Collaborative Type Design Experiment

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William
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Post by William »

Another font for which the artwork was prepared on the whiteboard is the Holly font.

viewtopic.php?t=2011

William Overington

22 December 2007
William
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Post by William »

I have now worked out an improved method for producing artwork for use in fontmaking from The First Public Cocomo Application.

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... cocom.html

The method relies on the fact that objects on the whiteboard are in layers depending upon the order in which they are added. Earlier-added objects are behind later-added objects.

Firstly, use the Shapes tool to draw some wide, very small height, filled rectangles which are to be guidelines for baseline, x-height and so on. Use whichever colours you choose, as they will not appear on the final artwork.

Next, so as not to cover the very ends of those rectangles, yet to cover the rest of them, draw a large, 100% opaque, black-filled rectangle, using the Shapes tool.

Now, select that filled rectangle with the pointer and move it away from the guidelines.

Next, use the Highlighter Pen Tool set at 100% opaque, white, to draw characters over the guidelines. If a character can be drawn without lifting the pen then that produces a much better result for fontmaking as there are then no grey shadows on the white artwork. Some characters, such as i, need two uses of the pen, but as the white parts are apart from each other, the grey shadows are not usually a problem.

The next stage is to move the large, 100% opaque, black-filled rectangle, back into position. It moves under the white artwork, yet obscures the guidelines.

Use Print Screen to copy the image of the whiteboard onto the clipboard and then paste from the clipboard into the Microsoft Paint program and same as a .bmp file.

The bmp file can then be imported into FontCreator using the Negative checkbox checked and adjusting the threshold to obtain a good clear result. I have used a value of 112 successfully.

William Overington

24 December 2007
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Post by William »

I was drawing some artwork for a font on the whiteboard yesterday and a strange phenomenon occurred.

I was using the method described in my immediately previous post. I had five red guidelines, a black panel and letters in white, width 10 pixels. The guidelines were for ascender, capitals height, x height, baseline and descender. I was using Undo from time to time when I wished to remove a design which I had just drawn and try again.

I am using a screen of 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. I draw on the whiteboard within Internet Explorer by first pressing F11 to get a full screen display. When I had drawn several letters to my satisfaction I pressed the Print Screen button of the keyboard and then F11 so as to be able to start the Paint program so as to save the print screen picture as a bmp file on the hard disc.

Having saved the file I returned to the whiteboard, pressing F11 to return to full screen viewing. Sometimes the display was as I had left it and I then moved the black panel down the screen and deleted the white letters, leaving the red guidelines: I then continued with the process and drew the next few letters.

However, sometimes when returning to the whiteboard after saving, the display was incorrect. It looked as if the white letters had been deleted and sometimes at least one red line was on top of the black panel. However, upon moving the black panel down the screen, the white letters would be revealed, sometimes with at least one red line on top of them. It was as if the layer order of what I had drawn had been reversed.

However, this was not catastrophic in this usage of the whiteboard as I simply deleted the white letters and deleted the black panel and drew another black panel on top of the red lines, then moved it down the screen and continued with the drawing of the artwork. One time things seemed to go wrong, so I closed Internet Explorer then started it again and went back to the web page and on which the whiteboard is located and then continued with drawing the artwork and it worked alright.

Although the layer order seemed to get reversed, it all worked out in this particular situation where I was deleteing various items.

I have started to produce the font in FontCreator earlier this morning. The font is presently named Whiteboard Blackletter.

William Overington

28 December 2007
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Post by William »

Here is a link to a development version of the Whiteboard Blackletter font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WBLAC003.TTF

Here is a link to an example of the font in use.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/w ... nttest.pdf

The font is in use at 24 point and the text is justified.

William Overington

29 December 2007
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Post by William »

Somewhat off-topic as regards type design, but I was trying the whiteboard earlier this morning with a view to trying to use semi-opaque layers over an opaque base layer and, having made some print screen copies I thought that some readers might like to have a look at the final stage.

It is about 1.4 Megabytes and may take a while to download and display.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/2 ... stage9.bmp

William Overington

2 January 2008
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Post by William »

Some readers might like to know that the whiteboard is still being used.

Illustrations appear and then get changed.

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... cocom.html

Yesterday, I was reading the following item.

http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html

Arial is on this computer, though Helvetica is not.

However, the whiteboard offers both Arial and Helvetica in its menu for the Text Tool.

However, I have been unable to display on the whiteboard the differences mentioned in the article. I am wondering if that is because Helvetica is not installed on this computer.

William Overington

23 January 2008
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Post by William »

I have noticed two errors in Whiteboard Venetian version 0.08.

There are small contours a long way below the baseline in each of m and r.

I have now produced Whiteboard Venetian version 0.081, which is a copy of Whiteboard Venetian version 0.08 from which those two contours have been removed.

I have uploaded the new version to the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENETIA.TTF

A reader who has the 0.08 version and who wishes to archive it may like to consider changing the name of that file from WVENETIA.TTF to become WVENETIA008.TTF.

William Overington

28 January 2008
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Post by William »

There is now an italic version of the Whiteboard Venetian font. It has not been designed using new artwork. It has been produced by automated transformation of the glyphs using the FontCreator 5.6 program.

There are some notes about this in a post in the following thread.

viewtopic.php?t=1989

The direct link to the font is as follows.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENETII.TTF

William Overington

10 March 2008
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Post by William »

As some readers know, I like sometimes to draw experimental artwork using the following facility.

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... cocom.html

Recently, when trying to load the page so as to draw some artwork, I have found that the page will not load: the page appears to start to load, yet it never gets to the grey background with the toolbox on it.

However, some time ago, I had to reload Flash onto the computer here and that may perhaps be something to do with it. However, I have tried altering various settings and the web page still does not load.

I am wondering if the web page has perhaps had so many items added to it that the system has jammed or perhaps has gone wrong for some other reason.

Could some readers possibly try the above link and say whether they can get the page to load please?

William Overington

24 April 2008
Erwin Denissen
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Post by Erwin Denissen »

It fails to load here too.
Erwin Denissen
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William
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Post by William »

Thank you.

I shall try to report it to Adobe.

William
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