See fonts

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Poppy
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Joined: Mon Jul 05, 2010 1:49 am

See fonts

Post by Poppy »

I downloaded the trial ver of scanhand.

1- it did not reconize my dell 926 all-in-one scanner, It printed the templates ok.
2- I filled out the font template and scanned with graphics program, saved it.
3- I loaded the graphic file, and when I tried to generate the fonts, got message that the trial ver would only do 2 templates during the trial period.
It did not generate any templates.

I would like to see a font created with scanhand, and not one that was edited after the font was created with scanhand
Erwin Denissen
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Re: See fonts

Post by Erwin Denissen »

1- it did not reconize my dell 926 all-in-one scanner,
3- I loaded the graphic file, and when I tried to generate the fonts, got message that the trial ver would only do 2 templates during the trial period.
All these issue don't look familiar to me.

What version of Scanahand are you running?
Erwin Denissen
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Poppy
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Re: See fonts

Post by Poppy »

By making fonts with scanhand how will the fonts look? will thay look like this (&, ^, *, %) or will they look just like your hand writing?
I want to make fonts for music.
Erwin Denissen
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Re: See fonts

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Is this a serious question :lol:
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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: See fonts

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Poppy, you can see some results on my Review Page for Scanahand.

Yes, you can create music fonts, symbols fonts, or handwriting fonts with Scanahand. However, you may have problems with spacing for swashes or steeply slanted italics where the strokes need to overlap the previous or next character. I don't think that is a problem for music fonts.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
William
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Re: See fonts

Post by William »

Poppy wrote:By making fonts with scanhand how will the fonts look? will thay look like this (&, ^, *, %) or will they look just like your hand writing?
I want to make fonts for music.

Some years ago, in 2003, I produced some fonts for percussion music. I am not a musician, these are not expert fonts, just some fun. The fonts were made with the Softy program, which was the fontmaking program with which I started making fonts, before I used FontCreator.

If you would like to try the following font.

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

(side note)
If you do open the font, there are lots of copies of an unusual black shape displayed by fontviewer amongst the characters. This is because the font only has glyphs for some character positions, not for others. The unusual black shape is just my own design for a .notdef glyph. Most fonts have a black rectangle if someone keys a character for which the font does not have a glyph: most of my fonts have my own design for a .notdef glyph, either that one or something similar. It is simply that I think that it stands out better than a rectangle.
(end of side note)

There are some notes about the font and some related fonts about halfway down the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font7001.htm

That web page is not my present main font page, it is an earlier page.

For the font mentioned above, the notes are as follows.
The following font has glyphs encoded as characters from the ordinary keyboard. It is not a Unicode compatible font. This font is provided so that people who wish to produce artwork for making illustrations, such as by printing a page directly from a wordprocessor or by using the Microsoft Paint program to produce graphics files, can easily have access to the character glyphs for those purposes.

If the font is used with the following characters, in WordPad or Paint, then graphics can be produced. The encoding scheme used is my own, I made it up. You could encode your own font as you choose.

e Empty staff line.
p Percussion clef symbol.
i Individual note.
d Double note.
r Left hand part of centre part of whole bar rest.
s Right hand part of centre part of whole bar rest.
u Left hand part of half bar rest.
v Right hand part of half bar rest.
q Quarter bar rest.
space Unit width space.
b Bar line.

For example, I produced the following graphic back in 2003.
A graphic produced using the font that is in the CPMUSICA.TTF file.
A graphic produced using the font that is in the CPMUSICA.TTF file.
font7004.gif (2.5 KiB) Viewed 15616 times

So, it is possible to make a font for music using a fontmaking program.

However, it may not be possible to get good results using Scanahand. I am not familiar with the latest version of Scanahand, yet feel that for a music font, the ability to have a glyph touching the next glyph to its right and/or to its left would be important. The early version of Scanahand did not work like that, it automatically added white space to the left and to the right of the glyph. That is good for a font made for handwriting, yet could cause problems for a font made for music.

The FontCreator program would allow you to produce a music font. It would be possible to make it look handwritten by scanning handwritten artwork and then importing the graphics file into FontCreator. The artwork could then be trimmed and adjusted in FontCreator. However, using handwritten artwork could produce alignment problems for the horizontal lines of the music, so it might be better, if a handwritten look is desired, to construct the horizontal lines within FontCreator as if doing technical drawing and then to superimpose the handwritten notes. The effect could be as if someone has bought some printed music paper and had then handwritten music notes upon it. Several tries and some experiments of scaling the handwritten artwork so as to get a good effect may be necessary in order to get a good result, yet FontCreator would allow you the flexibility to experiment.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

8 July 2010
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Re: See fonts

Post by William »

Poppy wrote:By making fonts with scanhand how will the fonts look? will thay look like this (&, ^, *, %) or will they look just like your hand writing?
I want to make fonts for music.
Computing equipment is made by various companies. So that end users can use equipment and software from various manufacturers all linked together, there is an encoding standard for characters.

It basically comes out as one particular number for each character.

So, for example, character number 65 is a capital A, character number 66 is a capital B.

Yet not only letters of the alphabet are encoded. For example, character number 44 is a comma.

Other characters are also encoded, such as & as character number 38, ^ as character number 94, * as character number 42 and % as character number 37.

So, for example, if a keyboard has a % printed on a key and a font has a glyph that looks like a % in it and both the keyboard and the font follow the same encoding standard, then pressing the key that has a % printed on it should display a % on the screen. It all happens behind the scenes and many computer users may not even realize that that is what is happening.

The Scanahand template shows a % as a guide to what to draw in the cell. For an ordinary font someone would draw a % character in the cell.

Yet if someone chooses to make a font where the cell contains something else, then that is up to him or her to do so. The font will not then be encoded to the Unicode Standard, but that does not matter if the font is to be used for special purposes. Suppose for example that someone is making a font to write poetry. That person might, for example, decide that instead of a % character, he or she will put a drawing of a flower in that cell, so that when someone uses the font, keying the % key will display a glyph of a flower. Such fonts can be both useful and fun if used carefully, such as for printing out a poem or making a graphic file. However, if the font is changed, then the flower may be replaced by a % sign, which would look wrong.

There is a table in the following document.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf

As it happens, the numbers are encoded as hexadecimal in the charts - it all goes back to the way that computers store numbers in binary. So capital A is 0041 hexadecimal, that is (4 times 16) plus 1, which is 65 decimal. This is not too helpful for a beginner. However, it can be a lot easier if one knows that Microsoft Calculator has a Facility in View Scientific mode for easy conversion between decimal and hexadecimal. One does not necessarily need to use the decimal numbers when fontmaking as much of it can be done using hexadecimal.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

8 July 2010
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