How Font Creator is Giving Me Back a Moment with My Mom

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ben8238723
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How Font Creator is Giving Me Back a Moment with My Mom

Post by ben8238723 »

My mom has early onset Alzheimer's. She was a great artist, an amazing calligrapher, and had several marvelous handwriting scripts. I am getting married early next year and if she were well she would have participated significantly in the preparations, including by addressing the invitations as she had done for others. Alas, she is not well.

But a few weeks ago I had the thought that maybe I could have my mom participate after all. So I gathered together an invitation she'd addressed to me for a cousin's wedding, some personal letters she'd written to me, and scavenged what I could to build a font in (mostly) her hand. It's wonderful (and, admittedly, difficult) to see her script resurrected, but it will be a nice way to honor and involve her.

So, thanks Erwin and others, I appreciate what I'm able to do with Font Creator.

(And because she was a perfectionist, I'll just add in unnecessary defense of the font... It isn't perfectly representative of her. She had several scripts she used, and all I had of her more formal hand was the one addressed envelope which she had done in a hurry. The name and address covered only a portion of the upper/lower case alphabet. So I had to augment the font with letters from one of her other less formal script styles. And then in a few cases create formal versions with pieces of other formal letters I had. Still, it's the closest I could get, and I think she'd understand.)
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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: How Font Creator is Giving Me Back a Moment with My Mom

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Mothers are wonderful. Everybody should have one. :)

My font Balava is based on Baskerville typeface, originally by John Baskerville. My mother was a Baskerville, and also suffered from Alzeihmer's in her final years.

My handwriting, unfortunately, is not good enough to create a Calligraphy font, but I was able to make a usable font out of it with the help of FontCreator. The result was Hattha.

Calligraphic scripts take a lot more work to make into a quality font than most other fonts. Getting the spacing, kerning, and baseline alignment right is especially difficult.
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Erwin Denissen
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Re: How Font Creator is Giving Me Back a Moment with My Mom

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Thank you for for sharing this. It is great to see you've been able to use our software in such positive way. Feel free to post an invitation, so we can see some final results.

I hope you have a long and happy marriage.
Erwin Denissen
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