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Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 6:27 am
by William
Song about colour fonts - in French

A few weeks ago I was thinking about colour fonts and I was thinking about whether they could be publicised by being advertised, on an industry-wide basis, at the Tour de France.

Not with any particular team, but neutrally, perhaps, say on the 5km to go banner.

Yet what would the banner say, bearing in mind that it would be in France?

And what would be the design of the banner so as to show colour font capability to best advantage?

As some readers may know, I like to write songs, and some lyrics seemed to form and I wrote them down.

Later I changed them slightly so as to be correct French, as far as I know, though I am not a linguist.

They went through the spell checker for French in Serif PagePlus X6 fine.

Alas, I am not fluent in French and so I put the lyrics to one side.

Yet, I wondered if there is anyone here who is fluent in French who might have a look at them please?

For those who are not fluent in French, but know a little of the language and who are also interested in colour fonts, maybe this song might be of interest anyway.

Here is the song, noting that my French is not fluent, so maybe it is not quite correct French. Please sing it at a lively pace.

Les belles fontes colorées

Fontes colorées
Fontes colorées
Beaucoup des fontes colorées
Écrivons-nous
avec les logiciels
avec beaucoup des fontes colorées
Elles sont charmantes
Elles sont jolies
Elles sont les fontes colorées
Écrivons-nous, écrivons-nous
avec les fontes colorées
Parce que nous avons
et parce que nous aimons,
les belles fontes colorées!

William Overington

2 May 2014

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 12:33 pm
by Alfred
Very good, William. Now all you need to do is write the music to go with it. :P

My French is a rather rusty — oh, all right, very rusty! — but I'm pretty sure it should be «beaucoup de» instead of «beaucoup des». Additionally, all of the French references to fonts that I've ever seen have used the word «polices»; i.e. the plural form of «(la) police (de caractère)». (My French-English dictionary tells me that «fonte» is cast iron.)

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 1:03 pm
by Erwin Denissen
The police is on your side.

My French is far from excellent, but our French press releases have always been written by professionals. Maybe it inspires you:
http://www.high-logic.com/press-release ... rench.html

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 3:08 pm
by William
Thank you both for replying.

The word police does seem widely used, but I have also found the following where also fonte as a feminine noun is used.

http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/font

So maybe fontes is acceptable French, even if perhaps not the main term.

It seems that the word police in English, as used for law enforcement officers, translates into French as police as well.

I looked for the sources of the words in English.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... ont?q=font

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... e?q=police

As for that it should be de rather than des I think that that might well be correct.

I think that I added an s to de so as to agree with the s added to fonte and the s added to colorée. That now appears to have been a mistake at the present moment.

Fortunately, if that turns out to be a necessary change to the lyrics it will not break the song apart and the song can go on with that change.
Alfred wrote:Very good, William. Now all you need to do is write the music to go with it. :P
Well, it depends what you mean by write.

For this song, and for the others, I can sing them to myself privately, but I just could not even start to write them down as musical scores.

Still, one often sees with songs that one person writes the lyrics and another person writes the music and often neither of them is the performer, so all is not lost.

An interesting typographic question is as follows.

Suppose that the banner was implemented for the Tour de France, worded as follows.

5km Les belles fontes colorées 5km

What software tools are presently available to produce that banner and which font should be used for maximum effect that colour fonts are a magnificent development so that television viewers notice and remember the wording on the banner as the riders race underneath it?

Maybe there could be a static banner to be displayed near the interviewees after the race as well.

I posted a link to this thread to the OpenType mailing list, so hopefully there will be some feedback there as well.

William

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Fri May 02, 2014 3:25 pm
by Erwin Denissen

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 7:26 am
by William
William wrote: As for that it should be de rather than des I think that that might well be correct.

I think that I added an s to de so as to agree with the s added to fonte and the s added to colorée. That now appears to have been a mistake at the present moment.
However, thinking about it later, I am now thinking that des might be correct.

Beaucoup des fontes colorées

I am thinking that

Beaucoup des fontes colorées

is

Beaucoup "of the" fontes colorées

yet the French would not say

Beaucoup "de les" fontes colorées

but rather

Beaucoup des fontes colorées

in a similar manner that although they say

de la

they do not say

de le

but say

du

instead.
William wrote: I think that I added an s to de so as to agree with the s added to fonte and the s added to colorée. That now appears to have been a mistake at the present moment.
Upon reflection, I think that I probably did not conciously add an s to de but rather just used des on instinct, as if when I learned French that construction had just been stored away.

Maybe from something like the following.

Nous mangeons beaucoup des légumes.

Yet maybe either de or des is possible?

William

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 8:00 am
by Alfred
Erwin Denissen wrote:We've used fontes in the past:
http://www.high-logic.com/press-release ... rench.html
The word fontes appears only three times in that article, but the word police appears twenty-four times. :P

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Sat May 03, 2014 8:11 am
by Alfred
William wrote:Yet maybe either de or des is possible?
Yes, either one is possible: it depends what you're trying to say. As you correctly observed, 'des' is a contraction of 'de les', so you might say «Nous avons quelques légumes. Nous mangeons beaucoup des légumes.» In this example, you would be saying 'many of the vegetables'; if you simply wanted to say 'many vegetables' you would say «beaucoup de légumes».

Re: Song about colour fonts - in French

Posted: Mon May 12, 2014 3:16 pm
by William
Here is the pdf publication version of the song.
une_chanson.pdf
(5.07 KiB) Downloaded 780 times
It is typeset using one of my own fonts, Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady, that I made using FontCreator.

William Overington

12 May 2014