25 November 03
From Calligraphy To Font
I have a new project here: turning our calligraphy letterforms into fonts, first Pica’s, then later on my own. The initial motivation is to be able to trace over typeset calligraphic letterforms to aid in designing calligraphy pieces, but there will be lots of other applications as well. To do the font work, I am using PfaEdit, which an impressive open-source outline font editor. It has support for digitizing from a scanned image of a letter, and can call an autotracing program to generate the outline vectors from the image. This evening was my first try at creating a font from Pica’s Roman hand. We’re quite pleased with the initial results.
Typeface design is not for the faint-hearted. There’s lots to learn, and to create a relatively complete font is immense amounts of work. But one begins at the beginning, and sees where that leads.
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Second, it’s really clear that most of the success of this project involves a “perfect” original from which to scan. That means about, say, 150 A’s before you get the right one, and about 500 S’s. 500 S’s definitely cuts into blogging time. Numenius scanned from less than “perfect” letters. Even so, it looked surprisingly good. It was a very odd experience. I saw the abecedarian sentence “Mad brother Jarvis was quickly axed for crazing praying” staring up at me last night when I returned from a dance performance, in my own Roman caps, yet I hadn’t written it out!
I know what you mean with the 100 or 500 a’s and s’s go. I’ll scribble pages and pages of letters over and over again till I find exactly what I’m pleased with!