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

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.