Pantone Colour of the Year for 2011 and fonts

[William]

I read a news report about Pantone issuing its Colour of the Year for 2011.

I found the following.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/Pantone.aspx?pg=20821&ca=4

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/pantone.aspx?pg=20824&ca=10

The first of the above two web pages has, almost at the end of the page, a table of colour values.

I decided to try to use the colour with some of my fonts.

I used the Serif PagePlus X3 program.

I decided to use the CMYK values for “fashion + home CMYK” as follows.

C=4, M=75, Y=24, K=0

The colour is called Honeysuckle.

I started a new publication within PagePlus X3 and I added the colour to the colour palette of the publication.

In fact, I chose the publication in PagePlus X3 to be A4 landscape, though I had no intention of producing an A4 landscape publication such as a print or a pdf document: the idea is to export a graphic from within the publication as a png graphic file. The A4 landscape publication that I am using simply provides an environment for adding graphics.

I keyed the word honeysuckle, using my Sonnet Calligraphic 029 font at 120 point, 120 point being one of the preset sizes in PagePlus X3 (other, non-preset, sizes are also possible). I then changed the h, the y and the lowercase l for calligraphic alternate glyphs from the Private Use Area of the font. I then added a space before the h so that there would be some white space at the start of the graphic and three spaces at the end. I then exported the graphic as a 24 bit png.

I then decided to try my Chronicle Text font, as it is a much heavier font and I wondered how the colour would look with a heavier font. I used 24 point. As the font has a ck ligature available I keyed the text twice, once without the ck ligature and once with the ck ligature.

William Overington

11 December 2010

[William]

Here is a graphic using my Quest text font at 72 point.

William Overington

11 December 2010

[William]

I thought that I would like to try a solid block of the Honeysuckle colour.

I thought of using the glyph that I designed for a ROASTED SWEET POTATO and which is included in the High Plane Mapping 004 font.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/font-with-some-emoji-in-a-high-plane-private-use-area/2343/3

In the High Plane Mapping 004 font, the mapping is as follows.

U+FE974 ROASTED SWEET POTATO

That is from the Google emoji mapping into Supplementary Private Use Area-A of Unicode, plane 15.

The font was produced on 3 January 2009, before ROASTED SWEET POTATO was encoded into regular Unicode as follows.

U+1F360 ROASTED SWEET POTATO

That is in plane 1.

As it happens, the PagePlus X3 program that I am using does not access Unicode above plane 0 and the only program that I have that can access glyphs above plane 0 is WordPad and, as far as I know, a special colour cannot be produced in WordPad.

So, with the facilities that I have available, the solution is to produce a new font, with the ROASTED SWEET POTATO glyph mapped into the plane 0 Private Use Area, with mappings chosen by me.

So, open HIGHM004.TTF High Plane Mapping 004 in FontCreator.

I am intending to save a new copy, yet what to call it? This is just a font so as to be able to produce a graphic, though a pdf is also a possibility, and is really just a font to solve a particular problem for me.

However, I do like to write and so I am likely to want to post the font as well, so the font needs to be produced with care as it might have wider uses than just me producing one graphic.

My first thought was to add a mapping to plane 0, but then what about the postscript names?

So, I decide to add three cells before the existing emoji glyphs in the font and then copy the glyph designs and then map them to plane 0. I am only intending using ROASTED SWEET POTATO at present, but as I am intending to publish the font and there are only three glyphs to map, I decide to map them all.

U+E001 NIGHT WITH STARS
U+E002 RAINBOW
U+E003 ROASTED SWEET POTATO

So, make the font HIGHM904.TTF High Plane Mapping 904.

Add the extra cells, copy the glyphs, map the cells and generate postscript names.

Also, change the width of the space the width of the nonmarkingreturn from 508 font units to 512 font units as 512 is a power of 2.

Validate the font.

Save the font.

Find the font using Windows Explorer and double click on it so as to install it temporarily.

The font can be found in PagePlus X3 but is found in the correct place alphabetically for High Plane Mapping 904 yet displaying the name 904 as PagePlus X3 displays the name of a font using glyphs from the font and the font has no glyphs for the basic alphabet.

In composing the graphic I used 250 point as the size for the roasted sweet potato glyph.

Here are the font and the graphic.
HIGHM904.TTF (15.6 KB)

Here is a version with a transparent background.

William Overington

13 December 2010