I have been thinking about how one could simulate the penmanship of a calligrapher directly in FontCreator.
I have devised the following experiment and hope that it will be of interest. It is a research-style experiment rather than a textbook-style experiment, devised so as to learn as I devised and carried out the experiment. The following was not the first attempt, it is the result of trying a few things, realizing where they went wrong and trying again several times.
Start FontCreator.
If the samples are not displayed, use View Toolbars and click on Samples in the cascading menu.
Start a new font. Name the font as you choose. I used the following.
Experiment 1 001
Save the font. Name the file as you choose. I used the following.
EXPT1001.TTF
In the Glyph Overview window, right click on the glyph for the digit 0 and choose Properties... and set the Advance width to 2048.
Double click on the 0 and open the Glyph Edit window.
In the samples, click on the circle, that is the disc with a hole in it which is just above the triangles, and drag a copy of it into the Glyph Edit window. It appears that however one drags the sample it ends up in the same place, which is good as it helps in explaining how to do this experiment. Set the Fill/Outines button to show just the outlines of the two contours of the glyph.
Use the Glyph Transformer and use its Scale facility to scale the glyph by 50 per cent both horizontally and vertically, about "Corner or middle of glyph" and for the Around: choice, click in the lower left corner. Next save the file.
It is now convenient to turn off the display of the samples.
The left most points of the glyph now have a horizontal coordinate value of 71 font units in the original copy of this experiment. The Advance width is 1025 and I changed it to 1024.
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In the Glyph Overview window, copy the glyph for 0 and paste it into the glyph for 1.
In the Glyph Edit window for 0, Edit Select All and then Edit Copy.
In the Glyph Edit window for 1, Edit Paste, taking care not to click on the background afterwards, leaving the two just-pasted contours highlighted.
Use the arrow keys to move the two just-pasted contours horizontally 20 font units to the right and vertically 10 font units upwards. Click onto the background.
Now use Edit Select All then Edit Join Contours Union.
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The next stage is to do the following.
In the Glyph Overview window, copy the glyph for 1 and paste it into the glyph for 2.
In the Glyph Edit window for 0, Edit Select All and then Edit Copy.
In the Glyph Edit window for 2, Edit Paste, taking care not to click on the background afterwards, leaving the two just-pasted contours highlighted.
Use the arrow keys to move the two just-pasted contours horizontally 40 font units to the right and vertically 20 font units upwards. Click onto the background.
Now use Edit Select All then Edit Join Contours Union.
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The next stage is to do the following.
In the Glyph Overview window, copy the glyph for 2 and paste it into the glyph for 3.
In the Glyph Edit window for 0, Edit Select All and then Edit Copy.
In the Glyph Edit window for 3, Edit Paste, taking care not to click on the background afterwards, leaving the two just-pasted contours highlighted.
Use the arrow keys to move the two just-pasted contours horizontally 60 font units to the right and vertically 30 font units upwards. Click onto the background.
Now use Edit Select All then Edit Join Contours Union.
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The above is just one way of doing things. There could be experiments using more pastes and experiments with the movement of the pasted glyphs being at smaller intervals one from the other.
The hope is that the resulting glyph design from this experiment is as if it were drawn by an expert calligrapher on paper and then scanned into FontCreator. Using Microsoft Calculator, the angle of 10 vertical for every 20 horizontal is, using the arctangent function accessed using Inv tan in Microsoft Calculator in Scientific mode is 26.565051177077989351572193720453 degrees. So, is this glyph as if a letter o were drawn with a pen held at an angle of just over 26 degrees?
The next stage is to note the leftmost coordinates of the outer and inner contours, which are 71 and 251 in the original experiment and to try to produce glyphs for b and p by copying the glyph in 3 to b and p and then for each of those two glyphs adding a vertical rectangular contour which goes from 71 to 251 horizontally, positioning it vertically so that it looks as one chooses it to look and then using Edit Select All then Edit Join Contours Union.
Then one can try other things, such as using a copy of b to try to produce a glyph for h, by first joining the two contours at the lowest vertical position.
Oh, and copy the glyph in 3 into o and test the font using FontCreators test facility.
For testing fonts I tend to use the following text at various sizes, particularly 24 point.
It was sometime later that they arrived at the edge of the forest. They rode beneath the canopy of trees and their horses enjoyed the shade. After a while they decided to dismount to rest the horses and to walk for a while. They gazed at the huge trees and wondered how long they had taken to grow to this size. Could this forest have been planned by people or was it a natural phenomenon? After a while they remounted their horses and rode on at a steady pace. They talked of many things and sometimes they sang. Occasionally they rode for a while in silence. There was much about which to think. When they arrived at the town they would be asked for news of what was happening elsewhere. Yet mostly they would be asked to write documents! It was late in the afternoon when they left the forest. The edge of the forest was not a sudden event, it was gradual. Gradually the trees had become less dense, then there were few, and then there was open countryside.
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Hopefully the above will be of interest and may lead to some interesting new font designs and maybe other readers can suggest additional ways of simulating the penmanship of a calligrapher using FontCreator. One thing in particular would be to simulate the drawing of serifs by a calligrapher.
William Overington
8 February 2007