Kelvinch - a font for body text.

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Alfred
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by Alfred »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Display the Image Toolbar (F9)
The Background Image toolbar is new to me. From a quick test, the 'Convert to contours' button doesn't seem to do anything apart from briefly flashing up a small window. Is it meant to have a more permanently visible effect? Apologies for the slightly off-topic question!
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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Alfred wrote:
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Display the Image Toolbar (F9)
The Background Image toolbar is new to me. From a quick test, the 'Convert to contours' button doesn't seem to do anything apart from briefly flashing up a small window. Is it meant to have a more permanently visible effect? Apologies for the slightly off-topic question!
Try deleting the contours first or show the Validation toolbar before you use that feature.
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by Alfred »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:
Alfred wrote:
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:Display the Image Toolbar (F9)
The Background Image toolbar is new to me. From a quick test, the 'Convert to contours' button doesn't seem to do anything apart from briefly flashing up a small window. Is it meant to have a more permanently visible effect? Apologies for the slightly off-topic question!
Try deleting the contours first or show the Validation toolbar before you use that feature.
No, I still don't see any effect. On revisiting that toolbar, I also noticed that the background image is yellow (or whatever) when the 'Monochrome' checkbox is checked, but black when it's cleared, which seems the wrong way around to me.
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by PJMiller »

I didn't know that it was possible to display a background image behind a glyph you are editing. It is possible in Font Forge but I haven't noticed it in Font Creator.

If it is possible then this is a very useful facility.
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Alfred wrote:No, I still don't see any effect. On revisiting that toolbar, I also noticed that the background image is yellow (or whatever) when the 'Monochrome' checkbox is checked, but black when it's cleared, which seems the wrong way around to me.
Try loading a colour image and converting it to contours. Then hide the image or move the contours.

Load Background Image.png
Load Background Image.png (14.25 KiB) Viewed 12105 times
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by William »

> The name Kelvinch is a joke, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

> My main character on the MMORPG Guild Wars 2 is called 'Kelvinch Twock'. Apart from that it has no real meaning.

Thank you for explaining.

It is entirely a matter for you as to what you name your font.

However, I am thinking of using such a beautiful font for a publication that needs two of the Esperanto characters, publishing to a pdf. The pdf will list the names of the fonts, so a joke name would be in the pdf. The pdf would become archived in the British Library. It seems unfortunate that if I try to produce a high-quality piece of writing, typeset in this high-quality typeface, that in the list of font names would be a joke name.

By the way, mentioning the British Library, the British Library will accept for legal deposit an original font provided that it is published, and that it is produced or published In the United Kingdom. As you are publishing your font you might like to consider depositing your font. I have deposited a number of my fonts.

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/index.html

Some years ago I produced a Venetian font, which I use as my personal font, using Scanahand on some specially hand-drawn artwork, drawn with a fibre tip pen onto a print out of a Scanahand template, then scanned into the computer, making a few minor alterations with FontCreator so as to have some ligature glyphs in the font. That was with a very early version of Scanahand. So the font is somewhere between a handwriting font and a type font. I named the font Gallery. Alas it has no Esperanto accented characters. I mention the fact of it being an early version of Scanahand because now one can, if one so chooses, include the Esperanto characters in the artwork for a font produced using a modern version of Scanahand.

A good name for a font is very important.

One option would be something associated with Venice, like Gondola.

Or something stylish not related to Venice.

> Do you still want the raw font file uploaded or did you install 7-zip? I will post the font file if you still want it.

Yes please, I would still like the font file please.

Please note that it might not only be me who would like the font file directly, not everybody who reads this forum posts in it.

William
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by PJMiller »

Dear William,

Here is a snapshot of the project as it exists at the moment, uncompressed as you wanted it. But understand this is a moving target, it is still a work in progress. I probably posted it too soon but I was interested to see what people thought of it. It is still under development so not all the glyphs are present in each file, some glyphs are wrong and/or incomplete and the kerning might be out of date.

However what is present is probably usable.

Sorry for the massive data files Erwin. I wish I had a website so I could host the files myself.

As to the name, you must understand the humble beginnings of this font. For years I have searched for a font which had all the characteristics which I like. I have tried many fonts, all of which had a subset of the characteristics I wanted but no one font had them all.

Around Christmas 2014 I discovered Font Forge and thought why can't I cobble together a font which has everything I want. It was only ever intended to have basic latin characters, numbers and punctuation, so the name didn't really matter. I got hold of a copy of Gentium which had a license which allowed me to do whatever I liked to it and deleted most of the characters (a bad move) and started to hack it.

Then the mission creep started.

My wife wanted some of the accented characters which would allow her to type in her language and I decided to put some of the mathematical characters in there just so it would be convenient to me.

By this time I was using Font Creator and I discovered 'Complete Composites' and went wild adding all sorts of wierd and wonderful characters, because it was easy to do.

I never expected it to be good enough that anyone else would be interested in using it.

But don't worry about the name being a joke, I won't tell anyone if you don't, it'll be our little secret :wink:

I probably won't post any more updates until it's finished, it would be unfair to Erwin.

Regards

Paul J. Miller
Last edited by PJMiller on Sun Sep 13, 2015 5:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by Erwin Denissen »

PJMiller wrote:Sorry for the massive data files Erwin. I wish I had a website so I could host the files myself.
No worries, we don't even spent half the bandwidth of what we are allowed to. I really enjoy reading the work-in-progress, and all help you get from experienced users of FontCreator. IMHO several are professional font designers and I'm proud they use our software and spent time on this forum to help other people with their font design!

And while we're at it, I really like your font, so keep up the good work :wink:
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by Alfred »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:
Alfred wrote:No, I still don't see any effect. On revisiting that toolbar, I also noticed that the background image is yellow (or whatever) when the 'Monochrome' checkbox is checked, but black when it's cleared, which seems the wrong way around to me.
Try loading a colour image and converting it to contours. Then hide the image or move the contours.
Thanks. Its working now; I'm not quite sure what I was doing wrong before.

By using a background image with plenty of variation in the lightness levels, I've also satisfied myself that the 'Monochrome' setting is working correctly.

Once again, apologies to Paul for the off-topic post!
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by PJMiller »

Alfred wrote: Once again, apologies to Paul for the off-topic post!
No problem, I discovered that you can put a background image behind a glyph just like Font Forge, yes it is in the documentation, yes i missed it in the documenttation ... Doh!
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by William »

Thank you for posting the fonts.

Here are some images that I have produced using the font.

Using two of the ligatures:
Kelvinch_example_001.png
Kelvinch_example_001.png (9 KiB) Viewed 12059 times
Using two of the Esperanto accented characters in a sentence in Esperanto:
Kelvinch_example_002.png
Kelvinch_example_002.png (6.53 KiB) Viewed 12059 times
The Esperanto translates into English as follows:

Is it snowing?

William
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by PJMiller »

Last week I said it would be this week when I finished Kelvinch. It is still this week (only just).

It still isn't finished but this one is usable. I have made many cosmetic changes, the bridges of the n m h and u have been thickened up as they disappeared at low point sizes. The metadata for the ascenders and descenders and a few other things has been equalised between the fonts.

As this is a body text font it had to work at low point sizes.

I have added some of the dingbats provided by Bhikkhu Persala in the sample font supplied with Font Creator (I resisted the temptation to add them all), thanks Bhikkhu. I even included a hot beverage for William. :D

This is not the end but at least its a beta test version rather than an alpha test version.

Microsoft Word (or at least the Word 2007 which I am using) does not kern by default you have to apply it as a format but even then it will only kern when a Legacy Kerning Table is present in the font. Therefore I have done these with a legacy kern table, sorry about the massive files.

I would welcome constructive criticism.

There will be another version soon and that one will probably be the final version, I then have to think about options for distributing the font. Anyone know any good websites for this?
Attachments
Kelvinch-Italic.fcp
(181.72 KiB) Downloaded 438 times
Kelvinch-BoldItalic.fcp
(196.84 KiB) Downloaded 442 times
Kelvinch-Bold.fcp
(180.31 KiB) Downloaded 444 times
Kelvinch.fcp
(166.59 KiB) Downloaded 454 times
Last edited by PJMiller on Sun Jan 17, 2016 3:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by PJMiller »

If anyone is wondering where the files went for the earlier versions of Kelvinch.

I took the liberty of deleting the files from the earlier posts I made. This saves Erwin some space on his server. The previous files were embarrasingly full of mistakes and inconsistencies.

The latest files are the ones you should be using.
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by William »

PJMiller wrote:I even included a hot beverage for William. :D
Thank you.

In fact Paul has provided a different glyph for hot beverage in each of the four fonts. This is excellent.

The glyph in the Roman version has a stylish way of producing the visual effect of showing that the cup has a curved surface: the contour used to produce the effect is amazing.

> I would welcome constructive criticism.

Well there is something I noticed. It is very specialised.

You have used the same glyph for ezh and yogh: the yogh has the postscript name uni021C for capital and uni021d for small.

This is an interesting matter in the history of Unicode because ezh and yogh used to be together under ezh using the ezh glyph yet were later separated with yogh having a different glyph.

If you choose to make the glyphs for ezh and yogh different each from the other then It is the glyphs for capital and small yogh that need changing.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf

William Overington

21 September 2015
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Re: Kelvinch - a font for body text.

Post by PJMiller »

I will change the upper and lower case yogh for more curved versions like the ones in the Unicode charts.

I was just being lazy.
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