Designing glyphs to represent colours

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William
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Designing glyphs to represent colours

Post by William »

Some readers may have read my post in the Gallery forum thread about my Quest text font and the glyphs to represent colours which it contains.

viewtopic.php?p=9831#9831

Those glyphs were designed with the idea of being used in a string of monochrome text so as to indicate the colour to be used for subsequent characters. I mention that using characters to represent colours is not standard practice, yet it is an idea which I like. I first learned of it in the 1970s when special characters were used to represent the colour of subsequent text characters in the teletext system used in broadcasting in the United Kingdom.

Yesterday I tried designing some glyphs to represent colours using the Fontstruct facility at the http://fontstruct.fontshop.com webspace.

I made a font, using lowercase letters to represent colours (for example, r for red, g for green) and subsequently downloaded it and processed it using FontCreator 5.6.

Each glyph is in a grid of fifteen cells by fifteen cells. In the processed font each cell is 128 font units by 128 font units with Win Ascent at 2048 font units and Advance Width for each printing glyph at 2048 font units.

This means that the glyphs are displayed clearly at 12 point in WordPad, as Windows uses 16 pixels for 12 points. Also the designs are compatible in size with my Poetry font and I am hoping to add them (or some other designs) into the Unicode Private Use Area of the Poetry font.

These glyphs are designed with the idea that they are expressed as if they were action buttons and also with the idea that they could be quickly expressed with a pencil by an artist making a drawing.

Also, I am thinking that other colours could be represented by other designs, so that monochrome diagrams could indicate quite a range of colours using just lines rather than solid areas.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/c ... ns_001.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/c ... chrome.pdf

There are various selections of colours. For example, Pantone specializes in colours.

http://www.pantone.com http://www.pantone.co.uk

The Serif PagePlus program also has its own selection of colours.

The present latest version of the PagePlus program is version X3. I have version X2. Prior to that there were versions 11, 10, 9, SE and maybe others.

Version SE is available "free if you register" from the following webspace.

http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/

Tools Palettes in version SE allows two palettes, each with lots of colours. However version SE does not support the production of pdf documents.

Expressing lots of colours using line-drawable language-independent glyphs is quite a challenge.

Readers are invited to post their own designs for glyphs to represent colours.

William Overington

16 September 2008
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