font makers, meet pangrams

[trochee]

I ran across The Daily Pangram via apollinax fluxbox today. [note: sorry apollinax, fluxbox: obviously the two of you share some handsome-and-wickedly-smart-fellow coordinates in my personal social space.]

This gave me a nudge to think again about making a handwriting font, as dkg did (his handwriting now available in Ubuntu and Debian!).

Here's what would be involved, as I see it:

• Writing out Daily Pangram examples on lined paper.
• Scanning them.
• Vectorizing to SVG. (Alternatively, writing the pangrams directly to rulers on Inkscape.)
• Using FontForge to assemble these into full-blown fonts (of at least the ASCII set).
• building a .deb file so that it can be shared with other Debian/Ubuntu/etc
• building a .ttf file so that it can be shared with other operating systems

This is definitely one of those "copious free time" projects, which is why I have thrown it out here, as a reminder and an aspiration.

Comments

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

There's also a quick and dirty route to having your own electronic padograph. But it is indeed dirty; the results are not anything like what one could do with proper vector graphics and such.

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

I've thought about this kind of thing in the past, but I'd have to figure out how to do an awful lot of custom ligatures. My terminal 's' tends to be a descender, "ion$" becomes 'i' with a long squiggle, "ng" is a bastardized eng (no idea how to type that in macos), and so on and so forth.

It's a fun idea, though. People with normal-ish handwriting should all do something like this!

Custom ligatures

[https://id.mayfirst.org/dkg (from livejournal.com)]

Custom ligatures are significantly more complicated. I don't have a terribly "normal" handwriting, but it wasn't too hard to get a basic set done. Figuring out custom ligatures, alternate glyphs, etc is taking it to the next level. But it can be a lot of fun to have just the basic level sorted out.

[dreamlogic.livejournal.com]

I did this a few years back, though I forget which program I used (not FontForge). Having a stylus & tablet made it pretty easy.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

love to know what program you used. I'm on Ubuntu Linux myself so it might not be available, but collecting the information is still interesting.

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

Hehe—I was wondering about that, but didn't want to confront. Nice save, though!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

:) my apologies. didn't mean to steal your thunder -- or give it to someone else!