Design experiments using the Waza font

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William
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Design experiments using the Waza font

Post by William »

There is a newly released font named Waza.

http://www.linotype.com/384034/wazaregular-font.html

On the page there is a link labelled Encoding map which leads to the following web page.

http://www.linotype.com/384035/wazaregu ... ermap.html

Also on the first-mentioned page is a link labelled Create sample, though that does not have a directly accessible web page address so the page needs to be accessed using the link.

An interesting aspect of the encoding map is the alternate glyph designs which are available using Unicode Private Use Area characters.

In the Waza font, the glyphs for the basic Latin capital characters are fancy swash designs and the character codes for the alternate more plain capital glyphs are in the Unicode Private Use Area.

What I found interesting was that, by copying a hexadecimal code point number manually into Microsoft Calculator in View Scientific mode with the Hex option chosen, then selecting the Dec option, one can obtain the Alt code for entering that character into WordPad.

Certainly one may well get a black rectangle in WordPad, yet that character can be copied and pasted from WordPad into the Create sample facility and used to produce the display.

I tried various things using the Create sample facility, including the word Middle in blue at 72 point on a white background, which is a nice effect, like clouds I thought.

The Private Use Area has a few alternate lowercase glyphs as well. As with the capitals it tends to be simpler designs in the Private Use Area.

That seems to be an interesting way of organizing the glyphs, namely that the default display of glyphs is the most fancy swash display and that the Private Use Area codes are, in most cases, available so that simpler designs can be used.

William Overington

4 December 2008
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