After working on so many fonts, I get to where I can’t remember where I’ve done what. Perhaps I need to widen a few line here and there.
For those that are conversant in other languages than English, What glyphs need to be added?
I found one character that I needed in English which I hadn’t figured on. In trying to decode problems in a text document using MS Word, I turned on the “show paragraphs” button and couldn’t see anything as the Paragraph Sign ¶ (alt+0182) hadn’t been drawn – there was a blank glyph which doesn’t show anything!
Interestingly, when I deleted all empty glyphs and reloaded the font the notdef character showed up as the paragraph sign (of course).
There is no need to add an ogonek to the long-tailed g, it only needs to be added to vowels. Adding accents to script fonts is quite a challenge. Almost every letter is a special case.
It helps a lot to add low profile accents to the font. Then you can have different accent designs for lowercase and uppercase. Complete Composites will use the low profile accents for uppercase and the regular accents for lowercase. Autopositioning is difficult for scripts too. Complete Composites will use autopositioning to centre accents on the base glyph with an offset for acute/grave and italics, but the optical centre is not always the same as the geometric centre, especially with script fonts.
Other glyphs, like æ or Þ need some creativity if they are going to match the font properly. Although you may never need more than a few accents, many users in Europe do require them for their daily work. Fonts without accents are next to useless for them.
Here is a very rough attempt. I haven’t made much effort to design the accents to match the font, they are more suited to Garava italic than to Yolanda. The low profile accents should be designed to suit uppercase glyphs, then moved down to the same vertical position as the lowercase accents. Setting the advance width to zero and using a Capital A or E in the Comparison toolbar helps a lot with the design process.
The document states “there are three major glyph variants”.
The character is used in the Latvian language. I do not know the Latvian language yet I have supported it in some of my fonts, as I mention in the following thread.
The tail on the p was too short so I lengthened it by 100 units.
All the glyphs are now filled with the exception of Thorn and eth. I haven’t figured out how I want to design them.
Ah, Joe, you’re a man after me own heart. Thanke lad!
I hadn’t run the font through with Compare using r.
Thanks to you, now I have.
The w was a little squished, and there were corrections needed with the connecting Caps too.
All is corrected now, and the link above now connects to the latest version.
Use it in any fashion you wish. You’ve more than earned it.
Underline and strikeout values don’t suit the font.
Format, Settings, Post, and General tab. Try:
Underline 75, -140
Strikeout 85, 385
I think the figure eight would work better if the upper loop was open, like the zero or the six, instead of crossing itself. Something like one of these;
88.png
The + and = signs are slightly too high for the figures, and much too high for the lowercase. Look at “a+b=c” for example. Moving the plus sign down to the baseline and the other maths symbols likewise (about 100 funits) works better for this font because the figures are much lower than caps height, and x-height is very low.
Tarnation! I never even Panosed it!
After entering William’s diacriticals I should have reset Win Ascent. Now done and re-linked above.
“Bhikkhu Pesala”]A few suggestions:
Underline and strikeout values don’t suit the font.
Format, Settings, Post, and General tab. Try:
Underline 75, -140
Strikeout 85, 385
Also done.
I think the figure eight would work better if the upper loop was open, like the zero or the six, instead of crossing itself. Something like one of these;
Agreed and done. This forced me to do the same with G that never looked quite right to me.
The + and = signs are slightly too high for the figures, and much too high for the lowercase. Look at “a+b=c” for example. Moving the plus sign down to the baseline and the other maths symbols likewise (about 100 funits) works better for this font because the figures are much lower than caps height, and x-height is very low.
This one I disagreed on.
They were designed to work with the numbers which I want intermediate between minuscules and majuscules. I doubt my version will ever be used for algebra.
BTW, knowing his excellent work, if he wishes I hereby grant Bhikkhu Pesala full rights to make his version of this font any way he wishes.
I like the font, and might enhance it to add to my collection of free fonts, but it is hard to make a script font with accents. The smart quotes are really problematic too. How do you get the single quote right for apostrophe, and lowercase letters, but still usable with uppercase?
Script Quotes.png Edit: Adjusted a bit to make the quotes taller. Comma made to match and full-stop adjusted slightly too.
I suppose that, for an ordinary TrueType version of this font, the answer is that one does not.
However, one possibility is that the single smart quotes could be at a height so that one of them could be used as an apostrophe with lowercase letters; the double smart quotes being at a height so that they could be used to indicate speech marks. This would not be ideal, but might well produce good results in many circumstances.
Another possibility would be to make all of the smart quotes at a height so that they are useful as smart quote characters; and also to encode in the Unicode Private Use Area an apostrophe to fit the height of the lowercase letters. Such a Private Use Area encoding would not be standard, yet could be very useful if the font is being used to produce quality desktop published material on a printer, or indeed if the font is being used to produce a pdf or a graphic to publish on the web.
I’m crushed! Continuing the top left connector on around to form a true lower case s is what I like most about the font.
It forms a symbolic cat’s eye saying “Here’s looking at you kid.”
Can’t you hear it Dick? Just kidding, but variety of opinions is what helps the world go round.
Thanks to everyone for all the comments.
I still don’t like the right hand connector on the o. I feel it needs to drop down more before swinging out to connect. The top right of the A should also be opened. I Panosed it as a Ball point because of the rounded ends. Perhaps it should be a Pressure Point because of the occasional flares? Yes, I just convinced myself. Do we EVER really finish a font?
Perhaps I should have placed this in the Discussion section instead of the Gallery.
Edit 25 Feb 2008
after mucking about for a bit I also changed the O to match the new A.
I considered doing the same with zero, but decided to keep them looking very different.
Thinking about script faces as a result of reading this thread, I remembered Palace Script from the days of metal type. There were also other script fonts, such as Dorchester Script and Madonna Ronde.
An interesting and unusual, though perhaps not unique, feature of one script font, (I think perhaps it was Palace Script but I am not congruently certain), was the inclusion of special types for Mr and Mrs. The Mr type was an M followed by an r up in the air. The Mrs type as an M followed by rs up in the air. There might perhaps have been one for Miss as well.
I have searched for Palace Script on the web and found a few examples of the font in electronic fonts, but I have not yet found any examples of the special Mr and Mrs types. Maybe it was not Palace Script that had them or maybe they have not become transferred to an electronic version of the font or maybe they are present in the font yet not in the examples.
The reason that I am mentioning this is that it occurs to me that if the Yolanda font had special glyphs for Mr Mrs Ms Miss Mme and Mlle that they could be made available in the Private Use Area in a TrueType font at the present time and maybe also as discretionary ligatures in an OpenType font at a later time.
Regarding Private Use Area code point allocations for special glyphs which might be useful in script fonts, the sixth and seventh posts in the following thread hopefully might be of interest.