More Fun With Fonts

I’ve gotten through most of the task of digitizing Pica’s Roman hand to turn it into a font. A few of the glyphs still need some work, as well as working on the character metrics—a task mostly completed, but some of the kerning pairs do need help. It’s quite a treat to see samples of the font printed out in Adobe InDesign.

I can’t get very far in playing with fonts without pondering TeX and friends. TeX is a markup language for typesetting that dates back twenty years or so. It excels at mathematical typesetting, which isn’t really of interest to me, but more importantly, it compels you to separate the writing process from the formatting process. These are distinct activities, and I find that it is easier to write documents in a text editor, embedding appropriate markup for section breaks etc., rather than in a word processor, which commingles the formatting with the actual words. (For a rant on the perils of WYSIWYG word processors, see here)

TeX gets arcane, which is why outside of the communities of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists it gets little use, but I couldn’t see writing a longer document using anything else. (My dissertation was written using LaTeX, which is its the most popular macro package.) Installing brand new postscript fonts into a TeX remains something I need to learn how to do. (It’s still probably easier than the general problem of managing fonts on Linux, however).

I’m imagining making fonts from my uncial hand, with lots of variant glyphs for letters, like long and short e’s. Typesetting with the variant forms, including many different ligatures, would be quite neat. I’m not sure if it would be easier to use InDesign or TeX for doing that, but not much other software can handle such a task.