf (155 KB)
Munson_Italic.otf (155 KB)
Munson_Roman.otf (157 KB)
Munson_Bold.otf (136 KB)

18

The real final version has just been put up on Deviant Art.

There were a lot of improvements to the open type features and anchor positioning between the version posted in the previous post and the final version.

Enjoy. :smiley:

19

The Munson font has just been updated to version 2.0.

This is a major update. It now has Cyrillic and Greek. Many more kerning pairs were added, more anchors and many more open type features.

Erwin’s masterful fraction code was used so it handles sophisticated fractions correctly.

It was also fixed so that it handles the dotted and dotless i characters correctly in Turkish when they are converted to small capitals.

Enjoy ! :smiley: