When designing a font I often end up having the most difficulty in designing glyphs for the K and k characters.
Any ideas on a good approach to designing these glyphs please?
William Overington
24 October 2008
Designing glyphs for the K and k characters
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A technique I use a lot to maintain consistent design within a font is to cut and paste contours between glyphs with the knife tool.
For the Uppercase K, you could combine Uppercase I and X like this:
Select the nodes that you wish to move and nudge them with the cursor keys — using control key to move them by 1 funit, and shift to move them by 100 funits. Move a few more nodes to straighten the strokes and serifs, then select all and use "Get Union of Contours."
- Cut off the bits you want with the knife
- Copy them to the clipboard
- Undo to restore the original glyph before the cut
- Move to the target glyph and paste in the bits
For the Uppercase K, you could combine Uppercase I and X like this:
Select the nodes that you wish to move and nudge them with the cursor keys — using control key to move them by 1 funit, and shift to move them by 100 funits. Move a few more nodes to straighten the strokes and serifs, then select all and use "Get Union of Contours."
Last edited by Bhikkhu Pesala on Fri Oct 24, 2008 10:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Thank you for your reply.
I had not thought of adapting a copy of the glyph for x.
My problem relates to what one might call the "flying-join" in your example of lowercase k and what one might call the flying-join in both K and k in the Arial font.
I have often had problems getting a flying-join to look good in my fonts. I have often tried to avoid it in the end. Starting from a copy of X or x is a very helpful idea. I have just tried it with a font which I have been making and have changed the design for K as a result: it looks much better now.
Thank you.
William
I had not thought of adapting a copy of the glyph for x.
My problem relates to what one might call the "flying-join" in your example of lowercase k and what one might call the flying-join in both K and k in the Arial font.
I have often had problems getting a flying-join to look good in my fonts. I have often tried to avoid it in the end. Starting from a copy of X or x is a very helpful idea. I have just tried it with a font which I have been making and have changed the design for K as a result: it looks much better now.
Thank you.
William
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Arial and Tahoma both use what you call a "flying-join" where the lower leg supports the upper arm some distance from the vertical stem. Times New Roman and Palatino both join the stem at a sharp point. Garava uses a smooth angle bracket connection to the stem.William wrote:My problem relates to what one might call the "flying-join" in your example of lowercase k and what one might call the flying-join in both K and k in the Arial font.
The arm and leg may also be disconnected from the vertical stem as in Constantia.
Contemplate further while taking your Kellogs cornflakes or Special K for breakfast.
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Thank you both for your comments.
Here are links to the development fonts containing "before" and "after" versions of the K glyph which I mentioned producing in my previous post in this thread.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV004.TTF
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV005.TTF
The present latest development version of the font is as follows. The change from version 005 to 006 is the design of the .notdef glyph of the font.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV006.TTF
William Overington
27 October 2008
Here are links to the development fonts containing "before" and "after" versions of the K glyph which I mentioned producing in my previous post in this thread.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV004.TTF
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV005.TTF
The present latest development version of the font is as follows. The change from version 005 to 006 is the design of the .notdef glyph of the font.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/FONTV006.TTF
William Overington
27 October 2008