HOW MANY MAN-HOURS ?

[GeneM]

.
To the Font Experts:

[1]
If I gave a font creating person a sheet filled out with all my letter and other characters, how many MAN-HOURS would it take them to turn it into a publication quality vector font?

I do not want a mere bitmap font (such should not even be called fonts, because doing so is misleading to lay-people).
The font must scale in size, just the way normal fonts do (from 8 pt to 72 pt).


[2]
Depending on the man-hours answer above, whom could I hire to turn my characters into a real font?


[3]
Why do so many forms seem to cover only ascii range 0x00-0x7f? I think I need some characters above 0x7f, because it is a chess related font.


Thank you.
Gene Milener

genem -at- castlelong.com

.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

See this earlier discussion.

[1] Anything between 1 and 1,000 hours depending on:

• The quality of the hand-drawn original
• The design of the typeface
• The number of characters wanted
• The quality of the font — do you need kering pairs, Panose classification, Open Type features, hinting, etc.

[2] There are several online font services that will turn your handwriting into a Truetype vector font for you. I don't do commercial work, but there are a few members who might offer to make the font for you.
[3] Fewer glyphs obviously means less work. All of my free fonts include glyphs for Chess, and many others. Most decent fonts will include the full ANSI character set.

Upload a sccan somewhere to give people some idea of what is required.

[William]

> I think I need some characters above 0x7f, because it is a chess related font.

Which characters are you seeking in relation to chess please?

The reason I ask is that regular Unicode only includes twelve chess characters, with the intention that they are used within text.

In the days of metal type one could purchase a chess font such that one could set chess problems as diagrams using 64 of the pieces of type in an 8 x 8 grid layout. The font contained many more than 64 pieces of type, for example, white king on a white background and white king on a black background and one would only use one of those in any particular diagram.

As you may know there is a Private Use Area within Unicode within which anyone may define his or her own code point to character assignments, though those assignments are not exclusive as anyone may define code point to character assignments within the Private Use Area.

However, the Private Use Area can be useful.

I defined some chess font characters some time ago.

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

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/chess2.htm

Some of the pieces, including all those required for regular chess, together with some others suitable for the chess variants Herb Garden Chess and Tree Garden Chess which I devised for a competition are included in my Quest text font.

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

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

These Private Use Area code point allocations are accessible from a page which introduces various Private Use Area code point allocations.

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

Are you looking for chess characters as such or for a font of chess characters made from your own artwork or designs?

Are you looking for other characters made to your own designs?

Are the chess characters in the Quest text font of use to you?

William Overington

20 May 2007

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Thanks for pointing that out William. You just gave me an idea.

One could design a pair of fonts: Regular with black and white pieces on white squares, and Bold with black and white pieces on black squares.

[William]

> One could design a pair of fonts: Regular with black and white pieces on white squares, and Bold with black and white pieces on black squares.

In which case one could use the regular Unicode code points for the chess pieces.

One could then make the space for the regular font the width of the chess pieces so that it would represent an empty white square of the chess board. Yet what about an empty black square? Would the bold version of the font have a solid black square at U+0020? Would that work with all applications or could there be problems with some packages if U+0020 did not have an empty glyph?

The italic and bold italic could allow for variant designs of glyphs for bishops, knights and rooks and indeed for a second queen so that no major two pieces on the board looked the same, yet keeping such alternative glyphs as options.

I have just tried a search at http://www.itcfonts.com/ for chess and found a few fonts with chess pieces.

Clicking on the Chess Draughts font link produces a page, though clicking on See Full Size Graphic is needed for all of the glyphs to be shown.

In the metal font made by Monotype there were special spaces with the font so that one did not need to use ordinary spaces. I seem to remember that the font was in an unusual size for metal type, namely 16 point. It was supplied with a set of four edging pieces, so I wonder whether the 16 point size was so that a chess diagram with surrounding border would be exactly 2 inches square, namely 144 points by 144 points, perhaps so that a chess diagram could be accommodated easily within a page layout designed in inches. The font used to look good printed in red, particularly as some chess sets are made with red and white pieces.

There is a link on the right side of the web page. It says "Try it first click here!"

Thus far I can get the 8 letters and the 8 numbers to display, but not the pieces for either chess or draughts. I wonder how the font is mapped!

William

[William]

I set the twelve chess symbols of regular Unicode using PagePlus 10 with the Quest text font using the Insert Symbol Other... facility of PagePlus 10, then copied the twelve characters onto the clipboard and then pasted them into the box on the web page and then clicked the Show Me! button. Twelve glyphs of the Chess Draughts font were displayed.

Here is the string of twelve chess characters from regular Unicode. They may well show as black rectangles in this posting.

♔♕♖♗♘♙♚♛♜♝♞♟

Yet how does one access the glyphs with the striped backgrounds which represent pieces on black squares, or the glyph for an empty black square? It is advertised as an OpenType font. Maybe they are tucked away as alternate glyphs‽ Wow, I tried that punctuation mark and it comes out in the posting, no black rectangle here! So what font is being used in this forum please?

William

[GeneM]

.
I have looked thru the links you all provided. It has become clear to me that one afternoon of skilled font making labor would not be a realistic idea on my part.

I have searched YouTube.com for a video entitled anything like "How to use FontCreator", but with no luck.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


[Bhikkhu Pesala]
"Upload a sccan somewhere to give people some idea of what is required."

[GeneM]
http://www.castlelong.com/book/pscbyec9 ... C960.shtml


In the above link on page 9, there is a chess diagram showing the font icons I have in mind, for diagrams. They are pseudo 3D.
I realize that on page 9 they have more detail than would be in any plausible font (the tiny edge dots on the black icons are hopeless).
And I am unsure how to translate the gray-scale depths into pure binary black and white.

For in-text icons, I envision simplified 2D cousins for each.
So the font would cover both chess figurine notation text and chess board diagrams.

I would provide a .BMP file (made using MsPaint.exe) containing all the precisely "drawn" characters.

Overall I would prefer more rounding of some harsh edges than I was able to achieve. But such rounding sounds like it would add to more man-hours, and thus to more $; which I want to avoid.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


[Bhikkhu Pesala]
"There are several online font services that will turn your handwriting into a Truetype vector font for you."

[GeneM]
Yes, but they do not explicitly say the font would scale up-down in size.
And they seem restricted to 0x00-0x7f.

I am unsure, but I do not think I want to involve Unicode. Ease of keyboard entry is very important. Perhaps those two concepts conflict.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


[GeneM]
The character to keyboard mapping would be roughly similar to that of font "Chess Alpha 2" , at web site...

enpassant.dk


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


[William Overington]
Are you looking for chess characters as such or for a font of chess characters made from your own artwork or designs?

Are you looking for other characters made to your own designs?

Are the chess characters in the Quest text font of use to you?

[GeneM]
I looked at William's Chess-3D.ttf, and his Quest font. Interesting to see this stuff. But I have my own very specific chess glyphs in mind.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


[Bhikkhu Pesala]
One could design a pair of fonts: Regular with black and white pieces on white squares, and Bold with black and white pieces on black squares.

[GeneM]
For the in-text 2D glyphs, my design has 4 concepts, in a 2X2 matrix:

White piece , notBold
Black piece , notBold
White piece , Bold
Black piece , Bold


But I had not envisioned the use of BOLD to achieve that. I think it would be better for me to just have different characters (keyboard keys) make those distinctions (with Shift being involved).


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


[Bhikkhu Pesala]
" - kering pairs, Panose classification, Open Type features, hinting, etc."

[GeneM]
I do not know what any of those terms mean (well, I kinda know kerning). Probably people who do know could have a fair chance of learning how to use FontCreator.


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


CHSym: I name the font I have in mind "Chess Handy Symmato", or CHSym for short.
.

[William]

Your comments give a good overview of how the font should be encoded.

Regarding the designs, I have looked at the pdf to which I think you are referring and found only one three-dimensional design, on page 6. I found no designs on page 9.

The link to the pdf at which I looked is as follows.

http://www.castlelong.com/book/pscbyec9 ... ts_Web.PDF

Is that correct?

William

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

This Chess Font uses another method to lay out a chess board like this:

Chessboard.png (17.04 KiB) Viewed 10492 times

The white pieces on white squares are capital letters: B, K, N, P, Q, R while the black pieces on white squares are lowercase b, k, n, p, and q. The pieces with squares are composites of the space character and the appropriate piece.

The pieces on blank squares are defined in their appropriate Unicode positions, while the white square is the space character.

Black squares are typed with the underline character _ after the square, so:

White square is space,
Black square is space _
Black King on a white square is K
Black King on a black square is K_
White Queen on a white square is q
White Queen on a black square is q_

White Knight on a black square is n_

[Jowaco]

Bhikku Pesala

I'm constantly amazed at the ways in which Font Creator is used so imaginatively. This must be the epitome of what Antoine de Saint-Exupery meant. What a succinct and efficient way to solve the problem of displaying a chess board and chess pieces. And all that in 25 glyphs!

Joe

[GeneM]

.

The link to the pdf at which I looked is as follows.

http://www.castlelong.com/book/pscbyec9 ... ts_Web.PDF

Is that correct?

Oh rats! I gave the wrong link. My apologies.
Here is the proper link (then view page 9 in the .PDF)...

http://www.castlelong.com/essay/Essay_H ... oc_Prn.PDF


- - - - - - - - -

Black squares are typed with the underline character _ after the square, so:

White square is space,
Black square is space _
Black King on a white square is K
Black King on a black square is K_

Clever and efficient! Unfortunately, the White pieces on the dark squares are "transparent", making them dark inside their borders. So this chess font would not be acceptable to most chess players.


Thank you.
.