fonts - greek, latin, semitic, hieroglyphs, and more!

Post by **klewlis** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 4:55 am

fonts for scholars, academics, students

this is awesome.

chrisb · Post by **chrisb** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 4:43 pm

Wow!!

The Sanskrit font is most welcome!

THANKS

chrisb

Raya · Post by **Raya** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 6:29 pm

Some cool stuff there - even things unavailable from my favourite ancient font site:

http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/al ... fonts1.htm

Jeff Tirey · Post by **Jeff Tirey** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 6:42 pm

That is amazing. Has anyone here ever created a font? Is it hard? I wouldn't mind making a font of my sloppy handwriting so that I can send it to everyone dear to me!

Raya · Post by **Raya** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 6:50 pm

Making fonts isn't so much hard as *time consuming*!

Each letter, number, punctuation mark - and every version of it (uppercase, lowercase - sometimes even bold and italic) is a separate graphic you have to draw. And if you're creating fonts for other scripts, you have the fun of deciding on the character map...

Jeff Tirey · Post by **Jeff Tirey** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 6:59 pm

Raya wrote:Making fonts isn't so much hard as *time consuming*!

Each letter, number, punctuation mark - and every version of it (uppercase, lowercase - sometimes even bold and italic) is a separate graphic you have to draw. And if you're creating fonts for other scripts, you have the fun of deciding on the character map...

So they're scanned first, right? I should give that a try - it sounds like fun, but I bet they hard part is making the font look good. I have seen some fonts that just don't layout all that well. Even SPIonic has some problems with the spacings of accents and aspiration marks.

Raya · Post by **Raya** » Thu Jan 08, 2004 7:15 pm

You *could* scan in each character first, but so far I find you get better results by drawing them as vector graphics. Or I suppose you can compromise by scanning in and then tweaking... but I think you're still left with one of the major troubles with font appearance, and that is when you scale fonts up and down. By using vector graphics, you're pretty much guaranteed for it to be smooth at all sizes.

mingshey · Post by **mingshey** » Fri Jan 09, 2004 2:50 am

PfaEdit is a free true type font editor that runs on unix-like platforms. You can run it on Linux and Cygwin(on Windows), too.

See PfaEdit

To use it, you'll have to know how to deal with the Bezier curves.

Post by **klewlis** » Fri Jan 09, 2004 5:36 am

mingshey wrote:To use it, you'll have to know how to deal with the Bezier curves.

*shudder*

I hate those things.

:)

mingshey · Post by **mingshey** » Fri Jan 09, 2004 5:53 am

klewlis wrote:
mingshey wrote:To use it, you'll have to know how to deal with the Bezier curves.
*shudder*

I hate those things.

But the tool provides easy method to handle the curve. You can add control points and drag the handle to modify the curve.