Venetian Old Style

Gallery
1

My Venetian Old Style font is under development.

It arose as a spin-off from the project in the following thread.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/your-handwriting-ii-program/1719/1

As I proceed I am uploading the various stages to the web.

There are four such fonts uploaded already, three produced yesterday and one produced today.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS101.TTF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS102.TTF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS103.TTF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS104.TTF

VENOS101.TTF simply has the glyphs from the scanned artwork loaded into the places for @ and #.

VENOS102.TTF has p Y and f copied into place and scaled by 400%, the figure of 400% decided upon after studying the p Y and f as they seemed to be the glyphs most useful to be considered as they cover descenders, capitals needing to take accents and ascenders. The metrics have been set accordingly, so much of the basic structure is now done.

At present I am copying the individual glyphs from the @ and # bays and scaling them by 400%, just placing them with no reference to any space which may be needed at one or both sides of the glyphs. I am making some vertical adjustments.

VENOS103.TTF has 7 capitals and 19 lowercase letters in their correct positions.

VENOS104.TTF has 26 lowercase letters and 9 capitals.

There are two kerning pairs added experimentally, though they may need to be redone if spacing is added around the glyphs. The two kerning pairs are Ve and Qu. I have tried them at 24 point using Serif PagePlus 10. Readers considering obtaining PagePlus should note that Serif PagePlus 10, mentioned here, is not the latest version of the PagePlus program.

Here is the test text which I am using.

Venetian Old Style Example

It was sometime later that they arrived at the edge of the forest. They rode beneath the canopy of trees and their horses enjoyed the shade. After a while they decided to dismount to rest the horses and to walk for a while. They gazed at the huge trees and wondered how long they had taken to grow to this size. Could this forest have been planned by people or was it a natural phenomenon? After a while they remounted their horses and rode on at a steady pace. They talked of many things and sometimes they sang. Occasionally they rode for a while in silence. There was much about which to think. When they arrived at the town they would be asked for news of what was happening elsewhere. Yet mostly they would be asked to write documents! It was late in the afternoon when they left the forest. The edge of the forest was not a sudden event, it was gradual. Gradually the trees had become less dense, then there were few, and then there was open countryside.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Quod erat demonstrandum

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

sample text ends before this line

As I make the font I have a look at the display of the test text after adding a letter to the font, often deciding which letter to add next on the basis that it will complete the display of a word in the test text.

William Overington

3 August 2007

2

VENOS105.TTF is now available on the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS105.TTF

This version adds five capitals and five punctuation characters, namely full stop, comma, exclamation mark, question mark and hyphen.

This version is much smaller in terms of the number of bytes in the file. This is because I have deleted some of the original artwork from @ and #. I have deleted all of the artwork for the lowercase letters and for the nine capitals copied in the previous versions and I have also deleted some of the surrounding contours. VENOS105.TTF is 43 kilobytes whereas VENOS104.TTF is 97 kilobytes.

VENOS105.TTF makes available all of the characters to set the story text which I use to test the font.

William

3

VENOS106.TTF is now available on the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS106.TTF

This version completes the transcribing of the capitals and adds an ampersand as well.

The capital I has been lowered slightly.

The font now has 26 capitals, 26 lowercase letters, an ampersand, full stop, comma, exclamation mark, question mark and hyphen.

William

4

The scans of the original ballpoint black pen upon two A4 size sheets of paper artwork used for this font are available on the web at the following places.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/scan4001.bmp

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/scan4002.bmp

William

5

I have now uploaded VENOS107.TTF to the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS107.TTF

All of the glyphs from the artwork have now been transcribed and placed in initial positions.

In addition in this version the r has been lowered by 48 font units and the k has each been lowered by 16 font units and a qu kerning pair has been introduced set at -128 font units.

The font has the basic character set shown by fontviewer (which here seems to show : twice and not show " as it used to do) together with ampersand and hyphen, four smart quotes and seven special characters for German. These seven were included on page 1 of the artwork, presumably because of the German origin of the Your Handwriting II program.

William

6

I had started VENOS108.TTF this morning and was hoping to continue later, though in the event I uploaded VENOS108.TTF to the web earlier than originally planned as part of a response to some comments in a thread in the Serif forum.

https://www.serif.com/forum/ViewThread.asp?Thread=31258#209040

Any further changes would now be in VENOS109.TTF.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS108.TTF

The changes made in VENOS108.TTF are as in the following extract from my notes.

Try to narrow the N. Move all points which start right of x=1024 to the left by 100 font units and reduce the advance width of the glyph by 100 font units.

Alter m by reducing all points which start at or above y=496 by100 font units.

With the lowercase l move a set of points left 50 font units and down fifty font units.

Reduce the advance width to fit, though it is not exactly 50 font units for some reason. CHECK WHY?

William

7

The Your Handwriting II program, which is featured in the http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/your-handwriting-ii-program/1719/1 thread also has what it terms a Proof Sheet.

This sheet allows for the insertion of redesigned glyphs and for the insertion of special characters.

I have produced a Proof sheet for Venetian Old Style which contains the artwork for some ligatures and for a long s.

I did not draw it directly. I used the Microsoft Paint program. I started with a copy of the Proof Sheet kindly supplied by a gentleman writing in the http://www.serif.com/forum/ViewThread.asp?Thread=31258 thread (specifically at the http://www.serif.com/forum/ViewThread.asp?Thread=31258#208702 post)and pasted pieces of artwork from scan4001.bmp and then adapted them within Paint.

The result is in a file named scpa4004.bmp.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/scpa4004.bmp

I have also produced a gif version of the file and it is available from the http://www.serif.com/forum/ViewThread.asp?Thread=31258 thread.

Using scpa4004.bmp in Your Handwriting II is interesting as the user chooses where to map the glyphs. There is a limited choice of map locations of where to place glyphs.

The artwork can also be used in FontCreator, where there is a much greater choice of map locations of where to place glyphs.

William Overington

6 August 2007

8

VENOS109.TTF is now available on the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/VENOS109.TTF

This version adds three kerning pairs, namely AV, Av and fo.

The lowercase l has been adjusted again so that the stroke at the top is not so large.

A long s has been added.

Eight ligature glyphs have been added. Five, namely ff, ffi, ffl, long s t and st, are at only their regular Unicode mappings. The fi and fl are at both their regular Unicode mappings U+FB01 and U+FB02 and at the Microsoft chosen Unicode Private Use Area mappings U+F001 and U+F002 respectively. The ct is at U+E707 in the Unicode Private Use Area, a mapping of my own choice which I often use for mapping a ct ligature glyph in my fonts.

William Overington

6 August 2007